‘The Belle of Amherst’ –Emily Dickinson Inhabits Palm Beach Dramaworks

 

This stunning production incorporates the best features of the streamed version, which was broadcast by Palm Beach Dramaworks last year, while showing the power of live theatre to move an audience.  It shines a bright light into the very soul of the enigmatic poet, revealing her art and Emily herself.  This first-person monologue speaks truths about life and death with wisdom that came strictly from within, looking back at her life from her early 50s.  Margery Lowe gives an incandescent performance, breathtaking in range and passion.

 

The Belle of Amherst was meticulously researched by William Luce who wrote it in the mid 1970s inspired by the actress who would play the role on Broadway, Julie Harris.  She is closely identified with the play.  In addition to Luce’s brilliant integration of 19th century sensibility with Dickinson’s letters and poems, the Palm Beach Dramaworks production with Margery Lowe playing Emily, breathes real life into the character and her setting.  One would never know there is only one woman on the stage.

 

Lowe is not only a doppelganger for Emily; she also played her in a two-hander premiere at Dramaworks in 2018, Edgar and Emily. That work was lighthearted, comic in many ways, and you really didn’t get to fully know Emily as you do in Luce’s play.   

 

Lowe’s Emily is filled with life and expectations and the acceptance of her obscurity as a poet, although secretly hoping for publication.  She has her “words” and words are her life.  Yes, she must seek “the best words” and they swirl all about in her observations of nature, light, love, and the routines of living as well as the inevitability of death.  Although I have seen Lowe perform in many plays over the years, this is the one I will always remember.

 

William Hayes, The Belle of Amherst’s director, also doesn’t see this Emily as a shy reclusive intellectual, but, instead, a passionate observer, almost to the point of breathlessness, highlighting her mischievous side, capturing her vivaciousness as well as her vulnerability.  And she’s a great cook (her own opinion)!  He has her moving to and fro, from her writing desk to her bed, to the parlor, sitting on the floor with her scraps of writing and her finished poems.  All this while talking not only to the audience, and to herself, but to friends and family, one sided, of course; only she can hear the other’s reply.  Nonetheless, the audience can divine the other side from her reactions. 

 

In the streamed version Hayes had to be concerned about the camera view and now live theater has liberated the director to bring the full expanse to the audience, including the many comic touches which the streamed version could not fully exploit.  Laughter heightens her humanity and Hayes and Lowe capitalize on those moments.  As Lowe said when asked: “nothing beats live theatre. I did the film without a scene partner, but now my scene partner will be right in front of me.”

 

Margery Lowe does it all flawlessly, making an inward journey, inviting us along.  She fully engages the audience, seemingly making eye contact with everyone, creating a sense of intimacy which is rare.  I found myself frequently smiling as if she was talking to me personally.

 

Hayes and Lowe are in perfect sync, and on a magnificent stage designed by the award-winning Michael Amico.  Every detail on the stage has a purpose, the floral arrangements, the large windows upstage, perfect for lighting touches, her flawlessly made bed and dresser, her sacred, small writing desk, the tea cart and service, inspired by historical accuracy.  The entire stage takes on the feeling of a fine tapestry.  And the centerpiece is the trunk of her poems which she finally offers to the audience as her legacy.  “Remembrance’ – a mighty word.”

 

Light imagery is so important in her poems.  Once when we visited her home in Amherst which is now a museum, we were allowed to linger in her bedroom where her writing desk was, to be able to look out those same windows, and see the late afternoon light as she would have seen it.  One becomes acutely conscious of her light imagery and the sparse, enigmatic content of her poems.  Kirk Bookman’s lighting captures similar moments, ebbing and flowing with her emotions, beautifully framing Lowe.  During a rare display of the aurora borealis, colors flood the stage. 

 

Brian O’Keefe’s costumes are stirring.  Not only did he masterfully design and create Emily’s signature white ensemble with the cinched waist and voluminous sleeves, but all the accessories, the shawls, the apron, the bonnet and cape, and parasol add the finishing touches that lend such authenticity to this production.

 

Sound designer Roger Arnold’s ominous church bells chime during a funeral, and when Emily’s normally strict, staid father sound them as the aurora borealis began.  The sounds of a train are in perfect sync with Lowe’s gestures of the local train’s labyrinth path to Amherst or when she follows the clip clop of a horse drawn carriage.  Her favorite bluebird sang outside her window.  Arnold also reinforces PBD’s attention to detail as he chose classical incidental musical selections by a composer and pianist of her time, William Mason, whose music Emily might have heard. 

