January 2011 Archives

Fans of Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Jule Styne, and other iconic composers have many chances to hear their music played and sung in concerts, cabaret acts, and major revivals of their Broadway hits. As for the shows and songs of Stephen Sondheim, they are always so easily accessible in one venue or another that Sondheim junkies never have to go very long between fixes. But opportunities to hear the works of the great Kurt Weill performed live are comparatively rare.

So one can imagine that Weiillophiles are positively vibrating over what's about to happen: Two of the master's lesser known scores, Knickerbocker Holiday and Lost in the Stars, are to receive very high-profile, limited-run resurrections in NYC in the space of a fortnight. If that coincidence isn't amazing enough, consider that both shows have book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, and they represent the only two Weill/Anderson collaborations in the canon.

First up is Knickerbocker Holiday, which will be presented by the Collegiate Chorale at Alice Tully Hall for two performances only on Tuesday and Wednesday, January 25 & 26. Directed by Ted Sperling, with James Bagwell conducting the chorale and the American Symphony Orchestra, this concert version of the show boasts a cast headed by Ben Davis, Christopher Fitzgerald, Victor Garber, David Garrison, Kelli O'Hara, and Bryce Pinkham. The original production opened in October 1938 and ran for 168 performances. Though the score yielded two gorgeous ballads that have become standards, "September Song" and "It Never Was You," the show itself is almost never revived, probably because it's very old fashioned in style if not in subject matter. Ted Sperling was kind enough to summarize the plot for me:

"This is a show about tyranny. It was written in response to Hitler's rise -- I think that was Kurt Weill's motivation -- and it also reflects Maxwell Anderson's unease with FDR and The New Deal. Which is interesting because, these days, we view those two things as almost polar opposites. The action of the show takes place in New Amsterdam, and the plot concerns a corrupt town government led by a guy named Tienhoven. The day of Governor Peter Stuyvesant's arrival in New Amsterdam from Holland happens to be Hanging Day, so the townspeople are scrambling to find somebody to hang. They decide to hang this fellow named Brom, but they can't find a cause, so they trump one up. He's about to be hanged when Stuyvesant arrives and pardons him, but Stuyvesant puts a whole new set of laws into effect which basically give him complete power over the village. Then he decides he wants to marry Tina, the heroine, who wants to marry Brom; it's to her that Stuyvesant sings 'September Song,' because he's considerably older than she is. There are hijinks and complications, but ultimately Stuyvesant is sent packing, the government reverts back to a more free-wheeling democratic system, and the young lovers are free to marry.

"This was only Weill's second Broadway show, after Johnny Johnson," Sperling notes. "To me, It feels like a transitional piece; it has a lot of Broadway flavor but also some of the jagged, spiky, almost sinister harmonies that his German stuff has. The show precedes Oklahoma! by five years, but it's a fairly well integrated musical, though the overall tone is very satiric and comic. I think Weill was a great innovator, and his shows are very modern for their time. Love Life and Lady in the Dark in particular are very experimental shows. Maybe that's why they're not performed more often. One Touch of Venus and Street Scene, which in some ways are his most conventional works, get done a lot."

There's one thing Sperling would like to make very clear as a disclaimer: "New Amsterdam was a tiny village located at the very tip of Manhattan, surrounded by a forest populated by Native Americans. In this piece, the Native Americans are the unseen enemy, and they're not dealt with in what we today would consider a sensitive fashion. I wasn't sure what to do about that, but I finally decided we couldn't pretend it didn't exist. The plot sort of hinges on it. So we're just presenting it all very honestly as it was written, and I hope everybody will understand that the show is definitely of its time in terms of political correctness."

Scarcely less obscure than Knickerbocker Holiday is Lost in the Stars, which will be presented February 3-6 by City Center Encores! Directed by Gary Griffin and choreographed by Chase Brock, with music direction by Rob Berman, the production has a cast led by Chuck Cooper, Daniel Breaker, Sherry Boone, Patina Miller, Quentin Earl Darrington, Daniel Gerroll, Stephen Kunken, and James Rebhorn.

