World Theater, Opera, and Performance

I’ve always been somewhat miffed when people today call the Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green 1956 musical, “old fashioned” and “out of date,” terms abundantly used to describe its 2001 revival with Faith Prince and Marc Kurdisch. Certainly, this charmer of a work, about the great new technology of the day, the telephone and, particularly, answering services, might be easily be transformed into a piece about meeting through cellphone or Facebook encounters! People still want to find their mysterious callers or on-line admirers, which is at the heart of Bells Are Ringing.

This musical was also about international celebrity fashion and behavior, which seems to me as current today as it was back in 1956, given the ridiculous fashion-conscious reality shows devoted to the Kardashians and others.

So, what’s the problem? Somebody simply needs to imagine a marvelously updated version, that re-contextualizes its wonderful songs. Maybe not “bells,” but “ring signals” and “emojis.”

Certainly, songs such as “It’s a Perfect Relationship” is even more appropriate to today’s on-line Facebook and Instagram relationships; and “Drop That Name” just needs a little dusting off—new names and new way to drop.

But nothing needs to be done to the heart-breaking song, when Ella Petersen believes that her magical relationship with the man of her dreams has ended because of the fibs she has told to help him in his career. “The Party’s Over,” heart-breakingly expresses it all; it’s a song that even Cinderella could have sung after running off from Prince Charming. For the “end of the affair,” a theme is so many musicals that it’s a wonder that the stage genre has ever survived (after all, it’s at the heart of Show Boat, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, Gypsy, Follies and so many musical theater works that it’s almost become a standard trope). Love generally falls apart on the Broadway stage.

Judy Holliday’s plaintive plea should almost be seen as a placard of the musical theater genre itself—even though her relationship with pretty-boy Sydney Chaplin does, after all, end happily; he wants her all to himself!

The party's over

It's time to call it a day

They've burst your

Pretty balloon

And taken the moon away

It's time to wind up

The masquerade

Just make your mind up

The piper must be paid

The party's over

The candles flicker and dim

You danced and dreamed

Through the night

It seemed to be right

Just being with him

Now you must wake up

All dreams must end

Take off your makeup

The party's over

It's all over

My friend

Holliday sings the song, sung to herself, so brilliantly that she might, metaphorically speaking, have “owned it”—until hundreds of other brilliant interpreters came along, including several male ones. What I find utterly fascinating is that Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis sang it as it was originally written, keeping the male “him” and talking about taking off “your makeup.” Singing with Garland, Mel Tormé (the two on matching motorcycles) pretended they were at the end of an all-night spree on New Year’s Eve, in which the “he” became “we.” Sammy Davis, Jr., on the other hand, given his macho role in “the Rat Pack,” turned the male designation to “her” and muttered over the “makeup” line.

So many brilliant women singers, including Doris Day, Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, and Peggy Lee, reinterpreted the work to fit their own vocalist stylings. And who might blame them given the simple beauty of its music and lyrics?

Old-fashioned? Well, if such great songs are out of fashion, I’m terrified for the fact.

Los Angeles, August 30, 2017

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

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Kier Peters | The Confirmation / 2007 [University of Passau, Germany production]

kier’s secret german audience

by Douglas Messerli

Kier Peters The Confirmation, performed by the English Drama Group (EDG) der Universität Passau, January 25-27, 2007

About twice a year, I check the computer to discover what my playwright pseudonym, Kier Peters, is up to. Over the years I’ve found he’s a fairly busy person, with plays being performed by experimental theatre companies and even at dinner theatres—all of which came as a surprise to me! But in 2007 I came across an even more interesting piece of information regarding his/my plays. The entry that popped up on Goggle sounded very promising, the first sentence reading: “The main topic of conversation, even after seven days, is still The Confirmation, the American play by Kier Peters we came to Bavaria to see.”

The blog of Frank W. Walsh went on to describe how he and his wife, after taking a long taxi ride, quickly found the train from Münich to Passau, arriving two hours later to be greeted by Josh and Jutta. Josh, a teacher at the University of Passau and the director of the English Drama Group, whisked the American couple away for lunch before taking them to Passau’s oldest movie theater, where The Confirmation was being performed. “The place reminds me of the theaters I went to throughout my childhood,” wrote Walsh. “Its concession stand serves popcorn, candy, beer if you like. You came through the doors under where the screen would have been, as in the Pheil Theater in St. Petersburg (Florida) many years ago when Central Avenue was hopping. Then you go up, past rows and rows of chairs to a wide aisle under the projection booth where you can see everything and still have plenty of room.”

