Hamilton Hip Hops into Broadway History

Ann and I once again boarded the New Haven train to NYC, this time to see Hamilton.

It’s everything that has been written and said about the show, probably the most talked about Broadway musical prior to its opening in history.  No sense repeating the story here about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s genius in putting together the most original Broadway musical since, perhaps, Oklahoma.  As with Oklahoma, Hamilton breaks all the rules, but similar to its predecessor, it uses dance, music, acting, and a fine “book” to move the action along.  The action is explosive, a constant pulse measuring the beginning of our nation, the meaning of compromise, and the contributions of immigrants, particularly the Caribbean born Hamilton.

This nation’s historical founders are played by minorities in period customs, singing history through the medium of rap and hip hop, where the copious dialogue springs to life.  There are very few speaking parts, and that factor as well as the staging, the subject of revolution, and some of the love songs hearken back to a previous transforming musical, Les Misérables.  The reminder of the latter in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work is omnipresent.  And like “Master of the House” there is a change of pace humorous song embedded in Hamilton as well, one sung by a foppish King George entitled “You’ll Be Back,” which contrasts with the hip hop in the show.  It was sung with such a recognizable Beatles’ beat that the audience erupted into instant laughter.  Nevertheless, the other music, even for old Rodgers and Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim fans, was memorable. Rap songs such as “My Shot” and “The Room Where it Happens” run like leitmotifs throughout the show and get under your skin (not that I could sing them or even play them on the piano).

If I had to sum up the musical in one word, it’s pure raw energy. Never a dull moment, with many emotional ones, particularly if one has an understanding of the beginnings of this nation, as well as cautionary inferences pertaining to our own times, it is the must see show of this season, and probably many to come.  We were fortunate to be able to get tickets months and months ago when we first heard about it.

 

 

An American in Paris in NYC

Last Sunday we ventured into the city to see An American in Paris.  Jonathan saw the preview in Paris of all places and gave us ample advance notice of how spectacular the production was and therefore we were able to buy tickets in the third row center many months ago, perfect seats for the most stirring Broadway musical we’ve seen in recent memory. 

From the South Norwalk train station we emerged into the light at 45^th and Vanderbilt.  We had a luncheon reservation at one of our favorite restaurants, Orso’s (conveniently located in NYC’s Restaurant Row between 8^th and 9^th Avenues on 46^th), one we’ve been to on and off during the past 30 years (especially Ann who used to do Wednesday matinees with friends while I toiled away at work : - )

Normally we would walk this, but Ann’s knee has been giving her trouble, so we agreed to “Uber” there and after the show walk back to Grand Central Station when traffic would be impossible anyway.  Uber is an amazing service.  Had a Lincoln Town car picking us up in four minutes and if it were not for the delays getting past 6^th Avenue because of the Dominican Republic parade, it would have been a breeze.  Still, we made it in about 12 minutes.  I love the concept of no cash trading hands and getting an email two minutes after we exit the car of the cost ($9.23).

After a delicious lunch, trout for Ann and rigatoni in meat sauce for me (wanted something more hardy – this was to serve as both lunch and dinner), we walked over to the theatre which is on a Times Square I no longer recognize, throngs of people as usual but the panorama reminded me more of Las Vegas than my beloved New York City, packed with tourists of course with the most popular hawked item being those “selfie” sticks.  We’ve become a world of solipsistic hedonists,  selfies snap away and post them on Facebook, just about the most passive act of saying, “hey, look at me!”  So while everyone was clicking away pictures of themselves, with Times Square tumult in the background, I took a few “non-selfie” shots to document the moment and we made our way to the theatre, mobs of people --- mostly tourists it seemed (I seem to forget that is our status now : - ) trying to get into just one narrow entrance. 