Based on the novel Cry the Beloved Country, the show is described in the Encores! press materials as "a stinging indictment of apartheid South Africa through the story of two aging men, one black, one white, who are brought together by a shared grief." The original production opened at the Music Box in October 1949 and ran 281 performances. I spoke with Chuck Cooper, who's playing the central role of Stephen Kumalo for Encores!, about this extraordinary work -- and given the subject matter of the piece, it seemed highly appropriate that our discussion took place on Martin Luther King Day.

"The show is stunning, really bold and brave," says Cooper. "Certainly, the evil of apartheid was something that deserved to be put under a microscope. The theater at its best can shed light on issues like that and cause us to take a look at ourselves and make improvements. All things are connected, so I think Lost in the Stars was probably one of the kernels or seeds that helped bring about the end of apartheid many years later. It's amazing that they had the balls to do this show, that they raised the money to do it, and that it was received so well.

"Lost in the Stars has one of the best scores ever written," Cooper continues. "It's so interesting that Weill, who came to America from Germany to escape the Nazis, is in many ways a quintessential American composer. I think his music captures the breadth of this country. In many ways, immigrants are the people who seem to really grasp what it means to be an American. Weill was able to grasp it and trasmute it into music. The book [of Lost in the Stars] may seem a little dated in terms of the style of the language, but nevertheless, the message is as profound as it was when Anderson and Weill wrote the show. It's all about how the truth hurts. The truth can really be painful and it's often very difficult to stand up and tell the truth, as the young man in this story finds out."

A film version of Lost in the Stars exists, but like such other movies of Weill musicals as Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, and Knickerbocker Holiday, it doesn't present an accurate picture of the stage show. "I just watched it the other day," Cooper tells me. "A friend of mine took it out of the library for me, and I think it may even be available on Netflix. It's not a very faithful film; many of the songs are done in different settings and in a different order. They did their Hollywood thing with it. But Brock Peters plays Stephen Kumalo, and he's pretty great. I'm honored to be a part of the Encores! production, especially because this show is so rarely done. I think it's a piece that people who love musical theater will really respond to. It's a perfect choice for Encores!"

As Mary Testa remarked at one point during the Michael John LaChiusa: Boys Night Out concert that was held at Playwrights Horizons last evening: If a bomb had fallen on the theater, we'd have only girls doing musicals.

Aside from Testa, who hosted the event (hilariously) and offered a moving rendition of "There Will Be a Miracle" from See What I Wanna See, the concert featured an all-male cast singing some of the best work of the remarkably prolific LaChiusa. The event was a benefit for the Transport Group, one of the most invaluable theater companies in the city.

With Chris Fenwick doing excellent work as music director/pianist, Boys Night Out was two hours' worth of terrific musical theater songs performed by nine of the most talented men in the business. Bobby Steggert started things off with "Safe" from Hello Again and then was joined by Malcolm Gets for the gorgeous duet "The One I Love" from the same show. (Mark your calendar: The Transport Group will be reviving Hello Again March 4-April 3. Visit www.transportgroup.org for details.)

Next up, Alexander Gemignani sang "The Storm" from Marie Christine. There followed two musical moments from The Wild Party: Max Von Essen in "Breezin' Through Another Day" and Marc Kudisch in an intense, scary performance of "How Many Women in the World." Von Essen returned for the lyrical "How Much Love Can a Heart Hold?", which LaChiusa wrote for the Transport Group show Requiem for William, an hommage to William Inge.

Chad Kimball was a charmer in two numbers from Little Fish, "I Ran" and the title song. Kudisch topped himself with the title song from The Highest Yellow, and then there were two more selections from See What I Wanna See: the amazing Chuck Cooper in "Morito" and the indefatigable Kudisch in Central Park. Steven Pasquale lent his golden voice to two songs from Giant, "I Need You" and "Lost in Her Woods." (Both The Highest Yellow and Giant had their world premieres at the Signature Theater in Arlington but have yet to be produced in NYC.)

Andrew Samonsky, most recently seen and heard as Lt. Cable in South Pacific at Lincoln Center, closed out the evening beautifully and appropriately with "Expectations" from Queen of the Mist, a new show that LaChiusa has written for Testa.

