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Parenthood on the Hoof

Gonna Fly Now (Theme from “Rocky”), by Bill Conti, lyrics by Carol Connors & Ayn Robbins, performed by Maynard Ferguson (1977), encountered 1977

Buy it here  |  See it here  |  Lyrics here  |  Sheet music here

Running: that was the way I summoned joy and the way I expressed it in 1977. That year saw the dawn of the great jogging era, the publication of Jim Fixx’s Complete Book of Running, and the first Rocky movie (well, to be technical, released in December 1976). No one who ever saw that movie forgets The Scene: the one where Sylvester Stallone whips up some horrible nutritious concoction in the blender, downs it, and goes out for a training run through the predawn streets of Philadelphia. The scene morphs into a montage of boxing training footage, but then returns at the end to Rocky’s run, memorably topping off, literally and figuratively, looking eastward into the rising sun from the summit of the grand staircase in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as Rocky flings his arms triumphantly into the air. All of this accompanied by Bill Conti’s soaring, pulsing theme song Gonna Fly Now, periodically propelled by swells of strings that communicate to every listener the sheer transcendence running can produce.

The Endorphin Rush

The Scene probably bred far more runners than Jim Fixx ever did, and led many of us who had no business lacing up jogging shoes to try living that dream for a while.

And I was one of them. I have preternaturally tight hamstrings (which I kind of knew) and a tendency to disk degeneration (which I guess I didn’t). Despite my body telling me there wasn’t something quite right about it for me, I was out there on Baltimore’s streets, and sometimes Washington’s when business took me there, three times a week. I was to pay dearly for it; I consider my three later back surgeries to have been secondary (at least in part) to injuries I inflicted on myself then.

But no matter: the immediate effect at the time was sheer joy. The Endorphin Rush was real, and I got hooked on it. No matter that my life and career had veered wildly off course; I still had a way to feel great as my feet were guiding me around, say, the Guilford Reservoir a few blocks north of our house.

Nosebleed-Inspiring

And of course as I did it, my breath got all rhythmic, and mentally I was singing songs to myself that went with the ragged pace of my breathing. Later running would involve Walkmen (Walkmans?), but those were a couple of years off yet. In a time before earbuds or even headphones, my own voice was the only portable sound source. And so voice it was.

And for jogging I couldn’t hum just any song to myself. Only certain songs had that power to make you run.  Gonna Fly Now was, predictably, a regular feature of my under-the-breath playlist. In the Maynard Ferguson version, that is. Though I saw the movie when it came out (who didn’t?), it was not really the Bill Conti soundtrack version I knew. Ferguson, a jazz trumpeter of formidable power and control, was never above jazzifying what was new and hot in the world of pop music. And frequently he moved as fast as the pop charts did. To choose the obvious instance, the release of his version of Gonna Fly Now was effectively simultaneous with the release of the Bill Conti original.[1]

This adaptation was everything you could want in a 1970s running song: pulsing disco beat and soaring fills and solos by Ferguson that took the melody to nosebleed-inspiring heights.

Outshining the Original

I don’t expect anyone would disagree that Ferguson’s adaptation outshines Conti’s original. Whereas Conti relied on strings and a wall of sound to add the sense of lift and elation, and this does work, Ferguson’s soaring solos are simply gutsier, more powerful, and more musically inventive ways to stimulate the same emotions. They are more in keeping with the dynamic of Conti’s own melody than what Conti does. Something about the song just calls out for a reach to the upper registers, which Conti does not do much but Ferguson does a lot – goes all the way up to three As above Middle C.[2] And not timidly: explosively, warbling at the heights.

Of course, what Ferguson could do with one of his custom-designed trumpets was far more impressive than anything I could have sung, even if I hadn’t been running, with my non-custom-designed voice. But no one else ever was intended to hear me, or did. So I was happy.

Celebrating the Arrival

I vividly recall one run with that number on my lips, the day Andrew, my first son, was born, in June of 1977. For medical reasons, this was a scheduled birth. We went into the hospital early in the day and by the afternoon I was holding my son in my arms. The photo to the right, the first of Andrew and me together, was probably taken that evening. But in between, after the suspenseful, impatient wait in the lobby, I left his mother to sleep for a while, drove home and – went for a run.

I’m the father of three, and I know there’s no accounting for anything in the feelings of parents. But whatever the reasons, this was the most euphoric I ever was over the arrival of a child. I felt – I don’t know – limitless, transcendent, as if I were floating rather than running.

It was a very good moment, one I shall always treasure. (As I do the son who occasioned it.)

A postscript: If you want to see a tribute to the Ferguson performance that, for sheer excitement, tops even the Master’s effort, click here. It may not be quite definitive, but damn! is it good.

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An Actorly Spring Awakening at Towson

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com on April 28, 2013

When I first saw Spring Awakening in 2007, I walked out of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York almost quivering. I knew I had just seen something so exciting and innovative it deserved the overused characterization of important. I fell asleep in my hotel room with the freshly-purchased CD playing on my laptop. I could hardly play anything else for a few days. Though it won the Tony for Best Musical, the show did not actually stick around Broadway that long – about 900 performances. That was followed by a national tour or two.

During that spell in which the show was a strictly professional production, a strange situation prevailed. Spring Awakening is all about youth, and the cast is overwhelmingly comprised of youngsters. But the audiences skewed old, because people my age tend to be the ones with the cash to buy tickets to professional performances. But about a year ago, the show started being made available to non-professional companies, and over the last year there have been at least four different productions in Maryland alone. Spring Awakening has come to the masses. Finally youth can afford to see a show so profoundly about them.

Finally The Right Audience

I wondered what that concatenation of subject and audience would look like.  Last night, courtesy of the Towson University theater program, I found out. This was an undergraduate house, clearly, and they were rapt and engaged. Yet it was a knowing engagement. By that, I do not mean that the kids came in knowing the tunes and humming along, in fact it was obvious from the laughs and the gasps when funny or shocking things occurred that a large part of the contingent on hand had no idea what was coming. Nor do I mean that there were intense conversations about the show during the break, because so far as I could see there weren’t. What I mean is, the viewers got it, they understood it on both intellectual and instinctive levels, agreed and approved; in a sense, that accounts for the absence of intense lobby conversations during the break. But the raucous curtain calls demonstrated the engagement and approval of the audience. And the identification.