“The lights darken,” he continues. “The play begins. But it doesn’t. A four-piece band plays Klezmer music. Foot tapping and stomping.”

“The curtain rises and an American family takes the stage. Then begins the peeling of the onion, layers of revelations. Much of it beyond me.”

Walsh goes on to discuss some of his favorite lines—one in particular uttered by the play’s shikker (Yiddish for a drunk) sister Blanche (speaking only Yiddish throughout the play, which the family believes to be Norwegian), who upon hearing one of her sister’s open a bottle of wine, shouts out: “Did I hear a cork?” With Josh and Jutta, evidently, this American couple “constructed tables with diagrams and arrows delineating relationships to better understand the play,” which had three sold-out performances! “Modern American theater is still alive,” declares Walsh, “—alive and well in Bavaria, Germany.”

The very idea of my crazy American family of women survivors—Grandma, Mother, Sister, Blanche and the family intruder, Sister’s lesbian lover Carmelita—being brought to life in that small Bavarian city nestled between three rivers (the Danube, the Inn, and Ilz) at the border of the Czech Republic, amazed me! As Paul Vangelisti merrily chuckled over the phone the other day—he being one of the few individuals who love such accidental collisions of discovery and event (insidious gaps in life) as I do—“Surely this can’t really have happened, this seemingly lost American couple coming across your play in Bavaria without a clue of what it was about! And you knowing nothing of it whatsoever. You made it up. You wrote this,” he proclaimed. “No one will believe you didn’t. It’s like all the stories in your memoir!”

“I know,” I concurred. “But you and I both realize that I didn’t fabricate a single moment of my adventure in New York with you. And I haven’t knowingly made up anything in any of these volumes to date. Things just happen to me that way. It’s my life.”

“I think they do happen that way to many people,” Paul concluded, “only they block it out, rationalize it away or perceive no significance in the facts.”

Yesterday, as I was about to write about this newest manifestation of my wondrously eventful life, I received an e-mail from Joshua Amrhein, outlining the details of his directorial choice and the performances of my play. Apparently, he’d first discovered my short plays, A Dog Tries to Kiss the Sky: Seven Short Plays, in City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and had thought about performing “Past Present Future Tense” or “A Dog Tries to Kiss the Sky.” “The plays…had an American kind of humor I thought, just ‘dada’ enough for my taste and approachable enough for any audience.” “Well, I wanted to see what else you’d written, and found The Confirmation. Besides really liking the story, and all things to do with grandmothers in general, I felt it was a perfect piece to do with a group mainly made up of women….” “My actors loved it,” he reports, and it beat out David Mamet’s Water Engine. Hearing his response, I could only recall the reaction of my German friend Hans-Jürgen Schadt upon reading the comedy: “I found it very sad, very sad, while my wife kept laughing out loud the whole time.” Perhaps some Germans do share the American sense of humor.

Amrhein apologized for not trying harder to reach me—he had evidently sent an e-mail which I did not receive. I reported that my only regret for not having been told about the production—although an amateur performing fee would be appropriate (he is sending a small payment)—was that I might have flown to Passau to witness it! I was delighted by the production.

We turned Blanche from a Yiddish speaking character, to a Polish figure, he explained, in part because we had a Polish actor playing the part. Coincidence, again, I responded: I originally wrote the part for a Polish actor I had seen in one of Mac Wellman’s plays; she was out of the country, however, during the July 1994 production of that play in New York at the Vineyard Theatre near Union Square.

And who was that visiting American man and his wife from St. Petersburg? His grandfather, who was overjoyed that I had stumbled upon his blog and that he’d been able to be the conduit between author and director!

Los Angeles, November 15, 2007

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).

Saturday, January 18, 2025

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer | "Shy" from Once Upon a Mattress / 1959

my favorite musical theater songs: “shy” from once upon a mattress

by Douglas Messerli

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouL9ZMzEZ4k

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress, 1959

Performer: Carol Burnett, 1964

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vugLimIj98g

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress, 1959

Performer: Carol Burnett, 1972

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kF43Gb4wCE

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress, 1959

Performer: Sarah Jessica Parker, 1996

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY9Xp6wwPF4

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress, 1959

Performers: Jackie Hoffman, John Epperson, and many others in the Transport Groups concert production, 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-pRFSM3R5k

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress, 1959

Performer: Sutton Foster, 2024

If one ever needed a definition of irony, I might invite young students to listen to Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer’s rendition of the song “Shy” as sung by the original performer, Carol Burnett.