Sitting alone on the stage before the performance began is an older grand piano, perhaps much like the one George Gershwin might have composed on.  And that is the conceit of the play – a composer being central to the action, Adam Hochberg (a.k.a Oscar Levant) movingly played by Brandon Uranowitz.  He composes a ballet for a woman he has fallen in love with, Lise Dassin, luminously performed by Leanne Cope.  Unfortunately for him, two other men are in love with her too, Jerry Mulligan (Robert Fairchild) and Henri Baurel (Max von Essen).  Because Lise and her family were harbored by Henri’s family during the Nazi occupation of Paris, she feels honor bound to accept his proposal although her heart has clearly been lost to the artist, Jerry, who fell in love with her at first glance.  All the action takes place in post WW II Paris and of course the “book” heavily relies on the movie version of An American in Paris.

In fact, the two leads could easily pass for the two movie leads.  Robert Fairchild, the principal dancer with NYC Ballet, credits the physicality of his dancing to his idol, Gene Kelly, and Leanne Cope is highly reminiscent of Leslie Caron.  But interestingly both Fairchild and Cope are luminaries in the world of ballet, not Broadway theatre.  It is remarkable to witness the transition – even their singing roles were of Broadway caliber.  Ann and I laughed when we heard someone say there was too much ballet in the production.  The dancing was superlative, breathtaking and from our vantage we could see every drop of sweat, and could feel the incredible energy that went into the play. As for the astounding performance by Fairchild, Ann could not stop raving about the perfection of his dancing, his grand jetes, his jazz movements and energy.

Ann was particularly interested in seeing Sara Esty, a talented young dancer she has enjoyed watching from her first performance with the Miami City Ballet when she joined the company several years ago along with her twin sister.  She auditioned and won a part in the Ensemble of this show enjoying the time spent in Paris and blogging about it.  Well to our surprise, we noticed in the Playbill that in addition to this being her Broadway debut; she has been chosen to dance the lead in place of Leanne Cope on the Wednesday matinees, surely an indication of how far along her career has progressed.  Robert Fairchild has substitutes as well for the Wednesday evening and Saturday matinee performances, so we were fortunate to see the leads at our Sunday matinee.

But for me, the heart, the very soul of the production is the music of George Gershwin.  I feel I have a special affinity for his music    -- much of it is the bulk of my more confident piano repertoire.  After hearing this production I’m tempted to play only Gershwin in the future, committing pieces to memory, learning how to play his music even better.

Unlike the film, the Broadway production is far ranging as far as his music is concerned, including pieces I don’t remember in the movie, such as parts of the “Cuban Overture” and many other Gershwin songs.  

An American in Paris is a massive undertaking, even on Broadway, a full orchestra, a large cast and striking, multiple sets.  The pace was intense under the brilliant direction and choreography of Christopher Wheeldon.  During intermission while Ann went to the ladies room, I texted Jonathan my thanks for pushing us to get tickets early, beginning my text with just two words.  “Intermission.  Fabulous.”  When Ann returned to her seat she said that she texted Jonathan.  I said I did too.  She said, here, look at what I wrote and it began with two words. “Intermission. Fabulous.”

 

6th Ave. after Dominican Day Parade

Two Songs

As an amateur pianist, I generally focus on the “classic” period of the Great American Songbook, including Broadway, from Gershwin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim.  I relate to that music, as I do to classic jazz (not the so called “smooth jazz.”) Just let me listen to a piano, bass and drums and I’m in heaven.  Think Oscar Peterson or Bill Evans and so many other wonderful jazz pianists.  A great vocalist such as a Stacey Kent is an added bonus.  And I enjoy classical music, although my ability to play classical pieces on the piano is limited to those that have been transcribed for fake books.  In effect, I have to improvise much of the music – not the intent of the likes of Beethoven, etc. 

Although my musical tastes sometimes extend to country and R&B, I do not relate to most contemporary music, some of the so called “American Idol” sound.  But I suppose I’m beginning to sound like my parents, criticizing my teenage addiction to the music sung by Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, and I could go on and on with that list.  I still enjoy occasionally listening to that music today, making me a nostalgist.  (After all, that’s what half this blog is about anyhow.)