 

This play demands one’s full attention, but those who give themselves over to this inspired solo performance are in store for a soul searching and satisfying tour de force.  It runs through June 5th at the Don & Ann Brown Theatre in Downtown West Palm Beach.

Golden Years

It’s the literal translation of Anos Dourados by the great Brazilian composer, father of the bossa nova, Antônio Carlos Jobim (also known as “Tom”), whose music was widely adopted by jazz musicians throughout the world.  To me, it’s also those years when the Great American Songbook came into being and flourished.  It still does in the world of jazz and regularly at my piano.

In my piece on Bill Mays I went into some detail about what distinguishes an amateur’s playing from a professional’s.  Someone wrote asking for clarification about my statement “I long ago lost the ability to sight read other than the melody line and the chords and improvise the rest.”  Doesn’t that mean you play by ear, I was asked?  I wish I did, having lost that ability long ago as well.  It is a contradiction I suppose, improvising harmony and the bass from the chords, playing the melody from the treble clef which I read.

With apologies to any professional musician reading this the best way I can explain it is by revealing a bit of serendipity as Covid-19 took control of our lives.  A friend sent me a link to a recording of Anos Dourados I had never heard it before and was spellbound by the melody.  I was compelled to find the sheet music which I managed to do – with chords, no harmonic arrangement and no clef bass.  So I sat down with it at the piano and after a few passes at it, I casually recorded it on my cell phone to mail drop to my friend.  I recently I had to upgrade phones and found that forgotten recording and was surprised by that first take at the song. 

Unfortunately Google and Microsoft do not play well together and there was no way to transfer this to my Windows based computer, so I improvised a transfer having to record the recording and since it is not up to par technically, just saved it in my personal cloud.  Imperfections and all I embed it here and include a photograph of the sheet music. Perhaps this explains better what I was trying to say.

Here’s the melody line and the chords.

 

Here is a link to the recording of the iPhone recording! Although amateurish, having the ability of sit down with a piece of music and just play it has been and continues to be a source of joy. If I first hear it I can capture some of the nuances, but even if I’ve never heard the music, give me the melody line and the chords, and I can play it. Anything up to five flats (D flat major) or three sharps (A major).  That in itself is an interesting anomaly.  I struggle with 4 sharps but not 4 flats, probably because it is less likely to find songs from the Great American songbook written in 4 or more sharps.   

The lyrics remind me of the romantic, lost love ones that might have been penned by Paul Simon, and while the title, “Golden Years” refers to the years when the singer was happy with his now lost love, ironically these are my “golden years” in another sense of the words. 

Baking the Cake

 

It’s a multilayered apocalyptic confection, suitable for a world addicted to dystopian hedonism.   Irreconcilable political ideologies, the plutocracy and the new class of “influencers,” have found the perfect recipe for destroying democracy.  And yet we go on, one step in front of the other, as if life can continue like this.  I’ve avoided these issues in my blog, but not in my mind, so time for a polemic catharsis.

To borrow from Dickens, the human race, like Joseph Marley, now wears the chain it forged in these times, having “made it link by link, and yard by yard; [and] girded it on of [our] own free will, and of [our] own free will [wear] it.”  I am now mixing metaphors (chains and cake), flailing for understanding.

We have embraced the kleptocratic emperor who wears no clothes, so transparent in his horrific iniquity and ignorance, but so in sync with popular culture, bolstered by social media.  We have become vassals to the very technology we now can no longer live without (somehow we managed before the ubiquity of the smart phone).  An agnotological oven has baked the cake and forged the chains.

It’s become a topsy-turvy world where an indoctrinated post-truth minority has turned the Bill of Rights and the Constitution on its ear.  The archaic Electoral College was almost toppled by its vulnerability to manipulation in the last election and state Republican bodies are now arranging for the members of the College to become their marionettes. 

The ideals of the Democratic Republic are under siege.  The Supreme Court was the first to topple.  The imagined rights of individuals hijacked those that the social compact of the Constitution was supposed to ensure.  One only has to consider the endless jousting over vaccines and mask mandates in a pandemic that has killed one million in the U.S.  Or the “rights” of military-style weapon owners transcending the right of society to live safely.  Only a morally bankrupt society would tolerate more guns than there are citizens.

The previous administration laid the long-term groundwork for January 6, and its execution on that fateful day using mob psychology.  Sedition, an act of a third world country was perpetrated in front of our own eyes, and yet here we are more than a year later still waiting for justice to prevail. 