Different Issues

But having used the word identification, I must immediately report as well that to my mind the program notes may not have got the significance of the play for young viewers quite right. Those notes, some of the most extensive and interesting dramaturgy I’ve come across in any college production (and they rate a tip of the hat for that) nonetheless seem to argue rather too strenuously for the contemporariness of the issues. In one of the essays, director Joseph Ritsch heroically makes this case, speaking of the continued fights in this era for gay equality and the availability of contraception, and of the continuing risk of HIV infection for young Americans, and the high rate of suicide among gay teens. But these are mostly issues parallel to the ones the German youth of 1891 faced in the source material, Franz Wedekind’s play Spring’s Awakening, and in the modern musical; they are not the same. For instance, the suicide in the show does not seem to be about sexual orientation, but instead is a reaction to unmet social and familial pressures to succeed academically. We still struggle with sexual abuse of children by predatory adults, but it’s no longer a secret that it occurs, and it’s not an issue as to which there are two sides within the realm of respectable opinion. Crucially, the kids in the audience are the children or grandchildren of the generation that fought and won the Sexual Revolution. Only a few of them, but surely not many, grew up in households that expected them to have no sex lives, which seems to be what Wedekind and his successors depict the parents and teachers in the play as doing. And what Wedekind clearly saw as an underlying issue, the struggle to humanize a bourgeois society, to the extent it is not deemed passé altogether, is in a very different phase.

In short, the world of Spring Awakening is more different from the one last night’s audience inhabits than it is similar, and I don’t think the grip the show exerted on the audience was owing to a similarity of issues. Rather, I think it owed to the similarity of experience and the music.

Same Experience

And again, by similarity of experience, I am not talking about being up against the brutal parental repression or shame. For instance, Wendla, the young heroine, becomes pregnant; we still have a lot of debates about unwed teen motherhood, but there aren’t many young women these days being hustled by their mothers into unsafe back alley abortions (as happens to Wendla) because their mothers are so afraid of being ostracized. Shame about a daughter’s premarital sexuality and pregnancy might have been issues once but are not generally for this generation. Rather, I am speaking of the experience of being young and discovering sex. It is that simple, and on that level, Spring Awakening works profoundly well.

And here, at last, is the opportunity to discuss this particular production. These young performers give the distinct impression of having been much more thoroughly trained as actors than as singers. This is especially true for the two leads, Wendla (Bridget Linsenmeyer) and Melchior (Nick Fruit). As singers, they each showed distinct problems with controlling their pitch, and not merely at the upper end of the register. But as actors they were superb, especially Linsenmeyer. Wendla’s path into sexuality is a spanking fixation, and the beginning of the sexual encounters between Wendla and Melchior begins with her asking Melchior to beat her with a stick, a sensitive and scary thing to do, as indeed is almost any sexual overture for those without prior experience, but a request of this sort even more so than most. I have now seen a number of Wendlas making that request, but none venturing into it so feelingly, persistently, and bravely as Linsenmeyer’s Wendla. And Melchior’s reaction, first confused and then suddenly not merely confused but also turned on, seems grippingly real. Likewise, when Wendla’s friend Martha (Ines Nassara) sings of THE DARK I KNOW WELL, namely sexual abuse by her father, aided and abetted by her mother, though all the notes are hit correctly, the song is more acted than sung, and very convincingly. (Although someone had better tell young actresses that even after Anne Hathaway, you don’t have to sob through every song.)

Of course none of this works without tremendous honesty, which Wedekind’s play and Steven Sater’s book both exhibit. Wedekind, of course, showed the greater audacity: masturbation, homosexuality, rape, pregnancy, and abortion among teenagers were things that one simply did not write about then. All of these things are acceptable to write about in Sater’s era (masturbation jokes seem to be a staple of sitcoms, for example). Still, Wedekind and Sater don’t merely go there; they get it right. And in this actorly version, that comes through especially.

Joyously Angry

And, lest it be forgotten, this show is not just about sex, but about another universal a young audience will recognize and respond to: the rebellion of youth against age. Here, (as has been the case since the days of Plautus and Molière) realism is not always called for but comedy is. All the adults are portrayed by two actors, here Billy McHattie and Jenna K. Rossman, and most of the roles are portrayed in broadly comic, ogreish strokes. As schoolmaster and assistant, for example, they actually break out into villainish bwa-ha-has as they contemplate their villainy toward Moritz (Montel Butler), the youngster who in due course will take his own life because of their oppression. And on the other side of the coin, the resulting anger and disgust of the youngsters at their elders is given enormous play, especially in the showstopper, TOTALLY FUCKED, which in this production was actually the curtain call number, to the great enjoyment of the audience, which clapped along. There never has been a song in any musical I can think of that has been such a joyous expression of anger and contempt.

And this brings me back to the music, which is the other reason the show is so right for youngsters. You can call Duncan Sheik’s music rock (and other critics have done that), but I’m unhappy with that label. The orchestra does include a standard rock band combo (keyboards, drums, guitars, and bass), but also a string trio and a separate piano. Much of the score is deliberately discordant, owing far more to Leoš Janáček than to Buddy Holly. Still, the rock label was deliberately courted in the original production, which had many of the characters grabbing mics or even microphone stands, rock style, when delivering their songs. This production wisely eschews those props. But whatever you call the style, the songs are gripping, and wistful, and angry, and at times they break your heart.

Tweets

Lyrically speaking, the songs are also completely modern in idiom. No effort is made to keep them, either in phrasing or in frame of reference, applicable to early Industrial Revolution Germany. To the contrary, they are the stuff of contemporary Tweets: “May not be cool but it’s so where I live.” “Bobby Maler, he’s the best …/ Looks so nasty in those khakis.” Und so weiter. Musically irresistible songs, couched in Tweet idiom: what’s for a young audience not to like?

