World Theater, Opera, and Performance

Based simply on the beauty of two songs in their off-Broadway, very long-funning (17,162 performances) musical The Fantasticks and their more recent Broadway successes, including 110 in the Shade and I Do, I Do!, the first Broadway show I ever saw was the 1969 production of Harvey Schmidt’s and Tom Jones’ Celebration. A disaster. Or maybe not, since I’ve never heard a song from it since my first night experience. It was a year of bad musicals: soon after I attended Jerry Herman, Jerome Lawrence’s and Robert E. Lee’s Dear World!

But the simple theatrical conventions of The Fantasticks, beginning with its lovely first song, “Try to Remember,” which attempts to take its presumably elderly audience back into a time of true innocence, a work very loosely based on Edmund Rostand’s Les Romanesques, with its numerous references to abductions and the growing correct-thinking anathema described by the word “rape.” Goodbye Shakespeare, Yeats, Pope, Donizetti, even gentle Eudora Welty! Schmidt and Jones were forced, over the years to change several of their lyrics of the song “It Depends upon What You Pay.”

Yet, “Try to Remember” remains a lovely paean to American innocence, and takes its audience beautifully down memory lane to when “you were a callow fellow,” even the word “callow” hiding its intimations of dangerous immaturity. This song was so beautiful that nearly every crooner (male and female) in the business have attempted to sing it. The original El Gallo, Jerry Orbach, is still my favorite, despite wonderful orchestral versions by Andy Williams Harry Belafonte, Julie Andrews and, most recently (2015) Josh Groban. But Patti Page’s 1001-instrumental backup and the movie version’s Jonathan Morris leave me cold—despite the fact that I found the movie version quite charming.

But who can complain with these simple lyrics, supported by the just as simple a set and piano-accompanied production of the original. There’s something to be said about musical theater that seeks out the purest elements of its roots, which Schmidt and Jones seemed to sense. They represented, in their day, what Stephen Sondheim rose to be later on. And, as I describe elsewhere in this series of “My Favorite Musical Theater Songs,” their other major piece from this musical, “Soon It’s Going to Rain,” seems to have so many Sondheim links that they simply cannot be perceived as accidental.

Try to remember the kind of September

When life was slow and oh, so mellow.

Try to remember the kind of September

When grass was green and grain so yellow.

Try to remember the kind of September

When you were a young and callow fellow,

Try to remember and if you remember then follow.

Los Angeles, September 26, 2017

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (April 2024).

August Strindberg | The Dance of Death / 2017

the quarantined couple

by Douglas Messerli

August Strindberg (adapted in English by Conor McPherson), The Dance of Death / the performance I saw, directed by Ron Sossi, was at the Odyssey Theater Ensemble on Sunday, September 24, 2017

Conor McPherson’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death which I saw at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theater Ensemble yesterday, represents a slightly revised version of Part I of the original play, deleting several minor figures, and closing in the terrifying triumvirate of monsters who attempt to destroy one another.

Nearing their 25th wedding anniversary, former artillery captain, perpetually dressed up in military costume, Edgar (Darrell Larson) is a penurious and, in this part of the play, acutely poor man who, surely as Strindberg himself did to his several wives, berates and dismisses the much younger Alice (Lizzy Kimball), who was previously a mediocre actress.

Living on an isolated island in a horrific-looking stone edifice—formerly the island’s jail—they have very few friends, both dismissing the local bourgeoisie as “small-minded nincompoops,”—and, in their hatred for one another have also turned their children, living on the mainland nearby, against them. Indeed, as the play begins they lose yet another cook, and throughout the play cannot seem to be able to serve up even a cold meal. They are true vampires or, as we later perceive, even cannibals. Perhaps they don’t need real food. Besides, the Captain refuses to pay his bills.

The sudden arrival on the island of Alice’s cousin, Kurt, who since his divorce from his wife and the loss of his children’s custody—a painful issue for him, which he later discovers was partially the doing of Edgar—and who since has been traveling to the US and elsewhere, creates a new dimension of friction between the already deep hatreds for each other which they have been acting out.

Kurt has now been hired to create a quarantine center on the island, suggesting that a world which is already separated from the rest of civilization, might become even a center of those people who, as Strindberg puts it, live in a hell created by others and themselves. Like Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, Strindberg’s is a world of the characters’ own-making and from which the sufferers cannot escape. This modern couple lives without a telephone and rely only on an antique Morse tape recorder, a bit today like living without a computer and cell-phone. (Admittedly, Howard and I do not own the latter).

