Loved this anecdote from Julie Crosby, artistic director of the Women's Project: At a recent performance of Bethany (which, by the way, I can't recommend highly enough, as much for the taut, surprising writing of Laura Marks as for the searingly alert, ultimately moving lead turn by America Ferrera): A woman at a recent performance let her cellphone ring twice in the last two minutes of the show, then answered it as she noticeably walked out of the theater. Apparently she was heard telling the person who called that the play wasn't over yet. Oops.
The best part: Crosby approached her and told her, "That was very disruptive." The woman's response: "There's a lot about my life I don't like." What a wonderfully all-purpose excuse for bad behavior.
This post has been amended to correct an error.*
Finally caught the Broadway folk phenom Once last night, and I liked it, but what impressed me most was the endearing fragility and directness of its sound; there are some well-chosen reverb effects on some of the vocals, a single moment of dance-club beats piped in, and some slight processing on the fiddle sound (an inevitable byproduct of miking them). Other than that, it doesn't sound much different from what you'd expect from a bunch of guitars and other assorted stringed instruments strumming and sawing away in a big theater. The introduction of a drum kit for precisely one song also sounds hearteningly in proportion; the sounds we hear are transparent, visible in a way even most shows with onstage bands don't quite approach. Even when it's jamming hard, it remains a refreshingly small, quiet show.
So how does it fill up the space with emotion? It's not just the big voices of Steve Kazee, Cristin Milioti, and the chorus. What I noticed, even more strongly than when I saw the movie, is the way composers Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova milk the suspensions--i.e., melody notes that are pointedly not part of the chord beneath them, in a dissonance that snags at our ear, tugs at our heart, and makes us yearn for the resolution. It's a great old musical trick, and you don't need a ton of music theory to hear what I mean. Listen to the word "time" (1:48) and "now" (2:03) and tell me that yearning sound isn't the key to whatever emotional freight the song carries (and by extension, the key to the show's emotional impact):
Crucially, it's a doubled suspension, with Kazee and Milioti hitting a B-natural and a G, respectively, over an F chord, before resolving to an A and an F.
And what's another big moment in the score, when a song positively bowls us over? (This, by the way, is a much bigger achievement than it's given credit for; in how many backstager musicals are we asked to believe that the song/performance of our lead character is stop-the-traffic amazing? The songs that are meant to do that in Once deliver.) I'd say it's the aching 5/4 jam "When Your Mind's Made Up." The burning dissonance that drives the song, on the word "mind" (:48 and :59), happens to be another B-natural, this time over an A minor chord, a particularly hard-edged suspension that beautifully illustrates and feeds the song's roiling frustration:
Hansard and Irglova didn't invent this evocative trick, of course, and while I'm reluctant to make too many claims for the power of suspensions in pop melodies, they are very often what gives a hook its sharp edge, drawing us into harmonic suspense as we wait for the resolution. One of the best examples that springs to mind is the following standard*, with the suspension that hooks the ear on the word "smile" (and later on the first syllable of "favorite"):
Paul McCartney, for one, is an inveterate suspender. I'd argue that the single note that most draws us into "Hey Jude" is the one on "song" (at 1:04), which is an F over a C7 chord:
It's not exactly the same effect, but the main melody of "Yesterday" is built on a series of suspensions that inexorably drive it forward, thus (suspended notes highlighted):
Yesterday
All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
You probably don't need to hear it, but just to jog your memory:
Not all suspensions are quite so exalted; the chorus of Barry Manilow's "Can't Smile Without You" is based on one. But lest this seem like only a contemporary pop tic, the musical Once is in good company, musical-theater-wise. What notes provide the biggest surge of feeling in the song below? I'd say the suspensions on the syllable "morning" (:30) and later "feeling" (:39) (the latter being same sweet suspension used so memorably in "Falling Slowly"):
This is part of what people mean when they talk about the dramatic character/potential of music. Songwriting, even for the theater, is not primarily about the words. *This post initially claimed that the song "Harbor Lights" epitomized a suspension; my ears failed me; it does not.
Years ago, when I first arrived in New York, I was up for an editorial position at the fine Met-produced magazine Opera News. I was in the running but it wasn't a perfect fit, as my taste in opera, such as it is, runs more in the City Opera direction. But now that the Met is hiring more talent from the theater, it's perhaps inevitable that our paths should cross again (though I must credit my colleague David Barbour for the link-up). The occasion: Michael Mayer's Met debut next month with a new, Vegas-styled Rigoletto. The last time I spoke to Mayer, for a Time Out piece about American Idiot, almost the last thing he said to me was that the Green Day musical was, in a sense, his "first opera." But this Rigoletto is for real:
He found the latter production, a through-sung extrapolation
of the band Green Day's 2004 punk-pop concept album of the same name,
to be salient preparation for directing at the Met — to a point.