As I have already intimated, in this production, the singing tended not to be up to the quality of the acting, although certainly one exception was Shannon Graham as Ilse, the “throwaway child” who has taken to a precarious if exciting existence with a commune of artists (a sort of precursor of Mimi in either La Bohème or Rent); Graham does full justice to BLUE WIND. There were also technical glitches with the sound system, which threatened to slide into feedback at some points and left actors effectively speechless at others. And the choice was made here, unlike most productions, to take the orchestra off the stage, which robbed the interplay between musicians and singers of a slight degree of spontaneity, also made it easier for the musicians to drown out the singers at some points. So for those who were receiving their first exposure to Spring Awakening, it would be wise to take in a different production to get the full sound of the show. But the ensemble numbers generally went off beautifully.

The Song That Must Be Right

And of course the acid test of any production of the show is the most important ensemble number, THE SONG OF PURPLE SUMMER, the stunner of an anthem that ends the show. I’ve always felt that that song, a celebration of the inevitable triumph of the natural order over the sadness that life can engender, should really have capped a different show. (This is a show about the beginning of the spring of life, not its summer; the sadness of life has been pretty overpowering, what with the deaths of Wendla and Moritz; and if this is a way of saying that Melchior will succeed in carrying on the life force and the hope of his fallen friends, it’s an unearned reassurance, since all we’ve seen leading up to it is Melchior resolving to do so.) But it’s pointless to carp, as this melange of undecipherably lovely chords and heartfelt relief would be the perfect end to any evening of musical theater, even West Side Story. Illogical as is its placement here, I look forward to it every time. And this one went off without a hitch.

Spring Awakening is not for the faint of heart – I’m speaking of the hearts of those who produce it. The show turns out to be a heavy lift. Towson may not have pulled off a technically perfect rendition, but the superior acting made the imperfections matter less, and the palpable gratitude of the audience was clearly earned. And we can all rejoice that this show is finally reaching its most appropriate audiences.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for artwork

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Knocking the Songs Out of the Park: Chess

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com April 26, 2013

As the program notes to the revival of the 1988 version of musical Chess at Dundalk Community Theatre correctly reflect, the show is “rarely performed.” At the same time it has a well-deserved reputation as the repository of some gorgeous music. As John Amato, director of this incarnation of the show, comments, the book is the problem, i.e. the problem that explains why the show doesn’t get done often. Some of the book has reportedly been trimmed in this rendering. Perhaps because of these trims, the songs get a decent chance to shine through, and it helps tremendously the songs are delivered by a cast that is simply sensational. Nobody told these actor/singers that this was community theater, and apparently they never got the memo. With only two minor exceptions, this is simply professional-quality work.

Amy Agnese, as Florence, the “second” (i.e. trainer and nursemaid) of the boorish American chess master Freddie, yields not a thing vocally to Judy Kuhn, who originated the role. I KNOW HIM SO WELL, Agnese’s duet with Lisa Pastella-Young, as Svetlana, the estranged wife of Florence’s new love, the Russian chess master Anatoly, is stunning.

And I think I actually prefer the vocal delivery of Ken Ewing, as Freddie, to Philip Casnoff’s original, although Ewing in this role will not be to everyone’s taste. Freddie, obviously based on the late Bobby Fischer (not only in personality but in the unfolding of the tournament at the center of the action) is usually portrayed by young, handsome, intense-looking actors. Ewing is large and made to look ungainly by unflattering velour workout clothes, and not a bit the intellectual matinee idol. Yet he manages to inhabit the role a different way, making PITY THE CHILD, his self-revelation, an explanation of his nerdly and gay (“probably queer,” say the lyrics) persona. And if the voice is a little ragged, well, that fits the psyche.

Steve Antonsen (as Anatoly) is also expert at milking the emotion from a song, especially with ANTHEM, Anatoly’s tribute to Russia and, more broadly, to the persistent power of the loyalties he has tried to walk away from when he defected and the TERRACE DUET, in which Anatoly and Florence fall in love. Antonsen is also somewhat unconventional casting for the role, not young nor svelte, but since the character is supposed to have had a life and a marriage before he got to this point, it rang truer than what conventional casting yields.

So, back to the book, by Richard Nelson (“based on an idea by Tim Rice”). What’s wrong with it? There is every reason for it to amount to something. It’s what they call “high concept”: star-crossed lovers torn apart by Cold War politics set against a background of grandmaster-level chess competition. But the concept sort of lies there lifeless. If you’re going to show how Cold War realpolitik wrecked people’s lives, you have to do it realistically: that’s why The Spy Who Came In From The Cold worked so well. Here, we are supposed to believe that Freddy’s wheeler-dealer business agent Walter (Timoth David Copney) is also a CIA agent – and that the said Walter would first draw a gun to help Anatoly defect to the West and then a little later turn around, in close collaboration with his KGB counterpart, and pressure Anatoly to go back. That creaking sound you hear is the audience’s credibility straining and snapping. But once that happens, the book seems like an exercise in willed unhappy endings, and in fact there’s a song, YOU AND I, that tries to get past the point by making the point explicit:

Well, of course they don’t have a happy ending if the book author won’t write one, but the plot has to support it credibly. We have just witnessed two characters with the strength to create the precondition for a happy ending, Florence by defecting from the chess master who has been her professional obsession for seven years, and Anatoly by defecting both from an unhappy nation and an unhappy marriage. The CIA and KGB characters then engineer a situation in which Anatoly is persuaded to return to both like Sidney Carton opting for the guillotine in Tale of Two Cities. And Anatoly pretty much folds his hand and goes with it. It just doesn’t wash for a character who has just shown such courage.

I mentioned the gorgeous, operatic score, by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus (better known as the “Bs” in the rock group ABBA), but it must also be acknowledged that Tim Rice’s lyrics leave a lot to be desired – for songs in a musical. Individual lines work, but they don’t form coherent arguments (okay in pop music but not on the stage), and they frequently don’t exactly align with the plot. For instance, one of Florence’s big numbers, NOBODY’S SIDE, the interior monologue Florence runs through as she is making up her mind to desert Freddie for Anatoly, seems to be in part about chafing at being a chess second (“There must be more I could achieve/ But I don’t have the nerve to leave”) and in part about declaring her independence of relationships to anyone, as the song’s title suggests. What it doesn’t seem to be about is forming any allegiances, quite the contrary. Yet that’s really what’s going on dramatically: she’s not rejecting allegiances at all, but simply forming a new one, giving her heart to Anatoly, who barely figures in the song. Little lyrical lapses like this, making for showstopper tunes but insulting the thrust of the dramatic action, are commonplace, and they add up.