My teenage musical “taste” gives me an opportunity to post something that’s been in my files for some 56 years now.  Why I kept it, who knows.  Maybe for this moment?  New York City’s WMCA distributed a weekly listing of the top hits at the local record stores where we would buy our 45’s. This particular one was for the week of Dec. 20, 1957.  I still can hear (in my mind) most of the “tunes” listed on this particular sheet.  Coincidentally, number 15 on the list for that week was Hey Schoolgirl sung by “Tom and Jerry.”  They were a local pair, growing up only a mile or so from me.  Never heard of them?  Later they reverted to their real names, Simon and Garfunkel.  They too tried to make a go of R&R but I don’t think any of their songs at the time rose higher than the one listed here.

I’ve tried to keep up with contemporary Broadway / West End musicals but except for Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Claude-Michel Schönberg, nothing really appeals to me. But I’ve been remiss in not seeing (yet) works such as Nine and Rent.  There is a song from each which I discovered in my fake books and I found myself playing them although I had never heard them before. 

From the more recent of the two shows, Rent, there is One Song Glory, which needs to be appreciated in the context of the lyrics and the story, but even without those, the music has a haunting leitmotif.  So I decided to make a video of my playing it, but it’s digital size is too large for the limited software that BlogSpot offers, and to my chagrin I discovered that BlogSpot’s video postings do not play on certain devices, particularly mobile ones (where the entire digital world is moving – get with it BlogSpot!), so I had to post my rendition on YouTube to play here.  There are risks doing that, opening myself for criticism – any professional knows that I am but a rank amateur, but that doesn’t matter to me, I still enjoy playing.

Unlike the other videos I’ve done its close up.  This is not because I’m wild about my hands.  After all, they are, together, 142 years old! : - ).  But the sound was better with my little digital camera nearer to the piano. One Song Glory is a genre outside my traditional classic Broadway comfort zone.  In other words, it doesn’t come naturally to me, but sometimes we have to forge into new territory….

The musical structure of Growing Tall, from Nine, on the other hand (no pun intended), is closer to the traditional Broadway musical, so I’m more relaxed playing this piece.  Its digital size is within the parameters of BlogSpot, so I can bypass YouTube (although it may render it unplayable on some devices, sorry).  Getting Tall is a very evocative conceit, the younger self counseling the mature version of the same person. 

Learning more, knowing less,

Simple words, tenderness part of getting tall.

Hopefully, that tenderness comes across….

“Clybourne Park” Downer

Ann and I boarded the Metro North at South Norwalk station anticipating a wonderful night of good theater and dinner.  I had purchased tickets to see Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, well before it received the Tony Award for Best Play.  It is now near the end of its run on Broadway.  The play had opened off Broadway a couple of years before, played London, and had toured some of the top regional theaters before returning to the Great White Way.  Besides winning the Tony, it had won the Pulitzer, but our main reason for seeing the play is that next season Dramaworks is reviving Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun.  

Clybourne Park is both sort of a prequel and sequel to Hansberry’s relatively tame but groundbreaking work about racism in, ironically, a suburban neighborhood in Chicago, the environs where Barack Obama rose in his political career.

The first part of the evening, our pre-theatre dinner at Glass House Tavern, was superb.   We’ve been there before, a great restaurant destination in the theatre district, with both a fixed price pre-theater and standard menu.

Unfortunately, Clybourne Park was disappointing, although the mostly out of town audience was captivated by its in-your-face racial invectives and humor. Maybe we were just expecting something more, to feel engaged in the production, but I wasn’t and felt emotionally duped.   

I am not going into the details of the plot – it has been written up and down and there is nothing much I can add, other than to briefly summarize that it takes place in two acts, the first in 1959 and the second fifty years later, in the same house in the fictionalized “Clybourne Park.”  The first act depicts the sale of the house to a black family, the same one Hansberry wrote about, the Youngers (who we never see). The lily-white neighborhood association is up in arms about the sale, but that same act carries the revelation that the current owners had lost their son in that house, his having committed suicide after returning from the Korean War under a cloud of possible war crimes.  The second act puts the shoe on the other foot.  It is now a middle class black family selling the house to a white couple who are in the vanguard of gentrifying the neighborhood. (Whole Foods is right down the road!)

