Simon Harvey | A Christmas Carol / 2019

a man of different stories

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Mynne, performer, A Christmas Carol (based on the fiction by Charles Dickens) / directed by Simon Harvey / the performance I attended with Diana Bing Daves McLaughlin and her granddaughter Elcie on December 7, 2019 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Lovelace Studio Theater in Beverly Hills, California.

 

Cornwell, England performer David Mynne, directed by another Cornwellian, Simon Harvey, performs the Charles Dickens’ Christmas classic A Christmas Carol as a kind of gang of voices, from the sounds of the wind to the chains of his former partner Jacob Marley. In a sense Ebenezer Scrooge, in this performance, becomes, if nothing else, a one-man dynamo, who seems to be everywhere at every moment. This is certainly not the isolated and trying-to-sleep businessman of Edwin L. Marin’s 1938 movie where Reginald Owens plays a miser desperately seeking to escape all human contact. No languid escapism in this version of the work!

      Just for the fact that Mynne himself performs the specters who threaten him throughout the night, we see a far greater vision of the physiologically-driven spirts who haunt him. It reminded me that Marley and he had been students together at the awful Dickensian boarding-school they both attended, and that the older “partner” had taken the younger under his wing, so to speak. I’ve always been interested in that strange male bonding, which, by accident, I discovered another fictional telling about two days later in The New York Times Book Review, a review of Jon Clinch’s new novel Marley which more carefully explores their relationship.

       Obviously in Dickens’ work there is no homosexual or even homoerotic connection between the two, but, as Clinch writes, “The adolescent Marley immediately establishes a viselike hold over the newly arrived Scrooge,” and you do have to wonder how Scrooge in his early days so interned himself as an accountant—a role Bob Cratchit later plays to the miserly Scrooge—to a secretive man who may have been working in his business dealings in the slave trade—so Clinch suggests—who, when Scrooge discovers the fact, attempts to redeem the company to which he is attached. But ultimately, it is the “frightening and dangerously attractive” (as critic Simon Callow describes him) who, through his love of Scrooge’s sister Fan, is redeemed while Scrooge becomes the greater monster.

     This fictional version of events, obviously, is not completely there in Mynne’s wonderful performance; yet there is something even stranger about his sudden attraction to Crotchit’s dying son, Tiny Tim, who he sits upon his shoulder as a hand glove, in such an intimate action that it almost suggests an act of pedophilia.

      I looked to my friend Diana Bing Daves McLaughlin’s grandchild Elcie to see how she was reacting to all of this, but realized her crawling into and up above her seat that she was probably simply enjoying the crazy puppet-like actions, as if Mynne’s shoulder sock might be just another version of Sesame Street.

      Yet Mynne’s lively production was not so tame as that children’s series. Even as he buys a giant turkey to feed Cratchit’s brood, there is something transactional about his actions. The family is well-fed, but we cannot quite comprehend how they will survive in the future, even as Scrooge now delightedly attends the Christmas dance party of his nephew.

      If he has found a new life in his very sudden conversion, we recognize him still as the same man of whoosing winds and horrors he has collected through his life. The leaves seem to pile up, created through his own voice, even as he attests a new joy in the Christmas season.

      Given he is a single tornado of voices, we can never be sure in this version who Scrooge really is. He has, in a sense, become his own past, Marley, the Spirit of Christmas’ past, and the horror of possible Christmas’ future all in the single spirit of one failed human being. And we never know when one of those myriad voices will again turn on the human race to express “Bah Humbug.”

       If Marley is locked-up in chains of his own terrible actions of the past, this Scrooge’s life is equally compelled by the man different stories he tells of his own existence.

       A “slave trade” is truly what Dickens’ work is all about, the trading of human flesh (or at least a giant turkey) for one’s own pleasure and servitude. Bob Cratchit must eventually return to work and Tiny Tim will ultimately be removed from the arm which has brought him back to life.

      Having lost his youthful sister, his dearly beloved partner, and his lover Belle, Scrooge will never truly be one of the ordinary people who surround him. Bitterness will surely sadly creep into his life once again. In this production, moreover, Mynne plays all the fragile figures and even the landscape of a world of capitalist greed, where all the tiny figures of money made and lost gets toted up. After all, money buys a large turkey for Christmas dinner; poverty buys an occasional small goose.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2019).

 

Gaetano Donizetti and Salvadore Commarano | Roberto Devereux / 2020

things change

by Douglas Messerli

 

Salvadore Cammarano (libretto), Gaetano Donizetti (composer) Roberto Devereux / LAOpera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / the production I saw with Lita Barrie was on Thursday, March 5, 2020

 

In his opening night review of the LAOpera production of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Roberto Devereux, Los Angeles Time’s music reviewer Mark Swed began by noting how the composer himself felt that his 1837 opera had been jinxed. The opera as Swed notes, was born out of his wife’s death and written and performed during a cholera outbreak in Naples.

