Duke Revisited in Spirit

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389 miles from Marietta GA to Durham NC
September 9-30

Arrival at Duke on my virtual bike tour coincides with an assignment for a church class (EfM) to remember spiritual development during a certain period of years.

I lived in many worlds at Duke during the years 1977-1981; learning to integrate them was my education.

World of Religion: ImpactAs Duke's West Campus centered on the Chapel (see photo), my world centered on faith, afloat on books by C. S. Lewis and friends in dorm Bible study. But there was an undercurrent of fear for failing to evangelize the sinners around us and we were (maybe) feeling some sinful temptations ourselves.

So I made easy prey when the roommate lottery matched me with someone more fundamentalist than I. He used scripture to show that my faith was incorrect, insufficient, and I was going to hell. Saving me from my roommate's efforts to save me, my friend Kendrick uttered the highest-impact single sentence of my life. See how in Theology Outside the Bible (07/2013), two-thirds through the article.

World of Theatre: Sustenance, GrowthDuring years when my faith shed its hard shell of judgmentalism, the world of theatre sustained me. Some drama people were religious, some were gay, and all were pot smokers. But my sinful theatre friends were warm, funny, insightful, and earnest about their art.

Dr. John Clum, founding head of the Drama Department, helped me to see that literature doesn't have to be about good people doing nice things in order to speak truth that a Christian would (or should) recognize. I learned how to act a character, not just perform lines, through empathy and imagination, salient traits of Jesus. The world of my religion was expanding. See Dr. John Clum, Writer, Dramatist, Scholar (11/2015) and Good Actors Make Good Company (06/2011).

World of Intellect: Challenge to Go DeepIntellectual depth challenged my faith and presented a challenge, period. When Professor DiCorcia remarked in passing during History class that "your brain is dead if you still believe in five years what you believe today," I retreated to Duke's chapel after class to pray about that. In the dim stained-glass light, I re-built my faith up from the feel of the grain of the wood in the pew ahead of me to the Creator.

In my junior year, retired general Professor Irving B. Holley taught me to respect how much there is to know about anything, and to confess the corollary, how little I know about anything. See The Essence of Education (09/2013). He advocated an education both broad and deep. As I looked for depth in all my classes, my grades declined a bit but my enjoyment shot up. When I met the work of Henry James, whose prose was a struggle to read, I committed to the challenge of reading all his novels for a two-year independent study. See The American: Henry James Lite (12/2011).

God's Presence in the Medieval and Renaissance WorldThe first classes I took at Duke introduced me to literature of the Medieval world, where God was a palpable presence, not something you "believed in" or argued about.

My last class at Duke was a deeper dive into that world's successor, the Renaissance. With an overflow crowd of students lining the walls, Professor DeWitt taught class like a Sunday-night camp meeting, pacing, calling out, with lots of perspiration and inspiration. My experience of those faith-soaked worlds has remained an ideal for me. See Church was Made for Waiting (11/2011) and a more personal article A Jung Man's Dream (01/2019).

Grace on a Plate: My Eyes Open to the WorldMy last college roommate Andréas shook up my world. Like everyone else, I called him "Andy." He'd seemed like a naive kid from Philly who'd needed my guidance, but our roles reversed when I heard him speak French on the phone to his mom and Italian to his father: he was a cosmopolitan Italiano and I was the naive one. Preoccupied with lit, drama, and music, I'd never questioned my US-centric views; Andréas was amused by American food, resentful about America's meddling in the world. I resisted, and we argued.

But a couple of years after graduation, when I chaperoned kids to France, a taste of Andréas's world was like grace, and my eyes were opened. See My Spiritual Encounter with French Asparagus (09/2018)

[I recently ran across this quotation from Andréas in a journal, where I remembered him as a great influence on my life: I'm no longer your little pet freshman, and you can't stand it! He was a truth-teller.]

The Rings of a TreeLooking back on those years, I see how my worlds had expanded like the rings of a tree, each one wider to encompass the others. I'd experienced what Professor Holley preached, both breadth and depth.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.

Lapine, Sondheim, and "Sunday": So Much Love in their Words

"So much love in his words...forever with his colors...how George looks...he can look forever..."
(lines written by James Lapine, spoken during the reprise of Stephen Sondheim's song "Sunday" at the end of their musical play Sunday in the Park with George)

The distinguished Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George wraps a love story in a lively conversation about art -- how we make it, why it matters. 

So does James Lapine's memoir of that musical's creation, Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). The starting place for both love stories is George Seurat's pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte - 1884.

Clockwise from top: Act One finale, 1984; Sondheim and Lapine on set, 1984; Sondheim studies La Grande Jatte, photo by Lapine.

The Musical The love story in the musical arcs through two acts and 100 years. In the opening seconds of the show, as artist George Seurat sketches "Dot," the woman in the forefront of the painting, she pleads with him to notice "there's someone in this dress." She is determined to "get through" to the artist. But during Act One, she comes to recognize that she cannot have his full attention. He sings why in a reflection about himself,

... however you live,
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out a sky,
Finishing a hat...
-(Sondheim, "Finishing the Hat")

Dot, carrying George's child, finds another man "simple and kind" who "makes a connection." With him, she immigrates to America, leaving Seurat with these words:

You have a mission,
A mission to see.
Now I have one, too, George.
And we should have belonged together.

I have to move on.
("We Do Not Belong Together")

In Act Two, another artist named George, descendant of Seurat and Dot, revisits the island of La Grand Jatte. He had planned to bring along his grandmother Marie, the baby in the painting, to celebrate the painting's centennial with a new art installation. But Marie has died, the island is encrusted with buildings and pavement, and he's having doubts about his own work. 