"The songs needed to be at a particular tempo, so I was bound to
those decisions, and while I could argue for different tempos at
different times, a song wouldn't change tempo in the middle," Mayer says
of Idiot. "That's definitely going to be the relationship that I have with Rigoletto.
The plot is going to be ticking, and at a certain point, something will
happen musically, and I'm going to have to fulfill that with the
staging."
In both cases, he sees one advantage through-sung material has over
traditional book musicals. "One liberating thing about doing American Idiot
is that the characters weren't bursting into song — that artifice
didn't exist," says Mayer. "It was a wall of sound. The scenes were all
the songs. So there isn't that moment of artifice. It's the one 'buy'
you have at the beginning — these people communicate with singing. As
artificial as it might be to our ear initially, it's consistent
throughout the evening."
I've been mostly knocked on my ass by the New York flu since my Ed Wood musical reading last week, but I managed to file this piece for Time Out before the deluge, about America Ferrera's appearance in a new play, Bethany:
“What was really enticing about this play was that it challenged me,”
the actor says. “I’m a first-generation American, and a big part of why
my parents left their home and came here was the American Dream; that’s
what I’ve been fed from the time I was born” (after, apparently, she
was given her patriotic first name).
But with freedom comes “the right to say, ‘The American Dream is
bullshit,’ ” Ferrera adds, citing the reality-checking economic
reporting of Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch). “There are all these fascinating conversations that I would love to have a part in.”
Coming out the gate into 2013 a little buried under deadlines, not least for next week's staged reading of The Passion of Ed Wood, my long-gestating musical with Justin Warner (deets here).
I haven't gone entirely silent in the blogosphere, though; about a month ago I started taking the radical step of unshuffling my iPod and listening to whole albums all the way through. I've been focusing on records that were in some way formative to me, and documenting the results on my Facebook page—and, more recently, on my other blog. Today's post is about Die Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera), and how a simple slide guitar made my love Kurt Weill. This album-replay journal has become in the past month almost a form of spiritual practice for me—not to mention a way to make my commute from Queens less of a grind. But it's also become another writing siren; my first post, on the Replacements' Let It Be, was barely a paragraph. The posts have gotten longer. The muse, such as it is, calls how she will.
(photo by Scott Landis)
Incredibly busy at the moment, but I'll take a moment to point you to my latest review, of a particularly high-profile Broadway property:
There’s a classic bit of advice for actors: Walk into the audition thinking of yourself as the solution to the director’s problem; be that solution and you’ve got the part. Closing the deal is a steeper challenge for the cutthroat salesmen in David Mamet’s 1983 masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross, now getting a gripping if lopsided Broadway revival starring Al Pacino. The customers these salesmen go after—mostly offstage, with one telling exception—must be convinced they have a problem in the first place, one that only a costly real estate investment can solve. The salesmen’s job, then, is to hunt for signs of vulnerability, of weakness, in their fellow men, to isolate and circle the victims, then pounce without mercy. The dramatic irony of their situation, though, is that this rapacity doesn’t harden them; instead, their extreme sensitivity to human frailty, even though it’s used for exploitive ends, seems to have shredded their nerves and wrecked their composure. These are by and large an oddly fearful and touchy bunch, as if their worst nightmare is to become marks themselves.
Hence the itchy, sweaty, sweary back-and-forth that constitutes the trademark Mametspeak, which is closer to a music than a language.
If Lincoln improves upon reflection, it is partly because it inspires reflection at all. That may sound like a low bar—there are plenty of subpar entertainments that may get stuck in our heads for the wrong reasons, like evil pop earworms—but in this case, though I found the film of uneven quality, I must credit its ambitious scope and intelligence for the quality of the reflections it's prompted, and certainly hardly only from me but from a wide range of smart folks who know a lot better about the issues it raises, and have prompted still further reflection on my part.