Much like George and Martha in Albee’s Strindberg-influenced Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edgar and Alice play a game similar to “Get the Guests” with Kurt, airing their open hatred of one another, while simultaneously attempting to win him over to their own side. As in the Albee play, the woman first succeeds in wooing the guest, the still-attractive Alice not only drawing Kurt temporarily to her bed, where he bites her lip like a vampire and suggestively hints that he would like to bound and rape her.

When Edgar ups the ante by declaring that he has found Kurt’s son and brought him as a young soldier to island, Alice strikes back by turning her husband in for an insurance-fraud scheme.

If Strindberg’s black work is brutal it is, just like Albee’s play a work that alternates between terror and comedy, as each of the marital partners perpetually find ways to torture one another. Their (and Strindberg’s) constant creativeness in their methods present us with what might be described as a comedy of marital horrors. The battlers, in this case, like elks with antlers locked, cannot release themselves from the struggle, and will clearly die in one anothers’ metaphorical horns.

These two, however, are seasoned travelers to the hell which they have created for one another, while Kurt, a basically gentle being who finds himself suddenly caught up in this maelstrom, is completely humiliated and even shocked by his and their behaviors. And when, finally, Edgar reveals that his stories have all been lies, Kurt changes sides, and quickly abandons the woman who he now realizes is just as diabolical as her husband, quickly fleeing the familial circus for the bourgeoisie households which Edgar and Alice have dismissed.

The play ends, as in Albee’s work, with a quiet détente, which we know will quickly be broken as the next day begins. But in that minute of peacefulness, we also come to comprehend that those two self-haters are also, still, very much in love, both declaring, for just one moment, their own fears and sorrows for the lives they have created.

These three characters demand such a high degree of subtle vulgarity that they are nearly impossible to perform except by the very greatest of actors. I’d like to have seen a production with Katherine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier (who did play the Edgar role in 1967), for example, or Vanessa Redgrave and some male of her league. Kimball, Larson and Jeff LeBeau, however, make a credible attempt to convey the dark comedic world that Strindberg created, and at moments Kimball’s tortured beauty and Larson’s dapper, if crazed, dances lift us to something close to the play’s demands.

The Odyssey Theater Ensemble has done so many wonderful plays over the 48 years of their existence, that it is notable that the company would produce this important play in Los Angeles. Strindberg, despite his true madness, spun like a creative hurricane through the early 20^th century which such a force that, in one way or another, he has influenced nearly all of us. Even my own play, written under my pseudonym, Kier Peters, Past Present Future Tense, is a child, through Albee, of Strindberg’s Dödsdansen.

Once more, the Odyssey should be recognized for their far-sightedness in reviving this work.

Los Angeles, September 25, 2017

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

Friday, April 5, 2024

David Roussève and his dance company REALITY | Halfway to Dawn / 2018

rose colored glasses

by Douglas Messserli

David Roussève and his dance company REALITY, Halfway to Dawn / Los Angeles, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), the performance I saw was on Thursday, October 4, 2018

One might not be able to imagine a better way to organize a dance concert as tying it to the life of black jazz composer, arranger, and performer Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn, writing (sometimes anonymously and sometimes receiving open credit) with Duke Ellington, not only gave the famed band a more coherent jazz sound but wrote and scored some of its most noted songs, including “Grievin’,” “Take the A-Train,” “Love Came,” “Blood Count,” and “Lotus Blossom,” the last song with which choreographer David Roussève and his dance group, REALITY (consisting of Bernard Brown, Raymond Ejofor, Dezaré Foster, Jasmine Jawato, Kevin Le, Julio Medina, Samantha Mohr, Leanne Iacovetta Poirier, and Kevin Williamson) ended their performance of Halfway to Dawn which premiered at REDCAT on Thursday night.

The performance basically takes us through Strayhorn’s career with Ellington and others—another close friend was singer Lena Horne—in mostly chronological order, filling in some facts about Strayhorn’s colorful life with written information projected onto a back screen, along with images and innovative lighting by Roussève’s collaborators, L. MSP Burns, d Sabela grimes, Christopher Kuhl, Lean Phiel, Cari Ann Shim Sham, Katelan Brayer, and Aexsa Durrans that further elucidate elements of Strayhorn’s life.

It doesn’t hurt, moreover, that the classically-trained diminutive composer, Strayhorn, looked more like a computer nerd than a jazz musician and that he lived an openly gay life—with two major lovers, African-American jazz pianist Aaron Bridgers, and a white man, Bill Grove—while smoking and drinking heavily through most of his career. Strayhorn was also active in racial politics and became a friend of Martin Luther King. Even Lena Horne wished she might marry him!