As he reads the notes that Dot wrote in her English primer, she appears to him in person. As if he were his ancestor Seurat, she thanks him for what he taught her about being "in the moment," not to worry over past or future -- a lesson that the modern George needs to hear. For his part, George sees in her "Things I hadn't looked at / Till now," her smile, "the way you catch the light," the "care / and the feeling." Now George and Dot sing in unison, "We have always belonged together." Dot inspires him to "stop worrying if your vision is new" and "move on."

The Collaboration James Lapine reflects in his book that the two years spent creating Sunday in the Park with George "changed my life, and I would venture to say it changed Sondheim's as well." No doubt about that: Sondheim's memoir, part I, ends at a lowpoint in his career, but he adds, "Then I met James Lapine."

The two men were unsuited to each other like characters who "meet cute" in a rom-com.

Lapine, barely in his 30s, straight, with "commitment issues," was an out-of-work teacher of fashion design with a couple of writing-directing credits at an off-Broadway workshop for experimental drama. Sondheim, 52 and gay, was a multi-Tony-winner and "Broadway's Music Man" (Newsweek) but suffering the end of his fruitful collaboration with director Hal Prince after their show Merrily We Roll Along flopped in 1981.

When a common friend arranged for a meeting, Lapine didn't know any of Sondheim's work except for the 1979 masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Blocked by a nuclear protest, Lapine barged through the crowds to arrive at Sondheim's town home just on time. Sondheim put him at ease by offering a joint.

"I loved that you did that," Lapine says to Sondheim in the book. The transcripts of Lapine's reminiscences with Sondheim glow with many moments when the two collaborators express feelings they'd kept private at the time.

For example, Sondheim reveals that it was Lapine's play Twelve Dreams that kept him from quitting theatre altogether. Sickened by the glee that greeted the failure of Merrily in "so-called Broadway circles" (17), he wanted nothing more than to create video games. But Lapine's play inspired him.  "Really? I didn't know that," says Lapine in his interview.

Then Sondheim describes the moment that began their long working relationship. Over several meetings, they'd not found a subject of sufficient interest to both of them. Then Lapine laid down a postcard printed with Seurat's Sunday on La Grande Jatte, and the two found possibilities. It looked to them like a stage set; all the characters seem to avoid looking at each other. Then Lapine observed that "the main character is missing" -- the artist. Sondheim says, "Boing! All the lights went on" (23).

As in any good romantic comedy, there were doubts, more than either man knew at the time. Reading Lapine's first drafts, Sondheim felt superfluous. "This will make you blush," Sondheim tells Lapine, "but you are -- a poet" and Sondheim feared that any song by him would be "intrusive" (35). At the same time, Lapine felt that Sondheim always had "one foot out the door." Sondheim says,

I never detected any of that. ...Not only did I enjoy your company, but also I thought everything you were showing me was fun and good and stimulating. (35)

Sondheim's procrastination made it a pretty one-sided collaboration until the day when Sondheim seated Lapine beside him on the piano bench to turn pages while he sang the opening number. Lapine admits, "This is going to sound odd... Suddenly, we were shoulder to shoulder... It was a kind of an emotional moment for me." Sondheim was so nervous that he "attacked" the keys and oversang. He had to do it twice before Lapine "got it," and even then, Lapine apologizes now, "I'm not effusive" (44).

Their trust grew through re-writes, rehearsals, and preview performances when the audience sometimes responded badly. "Out of the blue," Lapine recalls, Sondheim said to him, "I want to write my next show with you." Lapine writes, "I had never felt that kind of trust coming at me." He reflects that his "commitment issues" vanished forever (121).

In an interview about this book, Terri Gross asked Lapine why he never wrote another show with Sondheim after Sunday, Into the Woods and Passion. "Are you still friends?" she asked. "Yes!" Lapine said, though they never found another topic that interested both of them. Lapine worked with Sondheim on a successful revision of Merrily, a stage revue Sondheim on Sondheim, and a movie mixing archival footage and new performances, Six by Sondheim. Now, he told Gross, writing this book has been another way to keep Sondheim in his life.

The Art of Making Art The love stories in both musical and book are buttressed by dozens of thumbnail portraits of characters whose lives go into the making of the artworks.

In the musical, Seurat sketches the other figures of the painting between his encounters with Dot. Lapine's pithy bits of dialogue bring out their salient characteristics. In musical numbers called "Gossip" and "The Day Off," Sondheim distills Lapine's characters in brief songs. Though a couple of critics say there's "no life" in Seurat's art, Sondheim has Seurat sing along with portions of each portrait, showing how the artist enters into the characters' lives. Seurat even channels two dogs in a virtuoso duet for solo voice. In act two, Lapine and Sondheim interlace dialogue and lyrics to portray a slate of new characters from the contemporary art world who surround the 1984 George.

Likewise in Lapine's book, we get to know actors, producers, and designers. We learn how much the actors helped -- and prodded -- Lapine and Sondheim to flesh out their characters. In the roles of servants, Nancy Opel and Brent Spiner (subsequently "Data" on Star Trek) introduced German accents that gave Lapine and Sondheim ideas for character development (97). Lapine borrowed personality traits for his 1984 George from the technical designer Bran Ferren who created the laser-based sculpture called "Chromolume #7" (169).

Lapine also got a lot of pushback and resentment, especially during weeks of previews for audiences that grew restless and hostile. He learned about leadership from their pushback. Actor Melanie Vaughan remembers how she, Spiner, and Opel stonewalled Lapine, staring at him blankly while he gave them notes. They were thinking, just tell us what you want (98). Lapine reflects that, as both writer and director, he was still figuring out what he wanted (98). Actor Charles Kimbrough asks Lapine in the book if the memory of all that is painful. "I'm actually somewhat in awe of my younger self. At the time, I was just trying to keep my head above water. But when I look back now, I think: Boy, I had some chutzpah!" (242)

Sondheim felt mounting pressure to fill in gaps in the dialogue where he and Lapine intended the characters to sing. Bernadette Peters complained that "Dot" "kind of disappears" in the first act, pushing Sondheim to write "Everybody Loves Louis," about leaving Seurat for the baker, a peppy song with an undercurrent of sorrow: "We lose things / and then we choose things /...George has George, / and I need someone." Mandy Patinkin, already high-strung (the backstage crew wanted to kill him (218)) was on the verge of quitting. He pleaded for a song that would explain his character. Sondheim finally delivered "Finishing the Hat." Rehearsing it, Patinkin "lit up like a flare," remembers orchestrator Michael Starobin. The song explained "why [Seurat]'s so hard on his partner and also why he's so hard on himself. The piece didn't make sense until that song came in" (120).