The pandemic hastened supply side issues, labor shortages, the flooding of the financial markets with liquidity, and now, the consequence, inflation.  This will be borne on the backs of those who can least afford it with increases in transportation, housing, and food outweighing other inflation measures.  Not discussed much is the elephant in the room: as the Federal Reserve increases interest rates, the current National Debt of $30 Trillion will have to be financed at higher interest rates, a self-fulfilling prophesy (in the absence of higher taxes on the rapidly growing uber-wealthy class) of either default or still higher inflation in the future so debt can be retired with depreciated dollars.  One only has to look at the US Debt Clock which is a real time pulse of our economy and debt.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine assaults our senses daily, accompanied by a feeling of helplessness without risking a nuclear war.  It is far beyond my understanding to discuss this horror in any kind of detail.  Finger pointing can be found for whatever position one wants to take.  Putin very quickly referred to slaughtered Ukrainians as “fake news.”  Doesn’t this resonate?  We have forged the chains of gaslighting over years of social media.  Four years of the prior administration made “fake news” the centerpiece of how to manage its citizens where truth/lies are fungible according to one’s own belief and feelings.  In fact, feelings are as valid as scientific evidence. 

How all this will end is anyone’s guess; nothing is beyond the realm of possibility, including a civil war or a nuclear war between East and West.  Civil war is “easier” to imagine than the latter, but the April 30 Wall Street Journal carries an opinion article by Peggy Noonan, Putin Really May Break the Nuclear Taboo in Ukraine which goes to that very place.  She makes a persuasive argument:  “It seems unthinkable, but American leaders’ failure to think about it heightens the risk it will happen.”

Indeed, we have forged the chains, link by link. By weakening democracy here we have emboldened Putin’s actions with heretofore unimaginable consequences.

 

The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk Test Site, in Kazakhstan

Bill Mays’ Stories of the Road: This Book Swings!

 

A guy walks into a bar and says “set ‘em up, Joe, I got a story you oughta know” – but it’s not about “a brief episode,” but the tapestry of what constitutes an exceptional musical life.  Bill Mays’ Stories of the Road, the Studios, Sidemen & Singers: 55 Years in the music biz is a unique collection of eclectic stories which flow in such a way that you can hear the author’s voice, and his passion.

 

To me, it is more than the book’s blurb boasts: “a delightful, humorous, and entertaining collection of anecdotes from a musician who has truly done it all.”  There are 25 chapters in this 173-page book which in the aggregate is a tutorial about what it is to play music at Mays’ level, earn a good living playing nothing but music, all while revealing secrets us mere “amateurs” can only speculate about.

 

What separates a “professional” from an “amateur” pianist such as me?  “How to Tell If You’re an Amateur Musician” by Justin Colletti is a revealing article on the subject, very accurate in its assessment, other than really making clear how much an abyss there is between the two. Mays’ book underscores those differences but Colletti’s article makes me feel a little better about them.

Here I must digress.  Bill Mays and I are about the same age and have similar middle-class backgrounds, his on the West Coast (CA) and mine on the East Coast (NY).  We were raised on the music of the 50s and in high school we were ‘rebels,” more interested in cruisin’ than schoolin’.  It took a catalyst, a mentor, to bring us into the life for which we were best suited.  For Mays, that was a church choir director who was a professional trumpet player who recognized talent in the young man and took him to see the great Earl Hines and that experience changed his life: he knew immediately he wanted to play jazz piano.  It didn’t hurt that Mays’ father, although a preacher was a versatile musician, and his mother had a “sweet voice” and therefore he was from a musical family, and he was given gospel and classical piano lessons since he was five years old.

I on the other hand had little of those influences but it took a high school teacher, Roger Brickner, to set me on my indirect path to becoming a publisher.  Nonetheless, I did have some music lessons when younger, too few in retrospect, and if it were not for some wishful fantasy when I was around fifteen years old or so about becoming the next Elvis, I would not have briefly picked up the guitar.  That was serendipitous as the guitar revealed chord structure to me and even long after I abandoned piano lessons I would fiddle around with the piano, playing it not as I was taught, but with chords.  I long ago lost the ability to sight read other than the melody line and the chords and improvise the rest.

I know that it sounds “almost professional” but the chasm of ability between one such as Bill Mays and an amateur such as myself, at best a busker, is deeper than is apparent.  Simply put, I know enough to know what I don’t know and to this day I am in awe of the jazz pianist, especially one such as a Bill Mays.