In short, this is a first-rate production (not only in vocal performance and acting, but also in costuming and sets) of what is, overall, an incurably second-rate show. Director Amato is to be congratulated for having highlighted the one part that is top-notch, coaxing out of the cast song after song that knocks each one out of the park. It is well worth going to to hear those songs sail by. We can all go see Sondheim some other time.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for graphic element

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The Torture Report: We Need Names and Consequences

Published in the Maryland Daily Record May 8, 2013

Ordinarily, when this column turns to things our government has done wrong, out of respect as much as anything else, it lays out the facts in some detail. This time, I’m sick of facts; I have waded through most of the 600-page report of the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, in particular the parts that had to do with torture. The Task Force, a bipartisan group headed by former Republican Congressman Asa Hutchinson and former Democratic Congressman James R. Jones, examined all public information on the way this nation dealt with the captives it seized during the “War on Terror.” Their report provides fact after fact: waterboarding and slamming people into walls and stress positions, and keeping people awake for days at a time and insults and forced nudity, and who ordered it and when, and who justified it and how. Much of this has been discussed in this column in years gone by, and it was disheartening to focus on it yet again. And by now, it all amounts to detailing a picture we all know.

The Undeniable

At this point, no one has to prove that our country engaged in torture. No one really denies it any more. We did unspeakable things to people who were or we thought might be our enemies. We did unspeakable things to ourselves: the Report details the high incidence of PTSD among the torturers.[1] We renditioned people to other countries that we knew would torture them.

There is little support for the notion that torture is efficacious. The Report encountered no reliable evidence that torture has yielded reliable actionable intelligence; do not be fooled by Zero Dark Thirty. Conversely, there is little dispute that torture is harmful to our national interest.

There is, likewise, no disputing that torture is illegal, under both international and domestic law. There is no disputing that the lion’s share of the torturers worked for the CIA. Yet the few prosecutions for torture have been courts martial, of military personnel; no CIA employees or contractors have been defendants.[2] We know, therefore, that there is a huge aura of impunity surrounding most of the torturers.

If the infliction of pain for revenge or information has truly stopped,[3] as the Obama administration claims, that is solely a function of the will of the administration, completely reversible by the fiat of any future president.

Fix It?

So what are we going to do about it?

It might seem obvious: the law ostensibly provides remedies, both civil and criminal.  But only ostensibly. Actually, the law provides no remedies.

The criminal remedies theoretically available cannot be applied unless the government chooses to apply them. The Obama administration has shown a determination not to do that, and there’s no overcoming prosecutorial discretion.

And civil remedies have proven next to useless against the government and its agents. All the cases are thrown out. Sooner rather than later, some Assistant U.S. Attorney will announce that allowing the case to go forward would reveal intelligence sources, methods, and activities, and/or state secrets, and the case will be ended.[4] One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Laugh? Let’s face it, the intelligence methods being protected from disclosure are probably torture, the intelligence activities are probably torture, and the intelligence sources are probably people who blurted things out under torture. But though none of this is a secret anymore, saying it publicly “discloses” it.

Cry? Maybe with frustration. The torture is no secret, and we ought to know the real names of the perpetrators. We ought to shame them. We ought to fine them. We ought to imprison them. We ought to make them, or the government that enabled them, pay damages to the people they injured – yes even the injured ones who also did or tried to do terrible things to this country themselves. (The law does not exist merely for the benefit of our friends.)

Impunity

Oh, we know the big names: the people at the top of the Bush administration who made the policies. And we and they already know there are only a few countries in the world – other than the United States – where they can travel totally unafraid of prosecution or lawsuit. (The USA a haven for criminals!) But there are hundreds of others whose connections to unspeakable deeds committed in this nation’s name truly remain secret. And these people, who violated U.S. and international criminal law, walk among us – can walk out into the world – with impunity because judges have shut down even the means of linking them to what they did.

Is the ingenuity of our judges and lawyers so trifling we cannot establish that linkage without revealing things that are truly secret? (Establish waterboarding, for instance, without going into what questions the torturers were asking? Or conduct certain proceedings in camera?) Is it beyond all possibility to chart a judicial path to consequences for the people who did these things?

Because – let’s face it again – if there are no consequences, it isn’t really illegal. Oh, maybe as a theoretical matter we could say that even if a crime or tort is committed by one who can never be sanctioned, still there was a crime and/or a tort. But in real life, if there are no sanctions, we do not ordinarily recognize that crimes or torts have been committed.

At Least A Truth Commission

And if that is too much, then at a bare minimum, even if there are no consequences, we need to link the names and the deeds. What happened at Guantanamo, at Bagram, at black sites all over the world, and at the hands of autocrats like Qadafi, who tortured renditioned prisoners at our request, has ripped a hole in our national psyche. It is not how Americans generally act, and certainly not how we want to think of ourselves acting. And when I say we, I mean practically all of us. As this column recorded at the time, I spoke to Army rangers fresh from Iraq in 2004 who were horrified by the then-emerging abuses at Abu Ghraib and felt strongly the need to prosecute the perpetrators. This should never be or become a left/right issue. Torture is simply un-American, no matter where one stands on the political spectrum. And we need to cure what it has done to us.

So, even if we couldn’t bring ourselves to make the torturers pay personally, even if we protected the public fisc from reparations, it would still be important for the bandage to be ripped away from these horrors. At least there ought to be a truth commission. If we cannot have the Nuremberg trials, at least we should have what South Africa and El Salvador had. A Nuremberg or a South Africa tends to establish a benchmark for what a country will never again permit itself to do.

That is a benchmark we urgently need to establish. The Report shows how badly we need to make this right.

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Mondo Preview

Published in The Hopkins Review, New Series 6.2 (Spring 2013)

And actually, that last line is precisely the point: that a summer of shenanigans has really matured this crew. They have a lifetime to be grownups; this wisecracking dejeuner sur l’herbe is something like a closer to their extended childhoods. There is a detectable elegiac note here.

Theater always was and always will be what George Kaufman and Moss Hart called a “fabulous invalid,” no more susceptible to being killed off than to thriving. Surely the bizarre dance of the producers and the critics which has led to hypertrophied New York previews and ostracized reviewers will not damage it. And a system which serves up works like the ones just discussed has a lot going for it. Even if it forces the critic to go guerilla from time to time.