Everyone felt even more urgency for Sondheim to produce songs for the second act. For the book, Lapine presses Sondheim for an answer to what took so long.  After all, he and Sondheim had discussed the characters, the moments, the themes; Sondheim had written page after page of notes; yet the audience and actors, too, were left to wonder why they should care about the second-act George or why "Dot" suddenly appears in 1984. What was the delay?

Sondheim finally admits that he has no answer, but it's clear that he benefitted from seeing the actors in their roles. Performing the role of "Marie," Peters spoke to Marie's grandson "George" with a South Carolina lilt that put Sondheim in mind of his favorite composer, southerner Harold Arlen, whose blues-inflected songs were "seductive...warm...yearning" (233). Sondheim wrote those qualities into a new song "Children and Art" in which Marie gently encourages her grandson to produce "the only two worthwhile things to leave behind when you depart this world: children and art" (368). 

That still left a big hole in Act Two where the modern George expresses himself.  Sondheim tells Lapine that he knew the contents of the missing number, but not the form, until he saw the little red book in George's hand, the primer that Dot used to learn English in the first act, a gift to modern George from his grandmother.  Alone in the park, George reads from the book: "Charles has a book... Charles shows them his crayons... Marie has the ball of Charles...." George keeps the primer's simple grammar going as he muses about the lost park and his uncertain future:

George is afraid
George sees the park
George sees it dying.
George too may fade,
Leaving no mark,
.Just passing through.
("Lesson #8")

Lapine tells Sondheim, "So when we finally got those last two songs in the show, Mandy said it best, it was like a magic trick" (240). Sondheim responds, "That's the miracle. ...When music is used correctly, then everything coalesces." Actor Charles Kimbrough gives the cast's perspective. They'd watched from the wings each night as the last scene fell flat.

But the addition of these songs laid that carpet of feeling under the moment. When Dot entered to the music of "Lesson #8," it was clear that this George had summoned her. It was pure gold. And then they sang "Move On" and that just killed. And then when the "Sunday" reprise came around, bam! (241)

Lapine and Sondheim stuck to their vision while producers and actors advised them to just extend act one with some audience-pleasing number and jettison the difficult second act. Lapine writes, "[We] had to stay true to our initial impulses and write the show we had intended, not the show these people [who walked out on the second act] had wanted to see" (127). Actors Mandy Patinkin and William Parry both remember Lapine, a very "controlled" and "internal" man, opening up and choking back tears after the last rehearsal, pleading with the cast to "trust" the show. "Believe in what we have made." And they produced something "remarkable."

Art, Love, and Death Lapine and Sondheim both have discovered new things in what they themselves wrote. They have heard their own words come back to them in times of discouragement:

Anything you do
Let it come from you
Then it will be new.
Give us more to see.
("Move On")

Lapine says it's a letter to them from their younger selves (127).

Those words from "Move On" speak to me as an artist, too, but the moment that has always spoken to me as a man emerges from another arc in the story. There's a through-line of statements about art that tell us all why we should care about artists doing their work.

This other arc has to do with the death of what you love.

At the start of the show, Dot says, "If you want instead / When you're dead / Some more public / And more permanent / Expression / Of affection," then you want a painter or sculptor whose work will endure "forever." Near the end of the show, 1984 George fears that his life will have been "just passing through." In between, we've heard the admonition to "leave behind" either children or art, and we've heard the anthem "Sunday" that celebrates how Seurat's painting preserves a moment "forever."

But the song "Beautiful" reaches an emotional peak that affected me deeply, from the first time I heard it to the present moment nearly 40 years later.

This quiet song follows Dot's tumultuous aria "We Do Not Belong Together." While Seurat sketches his mother, the "Old Lady" played originally by Barbara Bryne, speaks of memories that are fading. Sondheim's music for her seems to be built on sighing, while an ostinato suggests the river nearby. She sings of regret that the Eiffel Tower is being constructed "where there were trees," and she mourns

Sundays
Disappearing
All the time,
When things were beautiful.

The accompaniment changes to cascades of notes when George tells her "All things are beautiful." In the earlier song "Finishing the Hat," he had expressed the joy of seeing this world through art "like a window...the only way to see." Now he demonstrates for his mother how the tower is "a perfect tree." He promises, "You watch / While I revise the world." Suddenly, she gets it, and her song becomes urgent, as everything is

Changing,
As we sit here--
Quick, draw it all,
Georgie!
("Beautiful")

"You make it beautiful," she says, eyes closed. As this quiet song subsides, the other characters enter, their confrontations with each other at the boiling point. Seurat freezes the chaotic action to compose all the players into the tableau we all know, Seurat's "perfect park" that continues "forever."

The song isn't mentioned in Lapine's book, but the 1986 edition of Craig Zadan's Sondheim and Company includes Mandy Patinkin's story of a two-hour conversation with Sondheim about "people that you love, things you'd like to say to them, ideal states of when you can communicate and when that communication can never take place again....And four days later, he came in with this conversation turned into a poem called 'Beautiful,' set to this simple, gorgeous music" (Zadan 305).

When the Old Lady says, "Quick, draw it all!" she speaks for all of us when we're suddenly reminded that people and places that we love will not last. Sunday gives us the reason to care about the making of art: it's an expression of love that distills, elevates, and preserves the object of appreciation.