Burnett brilliantly belts out her “Shy” song, proclaiming her demure behavior underneath her absolutely hurricane-like surface, literally, through Joe Layton’s wonderful choreography, blowing the members of Queen Aggravain’s medieval court off their feet. The young Winnifred (who likes her nick-name of Fred), is, of course, anything but shy. She has just swum the moat to apply for the role of princess, and is determined to find a husband, since, as she finally admits she is “shy” of a man if not naturally shy in personality.

Not a single courtier will admit to being Prince Dauntless, and whenever the Prince dares to admit that he is the one, also desperate for a wife, his imperious mother pulls him away. Winnifred takes the entire court on a whirlwind dance in order to discover the Prince’s identity, all the time denying her totally domineering personality.

The song and the musical as a whole is so close to camp that it later was performed by a group of gay and drag performers, including John Epperson as the Queen and the wonderful David Greenspan as the King, with comedian Jackie Hoffman as Winnifred. I’ve included a selection of songs from that Transport Group’s 2013 production.

But then, nearly everybody, including Dody Goodman, Imogene Coca, Buster Keaton, Sarah Jessica Parker, and numerous other luminaries have appeared in productions of this likeable musical, which, when first appeared Off-Broadway, was given lukewarm reviews, but was loved by audiences, allowing it to last a reasonable run of 244 performances before it was revived again and again in theater and in television productions. Tracey Ullman, performing it in 2005 on television, sang beautifully, but far more tamely than Burnett and others, almost convincing her audiences that she might really be a little shy and was just bluffing as the future Princess that couldn’t sleep.

I saw the 1964 television version with Burnett, Elliot Gould as the Jester, and others. Bernadette Peters later appeared in a 1972 TV production as Lady Larken, along with the original cast members, Burnett, Jack Gilford, and Jane White.

The talented composer, Mary Rodgers, daughter of one of the titans of composers, Richard Rodgers, went on to have a hit in the Off-Broadway musical The Mad Show, based on skits from Mad Magazine, and wrote Phyllis Newman's one-woman show The Madwoman of Central Park West (1979), as well as contributing, along with Stephen Sondheim, to the short-lived Judy Holliday musical, Hot Spot.

Her son, Adam Guettel, wrote the successful score for the musical, The Light in the Piazza, and previously sang in numerous operas as a child performer before turning to compose many notable classical scores.

Mary went on to write numerous children’s books, playing down her musical gifts, proclaiming that she had neither the talents of her father or son. But, to be honest, her crazy fairy-tale musical was one of my favorites of my youth, and her song “Shy,” I always felt, was a secret satire on her own father’s similar statement in “I Whistle a Happy Tune” from The King and I.

Los Angeles, August 29, 2017

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (August 2017).

Friday, January 17, 2025

Bob Merrill | "Mira" from Carnival!

my favorite musical theater songs: “mira” from carnival!

by Douglas Messerli

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXwix_Iw2B8

Bob Merrill, Carnival!, 1961

Performer: Anna Maria Alberghetti, 1961

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0lex7kZSBA

Bob Merrill, Carnival!, 1961

Performer: Joni James, 1961

One of my very favorite joys in the early 1960s was listening to the score of Carnival!, a gentle musical based on the 1953 film Lili with Leslie Caron in the lead role. The 1961 Broadway musical, with book by Michael Stewart and music and lyrics by Bob Merrill (previously of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” [a Patti Page song] and “Mambo Italiano” [sung by Rosemary Clooney]-fame). The musical was filled with notable singers and performers, including Kaye Ballard, Jerry Orbach, Pierre Olaf, James Mitchell, and Henry Lascoe. But it was its star, young opera singer Anna Maria Alberghetti, who made it so special for me.

Her lovely lyrical voice, particularly in the song in which introduces herself and her background, “Mira,” was such a delight that I even learned its lyrics and probably could sing along even today. But it’s the song’s utterly guileless simplicity that makes it so very special as a plea for knowing the world in which you live, with the hope, particularly, that everyone will know your name. Even chairs become something that might come to know you. It seemed to harken to another time and a peasant culture that was surely already impossible in 1961.