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Boeing Boeing: A Delirious Farce

James Whalen and Kelsea Edgerly

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com April 21, 2013

Let me get right to the point, commenting only that getting to the point is a thing good farces never do, because good farces, like the 1960 Marc Camoletti hit Boeing Boeing, in revival at the Rep Stage, thrive upon delaying what people are most impatient for and/or what they are frightened of. In Boeing Boeing, the thing Bernard, the Paris-based playboy at the center of the action most fears is that a unique arrangement that enables him to keep three “fiancées” in ignorance of each other’s existences will come crashing down. And of course that is exactly what the audience most desires to see – not out of anger at Bernard, who is rarely insufferable, but just because we all slow down for auto accidents and train wrecks.

To summarize, then, by way of a topic sentence – although of course summarizing is exactly what Bernard (portrayed with suavity but also increasing desperation by James Whalen) hopes each of his girlfriends will never manage to do. One, Gabriella (Kelsea Edgerly), an Alitalia air hostess, a vision in blue, as pictured above with Mr. Whalen, is passionate. Another, Gloria (Molly Cahill Govern), also an air hostess, decked in TWA crimson, sports a Noo Yoouhk accent and a stridently original take on the war of the sexes. And the third, Gretchen (Allison Leigh Corke) is what Brünnhilde would be like if she were wearing the lemon yellow uniform of Lufthansa.

So what it’s really all about is – naturally, what it’s all about is exactly what Bernard tries to keep the fiancées from understanding, abetted by his increasingly dysphoric and thus increasingly hilarious maid Berthe (Nanna Ingvarsson) and his old friend Robert (Paul Edward Hope), fresh off the boat from Wisconsin, who is torn between horror and horror-stricken envy at the webs Robert weaves when first he practices to deceive. Berthe’s French accent and Robert’s Fargo-ese add a polyglot flavor to the sheer mania of the proceeding, and no doubt gave a nightmare flavor to the almost completely successful labors of Dialect/Vocal Coach Nancy Krebs. The nightmare plays out on a charmingly 60s-styled bachelor pad set (a tip of the hat to Scenic Designer Daniel Ettinger) with doors for three bedrooms and a bathroom into which girlfriends are tossed with wild abandon, one or another emerging like a whack-a-mole as soon as a rival exits.

And thus, when you get down to it, the best farces – what was I saying? Until it comes back to me, let me comment that the thing about really great farces is that once they wind up, they become like three-ring circuses, with physical comedy (pratfalls and double-takes), character-based comedy, and the sheer geometry of exits from impossible situations being closed off, one by one, contributing to constant hilarity and nearly non-stop laughter. Of course, even in the case of the most beautifully-constructed farces, this requires a deft directorial touch, because the whole thing is always a soufflé of improbable coincidence, of characters missing unmissable cues, of perfectly-timed entrances and exits, of unbelievable ingenuity preventing inevitable disaster, of insults taken where none were intended, of passes made and, against all probability, not rebuffed. And keeping soufflés from falling is hard work. All praise is therefore due Director Karl Kippola, because in his hands the whole ridiculous confection never falls.

I seem to be wandering. Let me refocus: One of the interesting things about this play is that, after a great success in Paris and London, it flopped upon its first Broadway staging in 1965. It’s hard to imagine why. I was fortunate enough to see the 2008 New York revival, with, among others, Bradley Whitford as Bernard and Christine Baranski as Berthe, which was a deserved hit. As far as I’m concerned, this ensemble was every bit as good … So where was I going with this?

Oh, yes. Let me cut to the chase – and then you don’t really have to read the rest of the review. This show is a delight, an old-fashioned delirious laugh-fest. Of course, by the end, as in most farces, libertinage is chastened and conventional morality reasserted, and even Berthe the maid is properly compensated for the strain Bernard’s shenanigans have placed on her ethical sensibilities. But getting to that point we have not only laughed our heads off, not only witnessed the fulfillment, however temporary, of transgressive bachelor-in-paradise fantasies, but also been treated to something rarer: a visual reimmersion in the colors and sights of the most carefree part of an era: the coordinated uniforms and flight bags, the electric blue paint on the wall, the miniskirts, the smoking-jacket-and-ascot, not to mention the final payoff: a curtain-call that will remind viewers of the way singing groups used to present on television before rock videos and MTV.

Not to be missed.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn except for production photograph

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A Silenced Songbird

It Never Entered My Mind, by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart, performed by Joyce Carr (1981)

Buy it here | Lyrics here

This one is not about me. This is about a colleague I met in the course of my duties as a court reporter in Washington in 1976-78. Her name was Joyce Carr.

From the album artwork above, you already know I’m talking about the woman pictured there. So you know already that Joyce was a singer at some point. But you probably don’t recognize the name, and the album artwork gives ambiguous signals. It doesn’t look like the cover of a big-time release, but it does have a certain well-groomed look. (The artist, Reg Stagmaier, did a lot of album covers.)

So, was this a vanity project, the album, or the real deal? That’s an updated version of the question I always had about Joyce in the two years I knew her – as a fellow-court reporter.

The Real Deal?

You have to understand the way we reporters met each other. We didn’t usually go out in teams. There were two places I was likely to cross paths with her, and neither was necessarily conducive to long getting-to-know-you discussions. One was the Superior Court grand juries. There might be three or four juries meeting at the same time, in big subterranean rooms under Judiciary Square off a long corridor. When the juries were taking testimony, which was often most of the time, we reporters were in the room. Otherwise, we were most likely in the hall, which might be jammed full of witnesses, cops, prosecutors and jurors on break. The odds that any two of us would be in that long hall and sitting next to each other at the same time were limited. The other common milieu was the home office on Seventh Street Southwest, a somewhat secure facility where we would type up the confidential grand jury transcripts. And there, since we were largely paid by the page, we tended to keep our heads down over our Selectrics,[1] the better to churn out those pages.