      When Swed wrote his review, it had not yet been perceived just how much California itself was already being affected by the new coronavirus, an equivalent of cholera (fortunately, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion production played to a mostly full audience, although any intermission cough was duly noted by its audience).

      The major singer, highly featured in early announcements of the production, was to have been the great tenor, now baritone director of the opera company, Plácido Domingo—who had to bow out not only of his role of the villain of this piece, the Duke of Nottingham, but, because of revelations of sexual abuse—was bravely replaced by the talented Hawaiian-born singer, Quinn Kelsey.

       The beautiful Spanish singer Davinia Rodríguez was to have performed the most important role in this opera—not fully realized as the masterpiece it is until the 20th century rediscovery of the role by Beverly Sills, who Howard and I saw perform it at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.—after developing health problems, replaced by the American singer Angela Meade (a native of Centralia, Washington), who will reprise this role in September in the New York Metropolitan Opera production.

     It is Meade, this time around, who un-jinxed this work, bravely singing the role of Elizabeth I, without any stage rehearsal time on opening night, from a stage-side music stand, while the choreographer Nicola Bowie equally bravely acted out her movements on center stage.

     I was too young and operatically naïve to remember or, even then, have been able to evaluate “Bubbles” Silverman (the early incarnation of Beverly Sills), although we also saw a couple of her other major operatic presentations. But Meade certainly now owns this role, singing powerfully and yet scintillatingly beautiful, and suddenly coming onto central stage in the production I saw with friend Lita Barrie, as a bit more zaftig version of the queen than Rodríguez might have represented, but perhaps more dramatic for that very fact. If she loved Roberto Devereux (the truly excellent Mexican-born singer, Ramón Vargas) she is equally terrifying in her willingness to revenge his evidently quite chaste love of Nottingham’s current wife, the lovely soprano, in the production I saw, Ashley Dixon.

     Her color is blue, and she is the closest we can get to an early 19th century version of a blues singer. After all, she has been forced by her very best friend, the Queen, to marry the less-than-dashing Nottingham, who loves her but also attempts to lock her away and violently punish her for his own jealousy.

     At the heart of this opera, and certainly in director Stephen Lawless’ long-traveled version of it, is death, the many murders of Elizabeth’s father, some of which are encased, like museum morgue victims, in glass. Elizabeth’s desperate need for love, despite her childhood-taught lessons of killing off anyone who you felt had betrayed you, is the tragic center of this work. She clearly wants to save her former lover—a simple return of the ring she has given him might save his life—but despite all best intentions, the couple who are most involved in this love tale, Devereux and Nottingham’s wife, are locked away into worlds which the powers that be cannot comprehend their innocence. Devereux is tried as a traitor for even attempting to escape his proclivities, while Sarah is held as a prisoner in her own home for having even imagined a more robust lover in Devereux.

     All of the singers in this production were excellent, along with Grant Gershon’s remarkable chorus, singing through the almost voyeuristic portals, represented in their appearances, through Benoît Dugardyn’s simple wooden set. There may be far many more complex visions of Elizabeth’s court, but his simple design allowed us to see how the constantly peering figures of the Queen’s courtiers and women associates help allow her to destroy those she most loves. The tragedy here is not simply the Queen’s temperament, but the inexplicable interferences of the court itself. When Elizabeth heartily taps her cane to send them all running, you can truly comprehend her frustrations of being ruled by history itself.

     And in her last scene, we recognize that now, as an old woman, without her crowned head of hennaed hair, that she has lost her regal power as well as having lost any opportunity for love. Meade is totally brilliant in her version of a Donizetti mad-moment. Covered in white, we recognize she is as pale as death itself. Earlier versions of those killed by history, again encased by glass, are wheeled out. After all, isn’t British monarchical history actually a list of killers and their victims up until the current day?

     Finally, given all the operatic heroes who made this operatic production significant—Meade, Bowie, and Kelsey in particular—one cannot ignore the amazing wonders of conductor Eun Sun Kim, recently appointed music director of the San Francisco Opera. All LAOpera fans love conductor James Conlon; yet she brought out a sound from the LAOpera orchestra that shifted its usual muted acoustics to something that was quite glorious. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which has long recognized problems of muted orchestral sound, suddenly seemed to open up to new possibilities. If I am growing a little deaf, last night I heard every brilliant cord of Donizetti’s previously jinxed opera. And it was as if this opera’s sometimes clotted and unclear motivations of his composition had suddenly sprung into new life. I can’t wait to see Meade wow the Met audiences.