There is some very clever dialogue, much of it delivered with such breakneck rapidity that we had trouble hearing all of it.  Maybe we’re at the age of needing one of those assistive listening devices given out at theaters, but I don’t think so.  Of course the Walter Kerr Theatre, a venerable institution, perhaps has outlived its useful lifespan.  The seats certainly have.  The configuration was designed for a much earlier generation, when, indeed, the average weight of an adult was 150 pounds.  Those were the days when people dressed up for the theatre, not arriving in their shorts, their arms and the rest of their bodies spilling over into their neighbor’s seats.  Half of the audience looked like they were about to get on an airline and we all know what that now looks like.  The space between rows is mere inches.  No leg crossing here, assuming you can fit your legs in the row at all (we were second row, mezzanine).   If I was not at the end of the row, I would have fled the theatre in a claustrophobic angst.

Throughout the play I was aware of something I’m never conscious of while watching a great play: that indeed I am watching a play.  Here are competent actors going through the motion of delivering lines, traversing the stage as competently directed.   I suppose all of this was convincingly done judging by the audience’s reactions, but I never felt engaged, although Norris had his opportunities for some real drama, particularly with the death of the son.  He touches on that issue, but never really explores it.  He could have gone to emotional places where Arthur Miller has gone in his work, but as quickly as it arose, its development was abandoned, the symbolic trunk of the son left behind, buried, but unearthed fifty years later, just like the racial issues. 

Consequently, the play is more a device for delivering Norris’ misanthropic view of the “progress” we’ve made on race in America.  Could it be the paucity of great theater that renders merely an interesting play, with edgy humor, a prize winner?

So, while being conscious that I was watching a play, I also felt that I was watching a bunch of stereotypes, stick figures, no one really drawn out in any engaging way although Russ’ character, the father of the boy who committed suicide, played by Frank Wood, comes closest to one I can empathize with.  But sometimes his lines were delivered with such briskness they were not decipherable from the mezzanine. 

The dialogue at times, with its edgy racial humor, was well timed, and I suppose that is the glue that holds the play together, but much of it was well telegraphed, and in its poor taste meant to be tolerated by what we would like to think is a post racial world.  But is it?  At times I thought of the 1970’s sitcom All in the Family, which implied much of the same humor decades before.  The difference here is the humor is now explicit.  Norris is clearly an equal opportunity insulter, with ne’er a good word for any ethnic group of people, including the WASPS howling in the audience.

I tried to take notes while watching the play, which is my general practice, but as I lost interest, or, better put, never got to the point where I felt I was part of the action, I put down my pen (usually I can’t read half of what I write in the dark anyhow).  But I did get one quote near the beginning of the play which I think resonates right to the end, one of the characters in the 1959 first act saying “we all have our place.”  And I think that is Norris’ point.  Nothing has really changed in the intervening fifty years, in spite of having a President of mixed racial heritage.  One of the characters at the end of the play, after all the confrontational humor says something to the effect, “instead of doing this elaborate dance, what we’re really saying, it’s about race, isn’t it?”  Indeed, we’re still battling out the shame of the heritage of slavery, whether it is the beer summit involving Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s arrest, or the Trayvon Martin incident , Norris makes it clear that while some things are for the better (we can at least laugh and talk about it), the “change” we have long hoped for remains elusive. Racism is still alive and well in America.  And the latent racial tentacles could still impact the coming presidential election, although it miraculously eluded its grasp last time around

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Great theater?  No. But as a philosophical statement, right on the mark.  

Summer Endeavors

One of the benefits of living on our boat in the summer is being able to finally get to some postponed reading and catch up on local theatre either in Westport or NY and the last few weeks reminds me that so much of what we read or see in the theatre often serves as historical guideposts, snapshots of different periods of cultural change. I recently picked up John Irving’s The World According to Garp, which I first read when it was published in the late 1970’s. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to reread the novel other than I had forgotten much of it and always liked Irving’s quirky self-reflective story-telling, so much about the process of writing itself. I had forgotten how much the role of women’s rights plays in Garp, such a major issue in the 1970s. Irving playfully toys with the issue, satirizing it to a great degree, reminding me of my first business trip to Australia in the 1970’s when a Sydney taxi driver lectured me about the evils of women’s rights and, in particular, the role that Americans had in exporting those dangerous thoughts to Australia. I wonder whether Garp (or Irving) might have agreed with the accusation at the time.