I come from the town of Mira

Beyond the bridges of St. Claire

I guess you’ve never heard of Mira

It’s very small but still it’s there

They have the very greenest trees

And skies as bright as flame

But what I liked the best in Mira

Is everybody knew my name

Can you imagine that

Everybody knew my name

The musical, which also included memorable tunes such as “Yes, My Heart” and “Love Makes the World Go Around,” was one of producer David Merrick’s many hits, running for 719 performances, with several revivals in the years since.

I could hardly believe my luck when a traveling company decided to visit Cedar Rapids, near where I lived, to present the musical at Coe College. It was perhaps my very first professional musical viewing—although by that time I knew theater drama and musical theater better than anyone else in town. After all I had lived it through my imagination. Being somewhat a sentimentalist, I’m sure while watching it, I bawled my eyes out.

Years later, I met Anna Maria Alberghetti at an art opening, and couldn’t resist a blushing thank you for the joys she’d given me as a young man.

Los Angeles, August 25, 2017

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (August 2017).

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Djuna Barnes | Biography of Julie von Bartmann / 2020 [reading of play]

freeing the family

by Douglas Messerli

Djuna Barnes Biography of Julie von Bartmann (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2020)

Written in Cagnes sur Mer and the Maritimes Alps in France between November 1923 and April 1924, Djuna Barnes’ three-act play, Biography of Julie van Bartmann, related to several of her early stories—particularly “A Night Among the Horses”—and to her 1928 fiction Ryder. Like the father, Wendell, of that book, the father of this early play, Basil Born, refuses to let his children attend public school, and faces down the school authorities, challenging them with their teaching methodologies: he wins. And like the early short story, one of Barnes’ best, a strong and sophisticated woman verbally destroys her “bestial” horse groom, which ends in his death.

Yet it is hard even speak of “events’ such as these in Barnes’ work. Unlike most US plays, which lay out a “story” through their character’s lives are revealed, Barnes’ highly artificed theater is centered in what one might describe as “revelations,” most long statements about oneself and life, alternating with a questions or sparring conversations, such as those between the powerful opera singer Julie van Bartmann and the strong-minded “landholder,” Born. And even the “revelations” are less revealing of how the characters think than how they perceive the world morally and philosophically; yet since these statements are presented in a highly literary language, filled with aphorisms, puns, extended metaphors, and dualities, we cannot even be sure that the character is speaking honestly or attempting to play out a desired notion of themselves.

Barnes begins the play in simple anticipation as Born’s two sons, Gart and Costa (like her language, Barnes generally stocks her works with strangely named figures—not unlike her own name and those of brothers) who await the arrival of their father and a new boarder, Julie, who is apparently staying at the house—the boys do some farming, but Born seems to have retired—to rest up before she returns to the stage. Evidently, she is not the first grand person to stay with them, women who, throughout the years, have had had passionate relations with their father, even while their mother, now dead, was still living.

Gart, the elder son, is thin and handsome, a gentle soul who plays the organ well. The younger son, Costa, is shorter and broader shouldered, a figure described as a kind of “beast,” having a connection with the soil. The daughter, Gustava, nineteen years of age, is an excitable young woman who cares for pigeons and garden. All three are in awe of their dominating father.

The rest of the drama plays out various encounters between these figures, in which each falls in love, in some respect, with the grand Julie. The first such “encounter” is understandably between Basil Born and Julie, and she questions him about himself, his children, and the house in which she is to stay. These passages, in particular, have the feel of a tennis match as each of these strong figures sends out charged and even barbed messages about their temperaments and sexualities:

julie

I am not married, that is—not married. I have not money worries.

I love—peculiarity, perhaps you would call it vice (she raises her

eyes watching him). Nothing astonishes me. In the night, when it

rains, when the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls, I do no not

draw my toes up, I sleep, and leave terror and superstition to the

people.

basil

At a pinch madame, I can be a little peculiar myself.

julie

It begins to be something of which I am aware. I have heard

that you are savage. Is it so?

basil

Not at all. I have a certain influence with my family, but the

state does not like me.

At this point, he goes on to explain his encounter with “peoples in places of dictatorship” (i.e. the local school board). But the passage also clearly suggests Basil’s interest in her, and she in him. The act ends indeed in a kind a double entendre as Julie suggests “I am willing you should play a little,” suggesting that she might hear him play a hymn upon the organ they have their home; but with the end of that sentence, “but—I am noted for my detours!” hints that the “playing” and “organ” might mean something else. Basil’s command to his daughter, “Show that splendor to bed!” makes his desires, if not intentions, quite clear.