As Lapine has done for that life-changing collaboration in this book.

Of Related Interest

• In Sunday, Art, and "Forever" I speculate why many people cry for the song "Sunday."
• The show is key to what I see as Sondheim's Religious Vision, with George and Dot as saints.
• With my fellow arts teachers' thoughtful Sunday-themed retirement gift, the show spoke to me in a new way: Children and Art: Sunday in Retirement with George.
• See a curated list of many, many more articles on my Sondheim page

North by Northwest to Galesburg

North by Northwest, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and scored thrillingly by Bernard Herrmann, came to mind this past week when I drove with my sister from Atlanta to Galesburg IL to visit my mom's cousin Pat. It wasn't just that we drove north-by-northwest; the vast blue sky and level landscape reflected the movie's iconic cornfield scene. 

The selfie was shot in the parking lot of a hotel near a small airport outside of St. Louis. That's the same airplane that swooped down on Cary Grant, courtesy Paint 3D.

North by Northwest shows up in another blogpost about my virtual bike ride to Mt. Rushmore.

See video clips of the visit that I put together for Mom to see.

Jordan Scannella, Bassist for HAMILTON: Exclusive Interview on Two Wheels

Today I interviewed the bass player Jordan Scannella, now touring with Hamilton. We were both on bikes on the Silver Comet Trail north of Atlanta. He was ahead, then I passed him, and he stayed close. When we both passed a softball-sized turtle, he asked if turtles were a common sight around here, as he was passing me. I figured he was from out of town and started up a conversation -- once I'd caught up to him. Riding with him was very helpful for my average speed.

In truth, being a friendly guy, he was the one who asked most of the questions. From him, I learned something about the life of a musician traveling with a show. He's staying in a bed-and-breakfast close to the theatre and riding several times a week. When he goes to different places on the tour, he often hooks up with a cycling group to get to know the territory. Not all places are so hospitable as our Silver Comet; he told of unpenned, unleashed dogs. One time he outraced them, but another time they attacked on an uphill climb. In that situation, he got off the bike and put it between him and the dogs. His airhorn confused them. "They forgot what they were doing, and went away."

He was amazed by octagenarian jazz stars whom he saw at Piedmont Park last weekend during the Atlanta Jazz Festival. He theorized that musicians live longer than ordinary people because they keep playing -- "When you stop playing, your life is over," he said. I shared how playing piano in the pit orchestra for Sweeney Todd was the most intense living I've ever done -- and how I wished I'd discovered band when I was doing drama in high school.

About Hamilton, we said little. I told him how I'd known the music and went to find out what the visuals added. (See my article Hamilton on Mute.)

He does some teaching on Zoom these days, and misses in-person interaction, but he acknowledges some advantages in the remote learning.

While we did talk some about music and Broadway, I did not learn until I went online that he has recorded with groups including Jorscan and People's Champs. When conversation shifted to a new topic, I kept to myself a comment about a wonderful bike trail in Cincinnati, missing an opportunity for another connection, since that's his hometown and very dear to me (see Cincinnati on my virtual bike tour).

After I'd gone a bit over an hour, it was time for me to turn back while he explored land west. I told him I'd consider my Hamilton program to be virtually autographed, now.

In an Interview on Bassmusicmagazine.com from 2018, he discusses his background, how he hustles to make a living as a musician in New York, and how he got involved with Hamilton. He's very enthusiastic about the show. Near the end of the interview, he explains how he actually plays several different basses to get the sounds required.... and how he has literally two seconds to switch from one instrument to another. He's grateful for the consistency of his Hamilton schedule, giving him time to compose. And -- it goes without saying -- to ride his bike.

Cycling America, Virtually: Home again, Marietta GA

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178 miles from Montgomery AL to Marietta GA
September 2-8 Riding my bike around Atlanta, I've been plotting miles on a map of the US, making virtual stops in places that I've lived and/or loved. I'm "back" home in Marietta, GA. Yesterday, I posed for a virtual picture at The Walker School, where I taught 23 years until retiring this summer. Today, I think back on happy memories there.

What warms a middle school teacher's heart is any time a student discovers the inner adult they didn't know was there. It's like discovering a super power. A middle schooler can take a giant step towards adulthood, then go back to being a kid again.

One of my happiest Walker memories is a recent one, a father’s conference on Zoom with Jamie Rubens and me. Jamie and I did nothing more than describe the son’s classroom demeanor. Courteous, curious, determined to make class go well, and funny, the boy was so adult, and such a kid. To our surprise, the dad wept, he was so happy.

In fall 2001, my 6th grade MSD class (Music, Speech, and Drama) composed our own opera The Frog Prince, but we ran out of time. The performance was coming up, but we still had no finale. Andreas Wilder volunteered to write something for all 24 characters to sing at the end. The next day, he apologized, "I just took some of the music from earlier scenes and changed the words. Is that okay?" I reassured him that Mozart did the same thing. Andreas had transformed what the princess sang about the frog who had risked his life to save hers.  Kneeling beside his unconscious body, the princess had sung,

He's short and green,
not tall and clean,
but I think I could love him.

In Andreas's finale, all the students faced the audience and sang

We know we're young
Sometimes we're lazy
Do you think you could love us?
We know we're small,
sometimes we're crazy.
Do you think you could love us?

The parents, our MS secretary Terri Woods, and even our unflappable principal Nancy Calhoun wept.

I remember fondly "Cocoa Cabaret," a middle-school version of a coffee house open mike night that we did each spring in the early 2000s. Kids went up to the mike scared and came back stars. Back then, the Middle School Band had only five players, but they wowed the audience. A shy girl with a beautiful voice had trouble with pitch, so I played a few chords from a 1920s ballad and paused when she sang a line, then I played a little more, and so on. Her voice never clashed with the piano, and no one knew that she made up her own tune in her own key. Big success!