Still, we did chat a little, and it seems to me I also heard some gossip about Joyce.  The story was she had been a singer once upon a time, greatly admired in Washington jazz circles. There was some connection as well with Lincoln Inn, a joint on or just off Pennsylvania Avenue near the National Theater, where we had a Christmas party during one of my two years on that job. Apparently the proprietor was an old friend of Joyce’s, and had cut the court reporting firm a deal for old times’ sake.

Yet I never knew what to make of this. If she had been such a big-deal singer, what was she doing transcribing testimony? I gently pushed Joyce’s reserve when talking with her, but never got very far. The sense I came away with was that something had happened, something had gone wrong. But she never gave away much. I liked and respected her as a colleague. She still looked a lot like the woman you can now see on that album cover (not surprising since the cover probably was painted three or four years thereafter).

In the Era of Amazon

Fast forward six years to 1984. I was then a subscriber to Stereo Review (nowadays known as Sound and Vision), and there was a review of a record by a singer out of Washington with the same name as my old friend. I forget how I got ahold of it, Amazon.com being a few years in the future yet, but I suspect I special-ordered it.[2] As soon as I saw the cover art, I knew it was my friend.

After listening to a couple of songs, I had the answer to at least part of the question. As a singer, that friend was the real deal: exponent of classics from the great American and British songbook: I Wish You Love, Skylark,  I Get Along Without You Very Well, Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry. She had what the liner notes, by Jay McGahee, correctly call a “velvety timbre [which] she maintains throughout her vocal range.” True again that she showed “great insight into meaning and delivery of a song,” which is “direct but not exaggerated.”

I also received a trove of biographical information, and the best way to convey the gist of it is simply to reproduce a decent portion of Mr. McGahee’s notes (written in 1981, three years after I had exited Joyce’s sphere):

Joyce got from where she was (a college kid from Montana) to where she was not (reigning vocal artist in Washington, D.C.) by a path of ecstasy. With breathtaking ease she found herself established as a local star… [A]t 19, she left home with a one-way ticket and $30 for New York and musical comedy theatre. She stopped enroute to visit a sorority sister in Washington and has remained in the area ever since. Initially she took an office job and about four months later began singing in a neighborhood bar frequented by jazz musicians…. Her reputation spread….  She never had to audition for an engagement and one led effortlessly to another. Always very lucky, she seemed to be in the right place at the right time, only working in four rooms in 18 years. She suddenly found herself engaged to sing in the King Cole Room, the IN place at that time, and which was noted for its great atmosphere and staging of good singers. During this time she appeared on the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scout show, which she won, and despite a schedule to sign with MCA, decided instead to be married.

Her stint at the King Cole Room lasted about six years until it was sold…. In 1959, a room was designed for her in the Lafayette Hotel. She was given the luxury of choosing the musicians, the piano, and the acoustical equipment. She stayed there two years and followed that by two years in yet another room built for her, this one in the Lincoln Inn Restaurant.

McGahee goes on to talk about the years after 1963, when Joyce would hold forth at the Chimney Room in The Fireplace in Georgetown till 2 in the morning, and working with groups like the Army and Air Force musical ensembles, and the National Symphony.

A Lacuna

Although McGahee (as we have seen) mentions a marriage, he fails to bring up either a divorce or widowhood. Then, suddenly, this: “A few years ago she remarried and voluntarily put herself into semi-retirement. She put herself through business school and became and still is a top drawer professional court reporter.”

Hmm. I sense a diplomatic silence. One does not simply drop out at the top of a glamorous game and become an anonymous functionary in the halls of justice, marriage or not. Joyce Carr was born in 1931. Meaning that she probably became a court reporter in her forties, after the child-bearing years.[3] And I never heard anything about any children from either marriage. Even if Husband #2 was a (then)-conventional thinker to whom it was divinely ordained that wives belong in the home, I find it hard to believe that Joyce would have quit the bright world she so obviously ornamented for that reason alone.

No, I think something happened.

Two Possibilities?

I don’t think that simply because there is this odd lacuna in the official account. I think it because there was something terribly sad about Joyce. Something had burned her wings while she was flying high, that’s my take.

For my money, there are two possibilities, and I find one of them hard, though not impossible, to believe. The one that’s possible but hard to believe is that she had lost confidence in her voice for some reason. Yet the record, made in 1981, features the voice of someone with every reason to be confident about her instrument.

And the other would be a powerful man she had loved and lost. Washington was and is chock-a-bloc with those guys, guys who could stoke their egos by hanging out in sophisticated late-night supper clubs, romancing a cabaret singer. And Joyce, most of whose recorded songs are quietly torchy, about lost or unavailable love, would have been primed for just such a guy by her repertoire. So my strictly intuitive guess is that she had been a Washington mistress.

Looking Like Ava

There is one unforgettable and (to me) on-target cinematic portrait of the breed: Ava Gardner’s Eleanor Holbrook in Seven Days in May (1964), cool, elegant, sophisticated, warm but a little brittle, and catnip for the evil General James Scott (Burt Lancaster). I had previously inserted a link to a clip to illustrate my point, but the clip has been blocked by Warner Brothers. But here’s the associated still:.[4] 

I could see Joyce, who definitely bore some physical resemblance to that character, showing a resemblance that was more than skin deep – and then recoiling into obscurity and matrimony for a while to get away from all that.

Well, this is all speculation, and I cannot (as I did, for instance, with Darryl Runswick) get in touch with Joyce to clear anything up, since (as I learn) she died in 2002. The album is not speculation, though. The album, made a few years after I knew her, is cool, elegant, and sophisticated, and warm but a little brittle. And if I’m right about the songs in it, they are the result of her adding a little bit of the heartbreak from whatever set her back to the craft she had perfected in all of those late night sessions in Washington bistros.

An Emblematic Song?

Since I didn’t know her music when I knew her, I cannot choose (for a series of pieces about individual songs) one that evokes that acquaintanceship; I can only choose a song that seems to sum up what I now see in her: It Never Entered My Mind. This beautifully-written number,[5] to which she gives a haunting delivery, paints a picture of  heartbreak:

This could be what the General Jim Scott in her life, if there was one, said to her. And what her reaction was when he followed through. But if so, the heartbreak he inflicted was of a controlled and genteel sort:

Okay, she went to court reporting training, not matinees. Washington, not Manhattan. But you get the idea: Walking around in a daze, living what for her was only half a life.