This separation between the professional and the amateur can be best understood as the difference between a native speaking his/her language and a foreigner with a year or so training in that language.  Sure, the latter person can sort of understand some of the language, but to really speak it is to think in that language, not to try to translate it.

The great jazz musicians have that ability, playing alone, or playing with other musicians.  To me it’s always a wonder that they can instinctively play with each other, even transposing keys on the fly, and to play standard songs so abstractly that the original song is almost not apparent.

Not that all jazz is totally abstract.  What I love about Bill Mays’ renderings is that he rarely strays too far from the melody.  He can of course get into that other universe, but that is not his style.  Neither is it of one of my other favorite pianists, Bill Charlap who approached Bill Mays for a couple of lessons when he came to NYC.  Per Mays I advised more openness, fewer notes, and more space in his playing.  No wonder the two sound similar in a way, and I can hear some of the color of the playing of the late, great Bill Evans (Bills are wild!) in their work.

I’ve never seen Evans or Charlap play live, but I listen to their music all the time.  I’ve been fortunate enough to catch Mays a few times at the Colony Hotel in West Palm Beach.  Early next year we will see Charlap in person on a Jazz Cruise.

A few years ago a friend of mine, a bass player, David Einhorn, knowing how I feel about Stephen Sondheim and Bill Mays, gifted me a CD, Our Time, the second CD recorded by Tommy Cecil and Bill Mays of Sondheim’s music.  I immediately bought their first recording, Side by Side.  These are precious, priceless, so little of Sondheim’s music recorded in this style.

Amusingly, Mays recollects about their attempt to get a response from Sondheim regarding the recordings.  Although “Steve” acknowledged their receipt, he never did comment.  Gods are busy people!

The only similar recordings I know are the ones recorded decades ago by the Terry Trotter Trio, all of which I have, covering Passion, Sweeny Todd, and Company.  Interestingly, according to Mays, early in his career he sought Trotter for advice about professional career directions having admired Trotter, that advice freely given as so often is the case in the jazz world, a small world indeed when it comes to the leading performers.

To me, a particularly fascinating observation in Mays’ book is the following: Generally speaking, it seems we jazz musicians know a lot more about the world of classical musicians then they do of ours.  Indeed, we are often much more adept at playing in that style than the other way around – witness the lame attempts by some “name” classical players and singers to try to breach the divide. 

 

I’ve often thought that in my amateur world.  Sometimes we’ll meet a new acquaintance, one who has a beautiful grand piano in their home, so the natural question is “who plays in the family?” Frequently, the “player” is one with years and years of classical lessons (I’d give my right arm, no, make it my left leg for that advantage) but then comes the confession that he/she either can no longer play or rarely plays.  That would never happen to a jazz pianist (or even to me, who can be away from a piano for a month, but sit down and play as if I never missed a beat, if I have the melody line and the chords).

I’m sure that Mays and most other jazz pianists can play classical, perhaps not at the concert hall level, but their understanding of the genre is substantial.  I know that was the case with Oscar Peterson, who I saw perform in NYC when I was in college, but who also came back to live performance after his stroke, with a weakened left hand but his right hand making up for what his left hand lost.  Also, our favorite young jazz musician, Emmet Cohen, who we’ve seen live several times, is a skilled classical musician (love it when he drops in some Bach in his jazz phrasing) and is probably the most versatile of all jazz musicians today, playing any style of jazz.  He is remarkable.

Another amazing pianist who we’ve seen, also mentioned by Mays in his book, is the late great French jazz pianist Claude Bolling who is probably best known for his “crossover” work, walking the fine line between classical and jazz, particularly his Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano.

There are so many interesting stories here, not to mention laugh a minute moments, but most of all this book is about a guy who is totally in love with what he does best.  These range from live gigs at clubs, solo, or with “his” trio, or as a sideman, with an extensive discography and having worked in the world of film (as a performer and arranger), and as an accompanist to almost 200 singers, some of whom we’ve seen perform live and many of whom we’ve heard.

Whenever I’m asked the question what I would ideally have liked to have been if I were not a publisher, professional jazz pianist is right up there or writer (and when much younger, pitcher for the New York Yankees!).  Indeed: amateur, someone who does something out of love, and in my advancing age, I still have the piano and word-processor at my side every day.  Bill Mays’ book describes that alternative life, but I never had the supreme talent, nor learned skills, only the passion.  It is wonderful to have all three and few jazz musicians have “recorded” their experiences such as Mays has in this wonderful book.  It has that personal voicing as does his music.  Thanks, Bill!  

My room where it happens