The most memorable moment like that was a performance by Samantha Walker's middle school singers during our Black History program for Arts Month. When Rashan sang the first notes of his solo, I heard the audience of children and adults gasp at his pure, rich sound and the conviction of his delivery.

During an arts showcase, Mrs. Boyer's art classes risked monumental failure but triumphed when teams painted large landscapes live on stage. We watched the canvases go from blobby to beautiful.

At performances by the Upper School, I loved to see how students had grown. I think of Liane's singing with the jazz band, and Patrick's deep and intense performance in All My Sons. The most fun I ever had at Walker -- or ever! -- was playing piano with the orchestra for Katie Arjona's production of Sweeney Todd. Moved by the dedication and concentration of the upper school instrumentalists around me and by how each separate part fit together to support the passionate cast on stage, I had to find the notes for the finale through tears.

Grace under difficult circumstances isn't something you can always count on with middle schoolers, so it was memorable when rain and technical glitches wiped out our entire program for a retreat at a distant camp. We teachers faced the seventh grade in one room with nothing to do for the entire evening. Mike Mackey, Ayren Selzer, Susan Boyer, Lydia Drown, and Dennis McElhaney stepped up to get everyone involved. Dennis has had to fill this role many times, leading the game "Nibblety-Bibble." Some of our kids now play that game at Olympics level.

The teachers couldn't have done it, though, without the students' grace and goodwill. This wasn't what the kids wanted to do, but they understood the situation, and they played along with it.

That same grace and goodwill allowed me to fail numerous times during the months of online COVIDucation until we found ways to keep everyone engaged and producing great stuff. For that reason, I will remember the last two years of my teaching career as the best ones.

See cherished memories from the 17 years I taught at St. Andrew's School in Jackson, MS.

7202 miles on my second world tour begun June 2020;
3290 miles year-to-date in 2021, average speed 15

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.

Walter Mosley's "Charcoal Joe": Comic Relief

Opening up Walter Mosley's Charcoal Joe (New York: Doubleday, 2016), you may feel a shock at the sheer number of colorful characters, their schemes and scams. Soon, though, you realize it's an L.A.-wide block party with crooks and cops, saps and sirens, black and white and brown. Our affable good-hearted host is detective Easy Rawlins.

[photo of Mosley by Ann Weathersby]

To be sure, Mosley doesn't stint on action. From a comfy cell in a resort-style prison, crime boss "Charcoal Joe" hires Easy to exonerate a young black professor charged with murder of two white men. Following leads, Easy gets in fist fights, battles armed home invaders, and hunts a killer in the killer's own house. In his time off, Easy helps his partners to trap a vile sexual predator.

But this novel brings out Mosley's playful side. When the novel starts, Easy's having a great day. Friends everywhere, each one a character. Lovers, too -- it's a running gag that every woman he encounters want to have his child. Then Mosley makes a kind of game - how many ways can Easy handle whites, cops and proprietors, who mean "You don't belong here" when they say, "Can I help you?"

Mosley plays meta-tricks, too. When Easy names his detective firm with his partners' initials, is it coincidence that WRENS-L rhymes with "Denzel," the actor who played Easy in The Devil in a Blue Dress? Easy makes an important choice on the basis of a slight detail he noticed several chapters before, a virtuoso bit of observation and deduction that might be a respectful nod to Sherlock Holmes.

I found a fun photo of Mosley by Ann Weathersby with an article "Free Radical" by Logan Hill in New York Magazine (Sept. 15, 2005). Hill makes an apt comparison to the plays of August Wilson. Like Mosley, Wilson explored black experience in America across decades through stories set in one city.

I had put Mosley's series aside for awhile, ground down a bit by the weight Easy had to carry. Then I picked up Charcoal Joe and it picked me up.

My Blog Posts of Related Interest I read the first several books pre-blog.

• Mosley's Cinnamon Kiss is part of my essay "Guilty Pleasure in Crime Fiction" (05/2006).
• In "Black, White, and Noire" (04/2009) I consider Mosley's Blonde Faith alongside The Ivory Grin ,written by Ross MacDonald in 1952.  This essay begins, "In one of the throw-away lines that make Walter Mosley's novels so rich, detective Easy Rawlins reflects that he is no more a private eye than . . . any soul sitting in that [black dive, ca. 1966]. Each and every one of us was examining and evaluating clues all the time, day and night (98)."
• "One Plot, Two Thrillers" (07/2013) finds one-to-one correspondence between two successful thrillers that are otherwise entirely different, Mosley's Little Green and Dean Koontz's Odd Hours.  This article quotes Mosley's striking insights on race in America and on 1967.
• August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (12/2020) was filmed, with Denzel Washington the producer. Wilson was influenced by the art of Romare Beardon. See Something Over Something Else
(01/2020).

See a curated list of links to my reflections on many other crime fiction authors.

For History Teachers: Rap About Magna Carta

[After marveling at how Lin-Manuel Miranda squeezed so much history into his lyrics for Hamilton, I recalled that I once squeezed a couple centuries of English history into a rap, writing for a middle school pageant around 1988.  My colleague Martha Neilson wrote the hook.  Any teachers out there are welcome to use this.] 

It all started with a Viking finding England to his liking
and descending on our island with his crew.
All we had were sev'ral princes in their separate provinces;
it was Alfred who decided what to do.

So a kingdom was created; that is what Alfred the Great did
to unite and drive the Vikings from our land.
He was one king among others whom he treated as his brothers,
so the king and lords were working hand in hand.

But it wasn't too much longer 'til the kings were getting stronger.
It was John who fin'ly pushed beyond the line.
All the barons in their ardor made a thing called Magna Carta
and they said they'd kill him if he didn't sign.

(Refrain)
Keeping the kings in line,
keeping the kings in line:
Magna Carta, a petition,
was the start of a tradition
of keeping the king in line.

Now King John, he had a daughter, and the gentleman who got her
was DeMontfort, known as "Simon" to his friends.
Then the crown fell to another who by law was Simon's brother
who continued all of John's annoying trends.