But the second scene of Act I, it is not Basil who visits Julie’s bed, but Gustava, who snuggles up to Julie before pouring out a biography of the woman as she has been following her for years in fan magazines. Indeed, perhaps she has been following the career of the diva, since she is seen in another moment of the play as cutting out a picture from a magazine, several of which are posted on the Born walls. The vision she has of the grand lady is almost an inhuman one:

Wait, don’t laugh. It is like this: You were born. You were laid

in a bassinet, you did not cry. You learned to walk before other

children, you watched everything, and then one day, when you

were three or four, you realized that you were terrible, a child

of destiny.

As Julie quickly perceives, Gustava is not quite simple country girl she appears to be, soon moving even closer to the beautiful woman: “Let me put my head on your arm, your perfume is so strong, and so sweet—“ And by the end of their long conversation, she has hinted that Julie must come to terms with her—and her brothers—with Julie suggesting “I have never reckoned with children,” and Gustava responding, “Now you have to it, we are here, wat are you going to do?” Julie sends her away.

The second act begins with an extended conversation between Gustava and Costa, in which recounts her morning activities to the girl, both admitting their admiration for her (“She is beautiful.”). When, soon after, Julie approaches Gart in an attempt to the seemingly shy twenty-year-old out by describing her own past selves, Costa ends their conversation by striking his brother, the two of them violently wrestling, while Julie looks on, clearly recognizing the emotion chaos she has created in them: “It has begun.”

In the second scene of Act II, Barnes again creates a strangely ambiguous sexual scene, wherein Gart, troubled and unable to sleep, crawls into his father’s bed, querying him about the dazzling visitor in their house (“Is Julie von Bartmann a good woman?” “Beautiful, damaged, there more beautiful.” Finally moving to his own perceived condition, “What is passion in man?”)

The father, strongly demeaning Julie, is quite obviously trying, as he puts it, “trying to make Gart safe for tragedy.” Nothing, however, can calm the excited young man, who almost dares his father to kill him (“No, you must finish my life. You have begun it and you must see it through.”) before he threatens either suicide or murder: “I have come to something that I do not understand, or only in one way, I think it would not be your way. …Whether I must kill myself, or you.”

There is only one way this tragedy can now play out. For the first time in the elder Born’s life, he has meant less to a woman than his now nearly-grown children. At the age of 50, time has changed everything. In an attempt to demand she chose him, what he describes as demanding “victory,” she fends off his invitation to his bed off, ultimately proclaiming she prefers “the shy, gentle elder son, half musician, half human.”

By the end of the play, Born has shot himself, dying before the towering Julie, while Gustav demands the intrude leave:

Go, go, it is all over. You see what he has managed—accomplished. Go,

go, take everything and go. You see yourself—we are reunited—we need

nothing—it is all finished—settled.

Leaving, Julie’s slightly inexplicably reply, “Immense! Immense!”, seems to suggest she perceives Born’s act as a sort of sacrifice, an attempt to keep his family as a tightly knit unit opposed to the ridiculousness of other’s lives. Yet one can only wonder if his act is not also a highly selfish one, the act of, as he describes himself, the Beast, desperate to hold onto what he has created and his insufferable pride.

Barnes does not answer the question, but surely we recognize, at play’s end, the father’s symbolic death, which closes both his and Julie’s biography, has freed these isolated orphans to enter the world, to now lead their own lives, if slightly wary of the foolishness that may face them. And in that sense, Barnes’ theatrical family drama, ends, like Chekhov plays, with a somewhat comedic, rather than tragic, resolution.

Los Angeles, January 15, 2010

Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (January 2025).

World Theater, Opera, and Performance

Search the List

Monday, January 20, 2025

Jule Styne, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden | "The Party's Over" from Bells Are Ringing / 1956

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Kier Peters | The Confirmation / 2007 [University of Passau, Germany production]

Saturday, January 18, 2025

Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer | "Shy" from Once Upon a Mattress / 1959

Friday, January 17, 2025

Bob Merrill | "Mira" from Carnival!

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Djuna Barnes | Biography of Julie von Bartmann / 2020 [reading of play]

Index of Entries (by author, composer, lyricist, choreographer, or performer)

Report Abuse