 

Los Angeles, March 6, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2020).    

John Hawkes | The Innocent Party / 1966 [reading of play]

the empty pool

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Hawkes The Innocent Party, in The Innocent Party: Four Plays by John Hawkes (New York: New Directions, 1966)

 

Novelist John Hawkes' fascinating play, The Innocent Party, seems, at moments, to be channeling elements of Tennessee Williams, particularly in its location—“patio of an abandoned motel in a subtropical area of the United States”—but also in its central character, a strong survivor very much the mode of Clarissa Foxworth of Williams’ last play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere. I could almost hear Shirley Knight’s voice behind Hawkes’ Phoebe, a fabulously wealthy and world-weary woman who inexplicably has descended upon her brother and sister-in-law’s down-and-out motel after years of sailing around the world, seemingly, it appears, just to get a glimpse of her part  tomboy, part Aphrodite niece. The strangeness of the family and the unpredictability of their comments, moreover, help the work feel akin to Williams’ world.

     Despite all of the play’s apparent relationship with Williams’ works, however, the play seems even more linked to another, far more traditional American playwright, to whom, stylistically Hawkes has little kinship. For what we begin to perceive early on in this dark comedy is that the central character, Phoebe, is perhaps less of a real figure than a figment of this fallen family’s imagination. Like “Uncle Ben,” the mythical elderly brother of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, who when he was 17 walked into a jungle only to walk at 21 as a rich man,” so is Phoebe a wealthy woman who has traveled the world, while her brother Edward stayed home to “go under,” losing his small business of selling cheap cameras, and turning to collecting shells. He and his coarse wife, Beatrix, spend most of their time creeping around of their empty lives, by the empty pool, half filled with garbage, trying “not to mind” about the normal adolescent activities of their daughter, Jane. In short, like the Loman family, they have lost all hope of achieving the American Dream, spending most of their time moping around or pointlessly praying for a miracle of changed fate.

      And just as Ben, in Miller’s play, seems to be figure of hallucination, so too does Phoebe seem to be the family’s hallucination. They nearly worship Phoebe’s white car, peering into it with lurid desire. It may be that Jane herself has called her aunt up in an act of utter desperation, since she has no possible alternative in the closed and timid poverty of her parents’ lives and minds. As she puts it, she wants to “go under” too, not financially, but under water in dare-devil dives, somewhat like, as her aunt describes her, a mermaid able to alter her boyish young body. She has already begun to steel from the neighboring black boys, playing out a sense of endangerment in a world in which her parents neither drink nor dance, but simply complain and collect fragments of old sea-life.

      Although Phoebe attempts to throw a party, the participants ignore all attempts at celebration. Having already stolen from her aunt, Jane is banned from the party until Phoebe calls her out, pretending, in private, to both help the young girl learn to dance, but at the same time hinting at much more carnal desires. Despite Jane’s adolescent turmoil, however, she is still innocent, and, in her refusal to participate in her aunt’s lascivious Salomé-like activities, the party itself becomes an innocent remnant a sinister world which her youthful imagination, possibly, has whipped up.

       As suddenly as she has appeared, Phoebe, her large pocketbook filled with cash, and the hammock upon which she has slept all night and much of the afternoon, disappears, while the young Jane repeats her fervent pattern of rising, holding her hand before her eyes to sniff out the flowers before looking, like narcissus, into the pool at her own being, magically swimming away into a kind self-loving paradise.

      At curtain’s fall, however, we realize that this young innocent is as deluded as her horrific parents: for the pool is, after all, empty; any dreams it might have proffered drained away before she has come to life. And so this dark comedy reads as tragedy at last.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (Feburary 2013).

 

 

 

Wallace Shawn | A Thought in Three Parts / 1977 [reading of play]

even the thought

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wallace Shawn A Thought in Three Parts / 1977 [reading of play]

 

Wallace Shawn’s triptych, first performed in 1977 in London, was visited by the London vice squad, led to calls from The House of Lords to cease funding to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and nearly resulted in Shawn’s expulsion from the country! This hue and cry went far beyond the nudity and simulated sex of all sorts performed in the second part of this work, “The Youth Hostel.” I’ve never been to a youth hostel, but I’ve stayed—a year or two after this play’s premiere—at the New York Sloane House YMCA, where I lived through homosexual events not far different from the heterosexual ones played out in Shawn’s play. I guess the Brits just weren’t ready to know what went on behind those easily opened doors. A more recent, 2007, production in Austin, Texas’ Rubber Repertory—although much written about—received a far more felicitous reception.