Henry taxed beyond his rights and he imported foreign knights and
wasted fortunes buying finery and jewels.
Simon said, "You may be regal, but you're doing things illegal.
Here in England, rulers must obey the rules!"

So with hundreds of supporters from the high and lower orders
Simon led a great rebellion and he won.
With the king in his possession he proclaimed the debut session
of the Parliament: that's how it was begun.

(Repeat refrain)

But there soon were bad reactions from aristocratic factions
who resented being told to follow laws.
Knowing laws are part of freedom, Simon armed himself to meet 'em
and he died that day, a martyr for the cause.

(Repeat refrain.)

"Hamilton" on Mute

Since the story of Hamilton is densely packed in Lin-Manuel Miranda's songs on the recording [see my review (06/2016)], do you need to see it for $400 to appreciate the story? Turns out, even if you watched Hamilton on mute, you'd get your money's worth.

[See my exclusive interview with Hamilton bassist Jordan Scannella conducted while riding fast on two bicycles along Georgia's Silver Comet Trail.]

Before the show, there's the set to admire. It's a three-story collage of façades - brick, wood, plaster. There are gangplanks and stairs, ropes, warrens, and skywalks for variety of entrances and exits. There's little room for pieces to fly in or scenery to drop so we're going to be looking at the same sepia-toned set the whole time. No crashing chandeliers or helicopters lifting off: spectacle and color are going to be scaled to what humans do in the space.

Once the show starts, the ensemble, barely present on the recording, is fairly ubiquitous on stage. Dancers outnumber the principals nearly three-to-one. They stretch, climb, jump, twist, flex -- anything a fit human body can do to draw our attention to shifts in the mercurial lyrics. They mime battles, a hurricane, even a split-second hanging. Their basic costumes are beige undergarments, but they occasionally don colorful clothes for a change of scenery. Often dancers flow in with chairs and tables for principals who sit just long enough to sign their initials before the next incident.

Then you see over time an "ensemble" in the larger sense of co-ordination and camaraderie. I'd heard Act One as mostly exposition of Hamilton's early years and of Revolution. Seeing the show, I understood that the main action of Act One is about bonding: "scrappy and hungry" Hamilton gains buddies in a tavern, a friend in Burr, the adoration of two Schuyler sisters, the patronage of George Washington, and a company of soldiers. The friends' reactions to each other, often reinforced by the ensemble's close interactions, make you feel a part of a team. Hamilton is a warm show, like Miranda's earlier In the Heights.

Thomas Jefferson reboots the show when he enters stage center in a purple suit at the top of the stairway at the top of the second act. Now it's all about Hamilton's confrontations with Jefferson, highlighted by two cabinet meetings played as rap battles emceed by George Washington. At the Fox, Warren Egypt Franklin's Jefferson appeared as a Goliath to his little David, diminutive Pierre Jean Gonzalez as Hamilton.

Contrast intensifies our focus on individual players when the ensemble clears out. For comic relief, King George gets to interact directly with "his" people in the audience. We don't need words to understand the emotion when Mrs. Eliza Hamilton, betrayed, burns her husband's letters. Dressed in black, Aaron Burr makes a brooding visual presence even when he isn't singing. We see how his resentment builds while he's shut out of the deal-making in "The Room Where it Happens."

Onstage, two meta-theatrical events make more sense seen than heard. In Act One, Angelica rewinds the scene in which Hamilton courts and marries her sister, replaying it with herself as the bride. The fatal gunshot is suspended in time for characters to re-enact bits of Hamilton's story, heightening the impact for us when the bullet hits him.

That's human-scale spectacle, worth the price of a seat in a live theatre.

from the Fox Atlanta Company's website:
HAMILTON is the story of America then, told by America now. With book, music, and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, direction by Thomas Kail, choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler, and musical supervision and orchestrations by Alex Lacamoire, HAMILTON is based on Ron Chernow’s acclaimed biography.

Atlanta presents the "Philip" cast, one of three official touring companies, with Pierre Jean Gonzalez (Hamilton), Stephanie Jae Park (Eliza), Jared Dixon (Burr), Ta'Rea Campbell (Angelica), Marcus Choi (George Washington), and Warren Egypt Franklin (Lafayette/TJ).

[While Lin-Manuel Miranda was still in grade school, I packed a rap song with history. See Rap About Magna Carta (09/2021).]

Cycling America, Virtually: Shakespeare Festival in Alabama

←← | ← || →

265 miles from Jackson, MS to Montgomery, AL
August 19 to September 2
The Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF) proved that plays can be spiritual and uplifting without being religious. From high school and college through several years of teaching, I made a yearly pilgrimage to Alabama for inspiration and reflection. That makes Montgomery, Alabama a must for my virtual bike tour of the US.

The play was not the thing at ASF, but the company. ASF had a repertory system, meaning that a company of actors learned five or six different plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, and other more contemporary writers. Working together all year, sometimes for years in a row, they developed a rapport that brought warmth to the performances that I missed when I saw the same plays in other venues. The audience also developed a rapport with the company. We loved to recognize the same actors in wholly different roles during a single weekend. We spoke with actors in post-curtain talkbacks and sometimes saw them in casual dress around the campus.

That campus is a vast green park that extends far beyond the theatre complex in the photograph above. There are gardens, sculptures, winding paths used by the community for running and riding, and a lake with the same breed of swans you can see at Shakespeare's birthplace. (When ASF asked the Queen for some of her royal swans, they found out that she had imported hers from Alabama.)

Alone or with company, you experience the Festival Effect. So much time away from mundane things, focused on meaningful matters of family, love, and justice through brilliant images and words, you feel a boost in your IQ.  You start to talk like an Oscar Wilde character. You find your world on stage. I remember the end of act one in The Glass Menagerie when everyone in my group, students and chaperones alike, turned to each other to say, "That's just like my family!" During intermission of a play by Shaw, Josh Cox bounded upstairs to the gift shop for the script because, he said, "I want to highlight every line!"