In many respects Strayhorn might remind one of gay lyricist, Lorenz Hart, who as Richard Rodger’s collaborator also did not always get the attention he deserved. Yet, as the years passed Ellington did give more and more credit to the man behind much of his success.

Ellington wrote of him: "Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine.” And later, after his friend’s death, wrote a beautiful tribute to the man, describing Strayhorn was living out "four major moral freedoms": "freedom from hate, unconditionally; freedom from self-pity (even through all the pain and bad news); freedom from fear of possibly doing something that might possibly help another more than it might himself and freedom from the kind of pride that might make a man think that he was better than his brother or his neighbor."

In Strayhorn, accordingly, Roussève has found what you might describe as a kind of unspoken “saint,” certainly a man who deserves an intelligent bio-pic and is certainly worth a dance company’s attention.

And in most instances the choreographer moves his distinct company through a combination of joyful struts, clever and sometimes humorous interludes, and anguished body positions which show what are clearly the various aspects of the composer’s life. I was particularly moved by the first act’s dances based on the composer’s “Grievin’,” “Take the A-Train,” “After All,” and “Your Love Has Faded.”

Yet, ultimately, I found these pieces didn’t quite cohere in a terpsichorean whole, or even present themselves as a coherent ensemble of great dance moments. As those who know my writing realize, I adore narrative, but here its hand was just too heavy, as we attempted to quickly read the written texts and assimilate information that in the end did not fully contribute to the pleasure of the dance. Perhaps a longer, written text in the program, filling us in on Strayhorn’s life might have better served the works.

Clearly Roussève and his contributors must have sensed this even themselves, permitting, in the second act, the Strayhorn story to move into far more abstract territory—apparently, according to the choreographer, to demonstrate a life somewhat falling apart—and allowing the company to move into a less structural format in “I’m Checking Out Goodbye.” “Lush Life,” and the beautiful ending number, “Lotus Blossom.”

If there is something wonderfully ambitious and genre-bending in Halfway to Dawn’s mix of dance, biography, and story-telling, it is, in the end, only “halfway” there. As it is, we must keep adjusting our lens, moving in and out of the pure body movements and grand musical accompaniment with jibs and jabs of somewhat ineffectual story-telling. As incredible as Billy Strayhorn’s story is, perhaps dancing to his remarkable music might have to mean less attention to his life and more focus on the music and its rhythms themselves.

Still, I suggest everyone in Los Angeles run downtown this afternoon for the final matinee performance, and when this moves on to the Brooklyn Academy in New York, everyone who loves dance should flock to see Roussève’s brave attempt to yoke so many genres. And, yes, there ought to be a movie, perhaps incorporating dance, a kind of musical theater surely, as Strayhorn himself, with Lester Henderson, started without completing in their Rose Colored Glasses.

Los Angeles, October 7, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2018).

Thursday, April 4, 2024

Leonard Bernstein, Hugh Wheeler, John Caird, Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim, John Latouche, Lillian Hellman, and Dorothy Parker | Candide / 2018

the best of all possible candides—to date

by Douglas Messerli

Hugh Wheeler (book, adapted from Voltaire), in a new version by John Caird, Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim, John Latouche, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker and Leonard Bernstein (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music) Candide / LAOpera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / Howard Fox and I attended the work on Sunday, February 11, 2018

It is something short of a miracle that Leonard Bernstein’s Candide ever came to be produced. Spearheaded, in part, by Lillian Hellman’s desire to work with Bernstein; after having a touch of operatic experience with composer Marc Blitzstein who adapted her The Little Foxes into an opera he retitled Regina, the tough-minded Hellman contacted Bernstein about the idea of adapting Voltaire’s satiric polemic against Leibniz’s concepts and all religious proclamations.

She (and Bernstein) and other of their friends, including Bernstein’s mentor Aaron Copland, had recently been targets of U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, and had all accumulated rather thick files in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI investigations. Just a few years previous, Arthur Miller, also attacked by McCarthy and Hoover, had written The Crucible, using the Salem witch trials as a metaphor about McCarthy and his committee’s activities. And Hellman, even more a polemicist than Voltaire, but without his light satiric abilities, thought the material perfect for the time. I’m sure Bernstein felt that he couldn’t resist it.