      If sex is apparently behind the linking “thought” of the three parts of this play, two of the play’s sections talk about it rather than representing it. In the hilarious “Summer Evening,” a couple in a foreign hotel, speaking sometimes to themselves and at other times simultaneously in a pace that the author describes as “very fast, much faster than people really speak,” cautiously tiptoe around the subject. David and Sarah at first appear to have a felicitous relationship, as they carefully maneuver their attempted conversations by trying to outguess each other’s feelings before they can be spoken:

 

                              David: —I just thought we might go down to the— (Sarah

                                   enters.)

                              Sarah: What?

                              David: —to the restaurant and—Love dress, love—the—

                              Sarah: Well? Don’t you think just our chocolates, maybe? Do

                                   we really—

                              David: Well—it might be nice—Some sort of a soup, or one

                                   of those—

                              Sarah: I’d rather—my skirt’s ripped—

                              David: Oh really, darling? I was only thinking that maybe some

                                   toast—

                              Sarah: Well then why not go down—

                              David: I—

                              Sarah: You probably—

                              David: —what?

                              Sarah: You could still get some—

                              David: What? I know, but I really rather would—what? Did you

                                   want to wash?

 

 

     The conversation continues like this, each interrupting the other, exploring tonal changes and emotional responses so carefully as to make their conversation almost painful. In fact, it gradually becomes clear, David would love to have sex, but Sarah is so involved with denial and contradiction that we can only see her as frigid, her seemingly friendly conversation soon turning sour, as she attacks the appearance of the room, the hotel, the country which they are visiting, and, ultimately, David: “Maybe I will burn you.” The frothy conversation of the first part is revealed as only a cover for each of their fears and hates.

      If this first part represents a permanently precoital sparring, the second part is all about coitus itself, The five men and women of “The Youth Hostel,” Dick, Helen, Judy, Bob, and Tom, move in and out the two rooms of the set as they jump into bed with one another, seeking out any pleasurable combination of sexual acts. Coitus transforms into masturbation, masturbation into voyeurism—all peppered with obscenities about the other’s partners, present and past. Despite the comic sexual posturings of these figures (and, although I have never seen a production of the play, I presume they are presented comically), they find cold comfort in one another:

 

                                  Judy: “Here we finally are, Judy.”

                                  Tom: Do you want to help me now. I could use a

                                        a fuck.

                                  Judy: “I think I understand you, Judy.” (They sit for a long time.

                                        Both feel cold. Judy shudders. Silence)

 

     Surely these characters have everything that both David and Sarah were seeking in the first scene, but this quintet doesn’t even have the lightness of possibility that the language of the earlier couple attempt to express. In “The Youth Hostel” everything is coldly coarse, with excrement, sperm, and verbal venom covering every bodily crevice.

      By comparison, Shawn’s last short monologue seems positively romantic, as the dreamer “Mr. Frivolous” awakens to his morning breakfast, following the flights of the birds outside his window and posting a comical put-down of all the joys to be found in nature. But Mr. Frivolous’ post-coital conversation soon becomes even colder than the sexual splendors of “The Youth Hostel”: “I ask you to love. I ask you to love. I ask to be taken, out to the toilet. And washed. And cleaned. And washed. And cleaned. I ask. I ask. I ask. I ask. I ask. For your arms. To be there. And your shoulders. There. ….Our bodies slippery. And cold. And cold. And cold. And cold.

      Suddenly what has seemed a kind of prayer of heterosexual love shifts to a paean to abusive love, to illicit love, the love of priests: “Then I speak, to my priest, and I say, Priest, touch me. Priest, Father, I have asked you to come here, to tell you, these clothes of yours have stayed here with me too long. Lie down here beside me. (Pause.) Precious are the priests who lie by the side of their lovers.”

      But even the illicit love between priest and confessor, between Father and son is insufficient to this desperate romantic, as he imagines a love with holy beings themselves, a sexual interlude, with which he closes his monologue, with angels: “With wings unfurled, our angels scattered light across the grass. …You, the littlest angel, ran under my robe and held my legs.” 

      So is love, future, present, and past explored by the playwright in a world where the sensual seems always allusive, never fully satisfying, seldom fulfilling the desperate desires for bodily embracement. How such a dire statement of sex might interrupted as societally immoral is incomprehensible. But then, for some, just the word is enough. Even, as the title suggests, “a thought.”

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2003

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2013).