When I saw the plays in 1978 with my high school friend Matt Hutchison, we looked back over the weekend and realized how the plays had stimulated intense conversations about acting, writing, and beliefs. He announced that he had just made up his mind to be an actor; I had just decided to work the other side of drama, writing and directing. He did; I did (with students).

The man who in 1972 started the Festival was Martin Platt, then a college grad working in his old high school in Anniston AL. I met him on his last day with ASF in 1989. A photographer was posing him in front of the theatre complex for a farewell profile. I tried to convey what I've elaborated in this blogpost, my thanks.

I was a faithful pilgrim until ASF gave up the repertory system.  Writing this article, I've discovered that ASF in 2018 put the "Festival" back in ASF with a return to rep.  I'll have to check it out for next summer.  

My memories of specific ASF productions show up in these blogposts:

• We Need More Shaw in Our Lives (05/2009)
• Treasuring Playwright Athol Fugard (08/2012)
• Boy Gets Girl, Boy Doesn't Deserve Her: All's Well that Ends Well (07/2008)
• The Invention of Stoppard

I've checked back through my old pen-and-paper journals for what I saw at ASF and with whom -- name and initial only. Sorry to the people whose names and years I left out -- my 20-something self did not anticipate blogs.

• 1977 Othello with Ben E. and other high school friends.
• 1978 Oh, William (a musical revue), Clarence Darrow, and others with Matt H.
• 1982 12th Night, Uncle Vanya, Hamlet (I fell in love with this play and directed it three times over the next 40 years)
  
• 1983 All's Well..., Arms and the Man, Mass Appeal with Linda P., Emily P., and teacher Steve A. Emily went on to direct a production of Mass Appeal at school.
• 1984 Macbeth, She Stoops to Conquer, Love's Labours Lost, Oh Mr. Faulkner Do You Write? Linda P., Emily P., Leigh Ann E., Veronica A., Richard A., Bill H., Peter L., Kevin S.
• 1986 Betrayal, School for Scandal Linda P., Emily P., Jennifer, Ellen L., Kevin S., Kyle O.
  
• 1987 Othello, Hedda Gabler, Misalliance, Tempest (I borrowed the puppet idea from Tempest in a middle school production of Wrinkle in Time 30 years later
• 1989 Cyrano de Bergerac, Candida, Much Ado..., On the Verge, Road to Mecca Josh C. and Jeff A.
• 1992 Lear, Lend Me a Tenor, Richard II, Comedy of Errors Josh C., Jeff A., Melvin P., Alexis L., Lucy P., Tresa B., Jennifer A., Buck C. (ASF performed all the history plays in regilogical order through several consecutive seasons)
• 1993 Henry IV pt. 2, Heartbreak House Josh C., Alexis L., Jennifer A., Elise K., David M., Adam F., Dr. Charles W.
• 1994 Tempest, Dancing at Lughnasa, LIght Up the Sky, Othello, How the Other Half Loves
• 1995 The Circle, St. Joan, Sisters Rozenzweig, Much Ado... (St. Joan was so wonderful that I went back myself to see it a second time.)
• One of the 1990s Shiloh Rules (a very memorable play that made me laugh, cringe, and think!)
• 1997 Merchant of Venice, Ghosts, a play by Horton Foote (no title recorded), Lady Frederick
• 1998 The Importance of Being Earnest, Coming of Rain, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra
• 200-? Terra Nova, Rough Crossing (I stole the photograph idea from the end of TN act one for an original murder mystery that my 8th graders and I wrote 10 years later)
• 200-? Sockdology (a mostly funny backstage story of the fatal production of Our American Cousin that somehow managed to make everyone gasp and even cry when THE event happens at the end of Act One)
• 2004 Arcadia (A production so wonderful, I drove back the next week to see the final performance)

←← | ← || →Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.

"Gypsy" Stripped

Gypsy would seem to be your basic showbiz musical. The 1959 musical tells how Rose Louise Hovick goes onstage a nobody and comes back "Gypsy Rose Lee," world-famous stripper. But, like the outfits she peeled on stage, there are layers. Even while you appreciate well-crafted scenes, snappy songs, and brilliant lyrics, you feel dread.

I was recently reminded just how entertaining and emotional Gypsy is when I streamed it from London's Savoy Theatre which starred Imelda Staunton as the driven stage mother "Rose" back in 2015.

[Photo Collage: Gypsy 2015 Savoy Theatre. Imelda Staunton as "Rose," Lara Pulver as "Louise," Dan Burton as "Tulsa" ]

Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics and wanted to write the music, but Broadway diva Ethel Merman preferred the veteran composer Jule Styne. Still, Sondheim looks back on Gypsy with immense satisfaction. The chapter of his memoir about Gypsy concludes

Jule Styne supplied the atmosphere of both the milieu and of musical theater itself.... Jule's score was redolent not only of vaudeville and burlesque but of the old-fashioned, straightforward, character-driven musical play, the model that Hammerstein had pioneered, of which Gypsy was one of the last examples and probably the best. (Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, New York: Knopf, 2010. p. 57)

Playwright Arthur Laurents held off on adapting Lee's memoir to the stage until he found something dramatic to top the inevitable striptease number. He got what he wanted in the stripper's mother, as Sondheim explains:

Rose was that dramatist's dream, the self-deluded protagonist who comes to a tragic/triumphant end. When an audience knows more than the character does, every line of dialogue and lyric has an edge.... [The viewers] wait in suspended anticipation of the inevitable moment when the character will be forced to face the truth. They think: I get it, why doesn't he? If they care enough about him, every moment of the evening is freighted, and when he finally does get it, it's both devastating and satisfying (56).