She wanted academic poet Richard Wilbur to write the lyrics, but—fortunately, at least at first—he declined. This pair of high celebrities turned to clever lyricist John Latouche (previously the lyricist for Vernon Duke’s lovely Cabin in the Sky, Jerome Moross’ Ballet Ballads and the same composer’s The Golden Apple), despite knowing that he, as word had gotten out, was difficult to work with. Bernstein had long been a friend with Latouche, and the lyricist was also friends with nearly every major figure of the large gay-filled world of the 1950s, including Copland, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, playwright Tennessee Williams, writers Jane and Paul Bowles, W. H. Auden, Frank O’Hara, and numerous others, bedding with many of them or simply enchanting them with his wit. If perceived as a difficult figure, he was also much beloved, most, as friend Carson McCullers recalling, ignoring his occasional eccentric behavior. In those last five years of his life he lived with poet and later opera lyricist, Kenward Elmslie.

Hellman, who despite her liberal pose in society and her supposed advocation of lesbianism in her early play The Children’s Hour, immediately took a dislike to Latouche, in part because he was “queer.”

But very soon, everybody, except evidently Bernstein, became intimidated by her imperial hand, and the music ground down to a halt, due also to Latouche’s weekly disappearances and his other commitments—a situation in which he continually found himself throughout his short life—including the libretto for Douglas Moore’s highly successful opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe. Even Bernstein, working at the same time on his musical West Side Story decided to take a break from the difficult musical.

Bernstein, finally frustrated with Latouche’s lack of attention to his project, replaced him with Wilbur, who had now signed on despite his lack of experience with theatrical lyricism, and the musical further suffered from his continued re-adaption of Latouche’s quite clever lyrics in Act I and his often clumsy renditions of Act II songs, many of which were originally attempted by Bernstein and Hellman themselves, only one of which, the Old Lady’s tango “I’m Easily Assimilated,” written by Bernstein with Spanish lyrics by his wife Felicia, and whose tempo was wryly noted by the composer as “moderato hassidicamente,”was quite wonderful, the others of which fell flat of Latouche’s first act pieces.

The witty Dorothy Parker was also brought aboard to write, but soon left, leaving only one piece behind “The Marquise’s Gavotte,” which has now completely disappeared in the newest incarnation which I saw at the LA Opera production. Parker soon fled the scene as well, declaring that it had “too many geniuses.”

Poet, novelist, and critic James Agee also was briefly asked to contribute lyrics, but his death in May 1955, when the production was finally beginning to gel, obviously precluded his involvement.

Latouche continued with the project, retreating to his Calais, Vermont retreat—presumably not yet hearing that he had been replaced by Wilbur—to further work on the lyrics, he also dying of a “coronary occlusion” in August 1956, before the work’s premiere.

In the months before the Broadway production, most of Latouche’s lyrics were revised by Wilbur, many of them of them not so felicitously. Howard Pollack, in his recent biography of Latouche recounts at least one such revision, which is retained in the LA Opera version.

latuoche’s version:

Dearest lady, pray explain,

I had thought you slain;

Thought you rudely violated too.

wilbur’s version:

Dearest, how can this be so?

You were dead, you know.

You were shot and bayoneted, too.

The later clearly moves away from Voltaire, completely ignoring his illusion to her rape.

In another last moment change, Latouche’s clever “This is a perfect day for an auto-de-fé” was expunged because it was presumed no one might know what auto-de-fé (“act of faith”) meant. Characters were deleted, songs dropped, others replacing them. By the time Candide, after a tryout in Boston, reached New York, it was, as critic Walter Kerr declared—despite its marvelous music, incredible costumes and sets, and an incomparable cast of Barbara Cook, Robert Rounseville, Max Adrian, and Irra Petina—“a really spectacular disaster.” Candide was a musical flop, lasting only 73 performances, despite several other very positive reviews.

Over the years, Bernstein constantly revised it, throwing out songs and adding new ones, and others continued to rewrite it along with him. I saw a failed production of the musical at the Washington, D.C. The Kennedy Center in the 1970s. Even given my desire for the success of the production, I remember it as a failure.

The new LAOpera production, which I saw the other evening has completely expunged Lillian Hellman (good riddance) for a new adaptation by Hugh Wheeler, in yet a newer version by British John Caird, who rewrote it for the Royal National Theatre. Our program lists further lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Now it is extraordinarily difficult to know who has written what, although it seems that Latouche’s “Auto-de-fé” lyrics have been returned, and his early versions of “The Best of All Possible Worlds” and other songs have been retained.