I’m so glad she pulled herself together after I knew her and made that record. And I’m grateful to have known her, however superficially and briefly.

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On Same-Sex Marriage, Reasonable Minds May No Longer Differ

 Published in the Maryland Daily Record April 8, 2013

Last November, Maryland had a referendum on same-sex marriage. In the run-up to the election, the Catholic archbishop of Baltimore wrote a letter effectively ordering the faithful to vote against gays and lesbians marrying, and directed that it be read aloud in every pulpit.[1]  A friend of mine, from a venerable and distinguished Catholic family, was in church that Sunday with her two teenaged daughters, both of whom attend Catholic schools. After Mass that day and hearing the letter read, they announced to their mother that they were finished going to church – and obviously, short of dragging them physically, the mother had no way of forcing them into the pew. So that was that: the Church had just lost two bright young members.

This is just one example of the damage certain leaders and institutions are now doing to themselves by trying to fight the tide of acceptance on same-sex marriage. And it is entirely to be expected. After many years of dialogue, the public debate is well-nigh over. The arguments against same-sex marriage, after this prolonged vetting, stand revealed as simply irrational.

No Ducking A Reasonableness Test

Thus, for instance, the argument that the Bible forbids homosexuality. Maybe; that’s debatable. What isn’t debatable is that the dietary rules in the Bible also forbid ham sandwiches and pepperoni pizza, while both Old and New Testaments condone slavery. [2] You can be a rational Christian, but you cannot rationally maintain that anything is bad merely because the Bible says so. Reason calls for – insists upon – a separate reality check, in the course of which any sane Christian will discard some Biblical prohibitions. And the reality check with same-sex marriage leads to the other arguments, which all come out the same way.

Take the argument that marriage must have some kind of relationship to child-engenderment. We allow old straight people to marry, despite their evident barrenness.[3] Or the argument that children should have access to one parent of each sex: when compared to children of two same-sex parents in any respectable social science study, there is no deficit in the children’s well-being. Or the argument that gay people can (and will) train their kids to be gay: unsupported by any scientific data.[4]

And so forth.

The Consequences of Flunking The Test

When you get down to it, opposition to same sex marriage is not about rationality. It either comes down to distaste or shoddy thinking, or both. And now most of the American public recognizes this. If our leaders and institutions continue to attempt to enlist us against gays and lesbians marrying, they stand revealed as being, at best, shallow thinkers – at least on this issue. And shallow thinkers command little respect, which usually works out badly for them. As it did for the Church (my Church too, let me add) the day the Archbishop’s letter caused two young churchgoers to vote with their feet.

Which brings me to the Supreme Court. As the world knows thanks to the endless coverage, the Court must soon decide the fate of two laws: California’s Proposition 8, which would deny that state’s recognition to same-sex couples, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal recognition to same-sex couples, even those lawfully married under the laws of states which permit it.

At this writing, on the day oral arguments concluded, it seems quite possible the Supreme Court could act in such fashion as to leave both laws invalidated and yet avoid announcing a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry. And there is a reasonable chunk of the commentariat encouraging the Court to do just that, to go slowly and cautiously[5]. In my view, such a sidestep would be a big mistake, partly because of that losing respect thing I mentioned. It would put the Court in bed with stupidity, a place the Court can ill afford to be these days.

Not Rocket Science

Consider how simple and obvious the basic problem is. Marriage is a fundamental right: we know that from Loving v. Virginia (1967). Fundamental rights can be interfered with only for good reasons, and by now all the reasons not to let gays and lesbians marry stand revealed as bad ones or (to the extent they are simply religious) ones that a religiously pluralistic society cannot use as a basis for denying rights.

The Fence The Court Needs To Mend

Meanwhile, the Court has some fences to mend. It has severely damaged its standing with its indefensible and indecipherable ruling in Bush v. Gore, which handed the 2000 election to a man who had lost it (and in the process certainly bequeathed us the Iraq war, and probably also the 2008 fiscal crisis). It allowed corporations disproportionate sway in the political sphere with Citizens United. It’s Second Amendment jurisprudence has probably cost thousands of innocent American lives. And even its grudging support of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was done in such a way as probably to gut the Commerce Clause, a vital tool in effectuating national policy, going forward.

The commentators who urge caution in recognizing a constitutional right of gays and lesbians to marry all say this because they are afraid of provoking resentment and loss of acceptance on the right, the part of the spectrum where opposition resides. They urge that we allow matters to proceed state-by-state, hoping that each state electorate will eventually permit same-sex marriage, given time. But the Supreme Court has few fences to maintain or mend on the right, despite all the mutterings from that corner about “unelected judges.”

No, it is in the center and on the left that the Court had better think about its standing. For a generation, going decision by decision, including the big ones just mentioned, the Court has mostly been at war with the center and the left. And now it must deal with the fact that the center and the left look to be the majority for the foreseeable future, a majority whose respect the Court needs – and does not now have.

The last time the Court enjoyed such widespread disrespect was during the early New Deal, and it nearly resulted in court-packing. And the way things have been going, the idea might well be revived if the Democrats ever regained sufficient control of Congress.

Damn the Torpedoes

So, from the point of view of the Court’s legitimacy and integrity, this ought to be a Brown v. Board of Education moment. If there is a constitutional right of which people are being deprived, and pretty clearly there is such a right, there is no justification to wait for a “seasonable” moment to recognize it. In any case, it’s seasonable already. The gradualists, the optimists who see sweet reason swaying legislature after legislature, can ask themselves whether segregation would ever have become illegal in certain states without Brown. Certainly, at a minimum, it would have taken another generation to flush out all the Jim Crow laws. If we ever wish to see same-sex marriage recognized everywhere in our lifetime, the Court will have to say very soon that recognition is constitutionally required. Today is seasonable, then. And waiting will lose the Court respect.

Saying it today would not only be right, therefore, but awfully expedient for a Court that needs to realign itself sooner rather than later.

___________

[1] Interestingly, since the election, in which same-sex marriage prevailed, the Archbishop’s letter has become invisible on the Web, so far as I have been able to determine. Instead, the principal way to access references to it has been through references to a sermon preached in opposition by Rev. Richard Lawrence, pastor of Baltimore’s St. Vincent de Paul parish. The audio and video of the sermon are widely available. News coverage can be found here.