Then a few weeks ago we saw Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart at the Westport Country Playhouse, portraying two heterosexual couples vacationing at a home on Fire Island, in the middle of a gay community. It is a play that is constantly on an uneasy edge, the problems of the two couples acting out their aberrant behavior contrasted to the high-spirited, better adjusted gay community, off stage. But central to the play is the paranoia of how AIDS was thought to be transmitted at the time, symbolized by the couples’ dramatic fear of going into the pool (on stage) -- an obsession of twenty years ago when the play was written. Nonetheless, the play is still a compelling tragicomic drama and wonderfully staged at the beautifully restored Westport Country Playhouse.

A twenty year leap forward brings me to reading Jonathan Tropper’s Everything Changes. Here is a very contemporary novel by a thirty-something author about relationships between fathers and sons, and male female relationships. Tropper’s idiosyncratic characters (in particular, the protagonist’s father) at times reminds me a little of Richard Russo’s and Anne Tyler’s. Trooper’s writing can be very funny but sensitive at the same time. These are the two paragraphs that grab you and pull you into the novel:

Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it. This is no accident. I made this happen. I had a plan.

I am about to fuck it all up in a spectacular fashion.

It was quite a contrast reading Anita Brookner’s Strangers, perhaps the most interior novel I’ve read in some time, most of it taking place in the mind of the 72 year old protagonist, a retired banker and confirmed bachelor, who feels he may be missing something not sharing his life with a woman. By chance he meets one of his old lovers (he hasn’t had many), now aged and frail, but one for whom he thinks he still has feelings. He also meets a woman on a flight to Venice, younger than he. Much of the novel is a debate (in his mind) of the advantages or disadvantages of being with one or the other or neither. Brookner’s writing is timeless, meticulously exacting, set mostly in London, but a London that seems to exist merely in some recent time. It is also about aging and finding meaning in life after a lifetime of work:

His reading now was confined to diaries, notebooks, memoirs, anything that contained a confessional element. He was in search of evidence of discomfiture, disappointment, rather than triumph over circumstances. Circumstances, he knew, would always overrule. Those great exemplars of the past, the kind he had always sought in classic novels, usually finished on a note of success, of exoneration, which was not for him. In the absence of comfort he was forced to contemplate his own failure, failure not in worldly terms but in the reality of his circumscribed life. He knew, rather more clearly than he had ever known before, that he had succeeded only at mundane tasks, that he had failed to deliver a reputation that others would acknowledge. Proof, if proof were needed, lay in the fact that his presence was no longer sought, that, deprived of the structure of the working day, he was at a loss, obliged to look for comfort in whatever he could devise for himself. His life of reading, of walking, was invisible to others: his friendships, so agreeable in past days, had dwindled, almost disappeared. Memories were of no use to him; indeed, even memory was beginning to be eroded by the absence of confirmation. As to love, that was gone for good. Whatever he managed to contrive for himself would not, could not, be construed as success.

Finally, yesterday, we saw the NYC preview performance of Stephen Sondheim’s great musical, Follies. This is a show I failed to see when it opened in 1971 or any of the revivals and have been waiting, waiting for the opportunity. Sondheim is the last surviving composer of another era. Talk about historical markers. This is Sondheim’s tribute to various eras of Broadway’s past and it has some of his best known songs, too many to mention, including one that is perhaps my very favorite, Losing My Mind.

This new Broadway production, coming via the Kennedy Center, is spectacular, the kind of show no longer written for Broadway. It was Sondheim’s first musical as both composer and lyricist and every line, every word is delicious. The Broadway production includes some of Broadway’s luminaries, Bernadette Peters, Danny Burstein, Jan Maxwell, Ron Raines, and Elaine Page. Each brings the house down with some of Sondheim’s most iconic numbers. The juxtaposition of their ghosts from eras past is particularly evocative. Here is a two and half hour production which seems to pass in minutes, portraying innocent and happier times past, lost loves, regrets and heartbreak.

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