Frank Loesser | "Luck Be a Lady Tonight" from Guys and Dolls / 1950

my favorite musical theater songs: “luck be a lady”

by Douglas Messerli

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsvApGAhRWA

Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls / 1950

Performer: Robert Alda, the 1950 original cast recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmEwtWBte84

Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls / 1950

Performer: Marlon Brando from the 1955 movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4ejzGu4KWM

Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls / 1950

Performer: Peter Gallagher, from the 1992 revival

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxawfxXbmQA

Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls / 1950

Performer: Frank Sinatra / 1965

 

The gambling hero of Guys and Dolls, Sky Masterson’s, major song, “Luck Be a Lady,” appears quite late in the musical, and even then is sung in the bowels of New York City’s sewers. One might never have imagined that such a rousing prayer to the heavens might be sung so gloriously at such low depths, both psychically and spiritually. Yet Sky’s bet, matched by almost all of these low-denizen dice-tossers, strangely enough, is primarily an attempt to save their souls, or, at least, to pretend to save their souls by requiring them to attend a spiritual gathering at his would-be lover’s Sergeant Sarah Brown’s Save-a-Soul Mission, a venture that may save her job and redeem Sky’s apparent deception. 

     It is hard to imagine so much “evil” behavior devoted to such absolute “goodness,” but then that’s the true delight of Frank Loesser’s impossible-to-forget song.

     Sky sings not to the gods, but the Lady Luck herself, the goddess to whom he has spent most of his life bowing. This goddess is a lady—or in the lingo of his world, a dame—but of course that “dame,” this time around, psychologically speaking, is a stand-in for a preacher woman, which makes the song even more fun. In the hell of his world (a sewer lit up in garish greens, blues, reds, and purples) he is unconsciously praying to a higher authority, human love itself, and in a manner that is strangely enough not very different than a prayer to a deity; after all, the man has spent many years of his life reading the Gideon Bible in cheap hotels.

 

They call you Lady Luck.

But there is room for doubt

At times you have a very unladylike way of running out

You're on this a date with me

The pickings have been lush

And yet before this evening is over you might give me the brush

You might forget your manners

You might refuse to stay and so the best that I can do is pray.

 

A bit like a jealous lover, his “lucky protector” may behave badly, may leave him for other men, or, even more sexually suggestive, blow on their dice.

 

A lady doesn't leave her escort

It isn't fair, it isn't nice

A lady doesn't wander all over the room

And blow on some other guy's dice.

 

So let's keep the party polite

Never get out of my sight

Stick with me baby, I'm the fellow you came in with

Luck be a lady

Luck be a lady

Luck be a lady tonight.

 

    The macho terms of this song demand that his “lady friend” remain loyal to him, no matter what he does. But in his song of prayer, Sky also reveals that he attends to be loyal to his lover, Sarah Brown, a relationship later consummated in a true Broadway marriage. That Lady Luck does remain loyal to him is nearly a miracle, but then, that’s what this musical is entirely about: a series of miraculous transformations that occur in the midst of selfishly bad behavior. Nearly everyone in this marvelously joyful work gets converted in one way or another. Even mobsters join in singing “Hallelujah,” particularly when Nicely Nicely perceives the errors of his ways in another of my favorite songs from the work, “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat.”

     The original Broadway Sky Masterson, Robert Alda, beautifully sings this ballad of sinful love in a full-voiced rendition that reiterates the macho elements of a song in which a full male chorus joins him. Maybe these underground men may not be so sexually desperate as the more homoerotic male chant of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “There Is Nothing Like a Dame,” but the demanding chants of this song clearly do hint at something similar, even if the “coming out” of which it speaks, is something closer to “moving up” and “going straight.”

 

Stick here, baby, stick here, baby.

Stick with me, baby, I'm the fellow you came in with

Luck be a lady

Luck be a lady

Luck be a lady tonight.

Coming out, coming out, coming out

Right!

 

      Similarly, Frank Sinatra regularly sang this paean to love in a more authoritative, jazzier manner; Sinatra, it has been reported, was more than little disappointed that he was tapped to play Nathan Detroit in the movie version instead of more appealing Sky. And singing this song was clearly his way of taking over the role from Brando.

     In the 1992 Broadway revival, which I saw, Peter Gallagher sang it also quite beautifully and with a zest that the song seems to demand.

     Yet, the quieter-voiced, almost shyly sung Marlon Brando movie version, is my very favorite. Brando sings it almost with a reverent, boyish infatuation that makes you truly believe in his adoration not only with “luck,” but his luck in having found the highly religious Sarah Brown. Now he truly may have someone with who he can discuss the fine differences between Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. And after all, isn’t one of Damon Runyon’s points that every marriage is a kind of gamble. Despite what may seem as an utterly odd pairing, they’re obviously perfect for one another, which this song makes apparent.

 

Los Angeles, August 9, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2017).