The first act of this opera remains still a remarkable piece of theater, with Bernstein’s amazing overture, the best of almost any opera/theatrical piece—whatever you want to call the work—that has ever existed, and James Conlon, despite the limited acoustics of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, did it justice. I just wish it had sounded as blended as I sure it does up closer.

The cast, with Kelsey Grammer playing both Voltaire, now a link connecting the various aspects of an extraordinarily episodic plot, and Pangloss; the wonderful Broadway singer Christine Ebersole playing the Old Lady; and two gloriously new singers, who I am sure we will be hearing more of soon, Jack Swanson as Candide and Erin Morley as Cunegonde.

Morley has already begun an illustrious career as an opera singer, and I’m sure she will go further quickly. Swanson, a relative neophyte, was the real surprise of the night. A wonderful singer, a handsome and appealing actor, I can only hope he makes a career as a delightful operatic presence; he was certainly appealing in this role.

Christine Ebersole, who I also saw in Grey Gardens, was simply marvelous as The Old Lady, but I wanted more! And the role simply didn’t provide it. Just another song would have been perfect.

Grammar, a good actor and a passable singer, simply didn’t have the acoustical lungs to lift his words up to the balcony. I may be gradually losing my hearing, but most of us agreed he simply couldn’t be heard when he spoke. Ebersole came through nicely, and all the music came across quite accessibly, but Grammar’s voice just didn’t have the lung power to reach the entire audience, alas.

Yet, overall, despite the problems of the second act’s episodic adventures, a pattern already laid out in the first act—which I would argue is the real problem with this Bernstein work (too bad Latouche was not retained to create a cleverer body of poetry for the second act)—the theater piece which even Bernstein could never quite define, and is, after all, even after its hundreds of revisions, a truly “holy mess,” worked beautifully, stirring up the entire audience to rounds of applause.

And why complain? As James Conlon has described it in his brief introduction:

“Bernstein’s Candide wanders the musical world in a kaleidoscopic succession of styles and acquisitions: jazz, Broadway, Stravinsky, neo-Baroque, operetta, tango, the world of his American contemporaries and even, in some versions, a Schoenbergian 12-tone row. And, of course, there is Mahler, a composer with whom Bernstein identified deeply.”

Then there is Kurt Weill, the great German composer of so many of Brecht’s most serious dramas. Even Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife, recognized Bernstein’s understanding of that composer’s work. In Weill’s wild assimilation of popular and classical musical tropes, he tried to bring the masses into a far more serious operatic tradition than they might have imagined they were experiencing. Bernstein wanted the same thing.

And I think, in the performance I saw the other night, Bernstein achieved that. I was amazed how the audience, a wide range of individuals, did not suddenly stand in immediate obeisance of what they had just experienced—a standard procedure of LAOpera audiences—but sat in their seats applauding again and again and again in delight for the performances. I think we, after the last Mahleresque ballad, which is the true heart of so many Bernstein works, “Make Our Garden Grow,” were all in tears:

And let us try before we die

to make some sense of life.

We’re neither pure nor wise, nor good:

we’ll do the best we know.

I knew, as I think the audience also did, that I had just seen the best version of this terribly flawed musical extravaganza that might be possible. And, yes, it is the best of all possible productions. As Pangloss asks: “Any questions?”

Los Angeles, February 13, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2018).

Poet, novelist, and critic James Agee also was briefly asked to contribute lyrics, but his death in May 1955, when the production was finally beginning to gel, obviously precluded his involvement.

latuoche’s version:

Dearest lady, pray explain,

I had thought you slain;

Thought you rudely violated too.

wilbur’s version:

Dearest, how can this be so?

You were dead, you know.

You were shot and bayoneted, too.

The later clearly moves away from Voltaire, completely ignoring his illusion to her rape.

Christine Ebersole, who I also saw in Grey Gardens, was simply marvelous as The Old Lady, but I wanted more! And the role simply didn’t provide it. Just another song would have been perfect.

And why complain? As James Conlon has described it in his brief introduction:

And let us try before we die

to make some sense of life.

We’re neither pure nor wise, nor good:

we’ll do the best we know.

Los Angeles, February 13, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2018).

World Theater, Opera, and Performance

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Saturday, April 6, 2024

Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones | "Try to Remember" from The Fantasticks / 1960

August Strindberg | The Dance of Death / 2017

Friday, April 5, 2024

David Roussève and his dance company REALITY | Halfway to Dawn / 2018

Thursday, April 4, 2024

Leonard Bernstein, Hugh Wheeler, John Caird, Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim, John Latouche, Lillian Hellman, and Dorothy Parker | Candide / 2018

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