Whenever I see a new production of a classic in which the work in question is radically reconceived, I remember something that the great John Raitt once said to me. During the course of an interview in the late '90s, Raitt and I discussed director Nicholas Hytner's revival of Carousel. When I asked him to describe his reaction while watching this new take on a show in which he had starred some 50 years earlier, he said (and I'm paraphrasing only slightly), "One minute you're thinking, 'That's a great idea,' and the next minute you're thinking, 'What did they do THAT for??!!'"

I've had a similar reaction to many new stagings of time-honored plays, musicals, and operas -- including the Willy Decker production of Verdi's La Traviata, which was a hit in Europe and has now come to the Metropolitan Opera as a replacement for the previous, very elaborate, much maligned production by Franco Zeffirelli.

This sure ain't your grandmother's Traviata. Wolfgang Gussmann's stark set looks like a cross between an operating room, a bare-walled art gallery, and a tennis court. The stage is dominated by a huge, tilted clock (see photo), and the only pieces of furniture are a few large couches. When Act II, Scene 1 come around, the fact that it takes place in a country house is indicated only by a cyclorama with a floral design hanging above and behind the set proper, and by Violetta and Alfredo wearing bathrobes of the same design.

The production's aggressively post-modern look and sensibility is a problem in terms of the storytelling. As any opera buff will tell you, the central drama of Traviata is set in motion when the courtesan Violetta Valery is persuaded by the hidebound conservative Giorgio Germont to give up her romance with his son, Alfredo, and thereby remove from the family a mark of scandal that might prevent the marriage of Germont's daughter/Alfredo's sister to a respectable young man. All of this makes perfect sense in the social and moral context of the mid-19th century, but not so much in the modern era. Though Decker's Traviata isn't set in any specific time or place, the costumes and scenic design clearly communicate "now" -- and the idea that Violetta's past as a kept woman would be a major issue for these terribly au courant folks is hard to swallow.

Anachronisms aside, many of Decker's directorial ideas don't make a whole lot of sense. The members of the chorus, all of them clad in black tuxedos, are for some reason depicted as a malevolent force, constantly taunting the lovers. The symbolism of having Violetta disrobe down to her slip several times is muddled. In Act II, as written, Alfredo is supposed to surprise Violetta while she's writing a farewell note to him; here, we never see her writing, though she still says just beforehand that she is going to do so, and Alfredo still interrupts her with the question, "To whom were you writing?" And who knows what point Decker was trying to make in having Alfredo sit about 20 feet away from Violetta, with his eyes glued to the floor, as the poor woman collapses and dies in the final moments of the opera?

For many who attend this production, the most unpardonable sin of all will be that some of Decker's staging has an adverse effect upon the music. Despite conductor Ginandrea Noseda's noble effort to keep it all together, the performance I attended was quite ragged in spots, seemingly because the soloists and choristers were focused more on Decker's often obtrusive blocking than on singing in time with the orchestra. (One of the chief offenders or victims, depending on how you look at it, was tenor Scott Scully, who maddeningly lagged behind in every measure of his brief role of Gastone.) Also, the en masse movements of the choristers result in a great deal of clumping that's sometimes so loud as to distract from the gorgeous sounds emanating from the orchestra pit..

All of the above notwithstanding, soprano Marina Poplavskaya (Violetta) and tenor Matthew Polenzani (Alfredo) prove to be two of the most prodigiously talented singing actors (or acting singers) I've ever seen at the Met. They make the most of Decker's better ideas, such as bringing Alfredo back on stage for the last section of "Sempre libera" so that Violetta can sing her defiant expression of freedom to him rather than to the audience, and having Violetta on hand at the start of Act II to frolic romantically with her lover in their country house. Another strong presence is baritone Andrezj Dobber as Germont, although his voice sounds a bit strained in some of the role's higher passages.

So, there you have it. Maybe it's best to think of Willy Decker's Traviata as a sort of diuretic or laxative that the Met has taken to clear its system of the Zeffirelli production's excesses: It does the job, but it's not something you want to rely on for an extended period.