Yes, I've read the lefty takedowns of the film's treatment of the radical abolitionists, most notably Aaron Bady's, and I've followed the back-and-forth led by my favorite thinker on the Civil War, Ta-Nehisi Coates. (I was most intrigued, though, by the suggestion that Spielberg and Kushner, far from cribbing or dumbing down received wisdom about the 13th amendment fight that is the film's narrative engine, may have actually advanced a novel and historically grounded argument about Lincoln's arguable motivations that adds to our understanding of the period. Who'da thunk it?)
Much of this criticism boils down to a problematic if totally understandable kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking—a line of critique that "proper" culture critics are supposed to refrain from, in which they don't so much give their opinion of the work as it stands but instead offer their prescriptions for the story the artists should have told. From experts whose field is overlapped by a hugely influential film claiming some degree of historical authority, this kind of feedback is valid enough as far as it goes. My problems with the film, though, had less to do with the film Spielberg and Kushner didn't make than the one they did. And most of my issues could be filed in the familiar Spielberg-as-manipulator complaint file. It's not a position I resort to reflexively—I found Schindler's List, for example, almost entirely beyond reproach on this front—but it's reaction I often couldn't avoid. To give one example, in the pivotal scene of Thaddeus Stevens' capitulation, the great egalitarian, played endearingly by Tommy Lee Jones as a kindly bear in a flesh suit, is seen to temper his views on racial equality for a utilitarian end. There's a sharp subsequent scene in which he explains his actions, quite convincingly, to an indignant colleague, which should have sufficed to let us know that Stevens was at peace with the wisdom of his decision. But during the speech itself, Spielberg can't leave well enough alone; he must instead show us faces that are first shocked, then sagely approving, as Stevens' allies "get" his larger point.
There was also, for all the film's fine-grained detail and historical intellect, a perhaps inevitable prestige-historical-picture haze about too much of it (we might finger John Williams' score here, though I think it's only a symptom of the aesthetic cul-de-sac the film fails to avoid too often). Daniel Day Lewis' magisterial performance may be more aptly called a work of sculpture than of portraiture, with both the three-dimensionality and the cold surface that implies; there were at least a few scenes too many whose point seemed to be to show Lincoln's forlorn retreat to his distant interior depths, the place where are made the hard decisions beyond the ken of mere mortals.
Playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury talking with David Krut about the art of William Kentridge; video courtesy of Soho Rep's Feed
One well-worn line of critique about historical dramas is the question of not only who gets to tell the stories, but more broadly around whom the "great" stories are centered. It's to Corey Robin's credit, for instance, that, while he shares many of Bady's critiques of the film from the left, he recognizes the extent to which Lincoln "decenters" the 16th president from the story of emancipation—an all the more striking and subversive achievement given the film's title and its clear framing as a kind of Great Man of History drama.
I thought of these issues of historical representation in a new way, though, while watching Jackie Sibblies Drury's We Are Proud To Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 at Soho Rep (now extended through Dec. 16). Sensationally staged by Eric Ting and fiercely acted by a six-member ensemble, for me the piece's unique achievement is to situate us in the fraught space between parable and documentary, and to interrogate our motives for retelling the past's horrors—for reliving them vicariously, through nonfiction theater and the essential interpretive fictions it accrues.
Taking a not-widely-known colonial genocide as her subject, Drury seeks both to honor its specificity, to treat it not as a "rehearsal Holocaust" (the perpetrators were Germans) but as an irreducibly particular atrocity in itself, and to widen the lens and ask who by rights should tell such a story, and by what artistic means. Does it make sense merely to present a prosecutorial case against a clear crime that, with the benefit of hindsight, we can all too easily deplore? Or should we be asked to consider, even cathartically inhabit, the dilemma the perpetrators felt they faced? And if we do manage that dubious feat, where do we go from there? This is thorny stuff, given vibrant, unsettling stage life, and most impressively, in a seemingly freewheeling but tightly controlled form that mimics a piece of ensemble-devised theater as well or better than many actually ensemble-devised pieces (without the benefit of a program, my wife found it hard to believe it had been written by one woman rather than by the six actors themselves). We Are Proud To Present... certainly prompted as much reflection as Lincoln did, with the added benefit of also being viscerally involving in the moment in a way the film simply wasn't for me. I couldn't help thinking of another provocative, historically minded meta-play, a tendentious analogue between the Weimar Republic and Reagan America called A Bright Room Called Day, staged nearly 30 years ago in a tiny Chelsea theater by its own promising young writer. That upstart's name was Tony Kushner. In sum, as much as I have come to admire the eminently admirable Lincoln, I look forward to the day when our great stories are in the capable hands of another generation of storytellers.