[2] Some of the most shocking endorsements of slavery are to be found in Exodus 21, right after the chapter with the Ten Commandments in it.

[3] A point Justice Kagan memorably made during the recent Supreme Court arguments.

[4] When I wrote this, I was unaware that there is some evidence suggesting a somewhat higher incidence of homosexuality among children of same-sex parents. There is also evidence the other way. However, even if the higher incidence should be proven true (which seems unlikely though not impossible in the face of further scrutiny of the admittedly sketchy data): a) there seems to be no respectable data suggesting that sexual orientation is chosen, and hence none that same-sex parents are making homosexuality occur where it would otherwise not do so; b) there seems to be no data at all suggesting that anyone is consciously attempting to persuade their children to adopt a homosexual orientation (which would be futile anyhow); and c) no one should care anyway, because the very raising of the issue implies that homosexuality in children is somehow an undesirable outcome.

[5] See, e.g., here or here.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Who You Know[1]

 Libby, by Carly Simon (1976), encountered 1976

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A “Deliciously Disgraceful’ Tallulah

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com on March 6, 2013

It has become practically a genre: the ordeal of the showbiz little guy by balky, dysfunctional star. Think My Favorite Year, My Week With Marilyn, Barrymore, or Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In these dramas, young strivers in some branch of showbiz, given responsibility but little power, must endure the cutups of a star who has something very different on his or her mind (or what is left of it) than the job at hand. A recent entry in the genre, Looped, at Baltimore’s Hippodrome for two weeks, has the classical elements: a celebrity on her last legs, so addled with alcohol, coke, and pills that she cannot “loop” the recording of a single line to complete a movie; the striver, in this case a young film editor who comes to do his job but stays to experience a very personal catharsis; the star’s disclosure of the path to dysfunction; and some moments in which the star shows what she could do once upon a time. It’s an interesting genre, and this is a fine entry.

The star in question is the in her own words “deliciously disgraceful” actress and celebrity Tallulah Bankhead, channeled, in a very interesting bit of casting, by Stefanie Powers. The role was to have been played by Valerie Harper, who had held down all this show’s previous incarnations of Tallulah, starting with the Pasadena Playhouse in 2008, and continuing thereafter in West Palm Beach, Washington, and on Broadway. Ms. Harper has unfortunately gone on the sick list, however, and so Stefanie Powers has been called in. Considering that Powers was actually herself part of the event being dramatized, having co-starred with Bankhead in the very movie Bankhead held up with that unfinished “loop” (the 1965 horror flick Die, Die, My Darling), and given that Powers has of late distinguished herself as another faded and dotty star, namely Norma Desmond (in a production of Sunset Boulevard I was fortunate enough to see at the Ogunquit, Maine Playhouse, which is reportedly being brought to New York), she is an utter natural for the role.

There was a time when everyone knew what Bankhead looked and sounded like, but that time is past. This play cannot sell itself primarily on the thrill of seeing Bankhead walk among us again, as can My Week With Marilyn. Instead, it rises or falls on the strength of those classical elements mentioned above.

The central calculation playwright Matthew Lombardo has made is that the conduct of Tallulah, deliberately muffing lines, cadging drinks to fuel an outrageous alcoholic thirst, insisting on coming late and taking lengthy breaks will be more amusing than irritating. (The show is billed as “A New Comedy.”) And to the extent Bankhead’s schtick isn’t amusing, he hopes its appeal will be aided by Tallulah being Tallulah, recounting bawdy memories, dropping outrageous bon mots (for instance dismissing the notion that cocaine is addictive with the comment: “Nonsense, I’ve been doing it for years”). And if that doesn’t work, there is an appeal to pathos, a memory of a Bankhead performance as Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire that she deliberately camped up because her audience no longer looked to her to do it straight, followed, toward the end of Looped, by a purer, more vulnerable bit of performance as Blanche, authenticating Bankhead’s true gifts as an actress. And finally, should all else fail, Lombardo gives the comparative youngster, the film editor, Danny Miller (Brian Hutchison) a back story that shows him in bad need of moral and life lessons that only Tallulah can provide.

It would be very interesting indeed if there really had been an historical Danny Miller, but, alas, the real film editor seems to have been named John Dunsford, a creature of the world of British B-movies, not the Hollywood type presented here. (The movie was made in England, and, for all I can determine, the looping happened there too, not in LA as presented in the show.) It is thus a reasonable guess that the character of Danny was created out of whole cloth to be a foil for Tallulah.  Somehow this lack of authenticity matters.

I will not spoil the plot’s secrets by saying exactly how, but I will note that the gradual revelation of Danny’s story is made to carry an enormous amount of weight in the play that the Tallulah-being-Tallulah business therefore did not have to sustain, and indeed could not have sustained. In plain English, it looks as if the Danny-plot were conceived as filler that enables what is organically a one-act play to grow to two acts. The ultimate success of Looped therefore depends on the ability of this filler to take on a life of its own, even if we know it’s likely a complete fiction. I believe it does, thanks in no small measure to Brian Hutchison’s careful handling of the part. Hutchison takes a character who at first glance is flat and non-descript and allows us slowly to witness the character’s tortured inner life, one that the encounter with Tallulah Bankhead arguably improves and perhaps saves.

In the small but crucial part of Steve, the recording engineer, Matthew Montelongo nails the archetypal Hollywood tech guy, one who is not (as Danny turns out to be) terribly emotionally involved with the bits of moviemaking activity that come within his purview, but able to interact forcefully in an understated sardonic way when called upon. If the label of comedy truly fits on this performance, Montelongo’s character has a lot to do with it.

Credit is also due to director Rob Ruggiero, for keeping things moving along, not slaughtering the audience with frustration at Tallulah’s balkiness, not allowing the strong reminders of Tallulah’s impending demise or the sad secrets of Danny’s life to make things too gloomy, and for maintaining a consistent tone even through Tallulah’s flashbacks. This is not great drama or great comedy, but it is an enjoyable evening of theater, thanks in large measure to Ruggiero’s sure hand.

Of course, in the end none of it matters if Powers does not deliver, but no one can deny that she knocks it out of the park. It may be a tinier park than some, but knock it she does.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for photograph

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