Before they wrote, Laurents took Sondheim to see a class at the Actors Studio. Laurents wanted his friend to appreciate how "subtext" is a silent "counterpoint" to dialogue that "keeps the text alive." For Sondheim, this was a revelation. He cautions writers, however, "you have to have something worth not saying."

What they're not saying in Gypsy is that Rose is living through her children's lives. Bullying, flirting, and conning people to keep her cutesy act on tour years past its sell-by date, she keeps her daughters and a raft of orphan dancing boys in perpetual childhood without lives of their own (compare Into the Woods, Witch and Rapunzel). It's all about Rose.

For Laurents, the thrilling montage of ever-glitzier strip routines for "Gypsy Rose Lee" sets up the dramatic moment that tops it, when Louise realizes that she has become the adult who must now take care of her parent. Sondheim observes that this is something everyone will experience but not something we like to think about, and that may be why this perfect show wasn't as big a hit as some with more palatable themes (Sondheim in Craig Zadan's Sondheim and Co., New York: Macmillan, 1974, p. 59)

Sondheim gives us the origin story for the spine-tingling finale called "Rose's Turn." Director-choreographer Jerome Robbins had imagined a ballet in which Rose would be confronted by all the characters in her life. But he'd run out of time. When Robbins called a meeting to find a Plan B, only Sondheim showed. Sondheim writes, "It was like every shimmering nighttime rehearsal scene I'd ever loved in the movies," in an empty theatre with just a piano and one lightbulb.

I suggested to Jerry ...the songs we'd heard all evening, colliding in an extended surreal medley consisting of fragments of the score. He asked me to improvise what I meant....As I pounded out variations on the burlesque music, Jerry clambered onto the stage and started to move back and forth across it like a stripper, but a clumsy one: like Rose doing a strip. (77)

Ethel Merman, Broadway comedy star making her dramatic debut, was uneasy about the music, Sondheim recalls. "'It's sorta more an aria than a song,' she commented doubtfully, halfway between a question and a complaint."

Yet Merman nailed it, and "Rose's Turn" has been a show-stopper ever since. much-imitated in its collision of songs. Cabaret comes to mind, and Sondheim's own Follies. For Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda suspends time to replay key phrases from Alexander Hamilton's life before Burr's bullet finds him.

Directing a revival of Gypsy years later, playwright Laurents improved on the finale by having "Rose" bow over and over until Louise steps on stage in silent witness. The theatre goes quiet, and still Rose is bowing: our applause was a sound in the character's demented brain.

Sondheim makes no comment about his lyric for "All I Need is the Girl," so I'm stepping up to peel the layers off a favorite number of mine.

• Layer 1, Song: Sondheim and Styne have created a song-and-dance number in the vein that Fred Astaire mined so memorably in "Top Hat and Tails," "Steppin' Out with My Baby," and "Shine on Your Shoes." The music swings and the lyrics sparkle with rhymes both tricky and natural. The character sings

  Once my clothes were shabby,
  Tailors called me "Cabbie,"
  So I took a vow,
  Said,"This bum'll
  Be Beau Brummel."
  

  Now, with his "striped tie" and "hopes high," all he needs to complete his outfit "is the girl." In the last lines, the meaning of the title turns around:

  And if she'll say,
  "My darling, I'm yours," I'll throw away
  My striped tie and my best-pressed tweed.
  All I really need
  Is the girl!
  

• Layer 2, Character: "Tulsa," one of the grown-up "boys," rehearses this song for a nightclub act that he dreams of doing. Louise watches. In the world of the play, Tulsa presumably has learned the song from radio or sheet music; it's not the character singing his thoughts the way other songs in the score are. Still, the lyric fits him, a young man with ambitions to step out and have a life of his own.
• Layer 3, Context: The number is both literally and figuratively a breath of fresh air. Near the end of Act One, following scenes in shabby rooms and gaudy stage sets, this number is set under the night sky behind the little troupe's lodging. It's also one of the rare scenes free of Rose, who sucks up all the oxygen in any scene.
• Layer 4, Subtext: Louise, always self-effacing, always relegated to the background, is being drawn into the action. Tulsa tells her how he imagines putting a flower in his lapel, how the light hits, and, at a climax, how "she" appears upstage "dressed all in white." Tulsa takes Louise's hand and brings her into the dance. Elated, she's living the lyric; she thinks she's "the girl." But we can tell: Tulsa barely even knows she's there -- she's just a prop for his fantasy.

The next day at the train station, Louise, Rose, and their agent Herbie learn that Tulsa eloped with June and all the other "boys" have quit. Rose seems to have reached the end of the line. Herbie offers to marry Rose and live happily ever after with the remaining daughter Louise. Instead, she turns to Louise, the one she's always slighted, and sings "You'll be swell / You'll be great / Gonna have the whole world on a plate... Everything's coming up roses!" Sondheim wrote the number to be the kind of optimistic "trumpeting fanfare of a song" that had been Merman's specialty for decades, only with Louise and Herbie registering "the horror of the moment" as they recognize just how demented Rose is.

So, the layers are many, and watching them tear away gives this showbiz show its distinctive feel of impending doom. Let me conclude, then, with a couple of Sondheim's happiest bits of lyric fun. First, "If Momma Was Married," a duet for the two sisters mid-way through Act One, with deliciously interwoven rhymes, which include references to comedienne Fanny Brice and Alfred Lunt's family of actors:

BOTH: Momma, please take our advice!
LOUISE: We aren't the Lunts.
JUNE: I'm not Fanny Brice.
BOTH: Momma, we'll buy you the rice,
If only this once
You wouldn't think twice!

That Rose is notoriously cheap enough to need someone else to buy the rice for her wedding is a nice touch. Then, there's the song for three strippers who teach young Louise "You Gotta Get a Gimmick." Sondheim writes admiringly of Frank Loesser and Irving Berlin, how their jokes land even on multiple re-hearings. I'd say the same about this song, especially this rhyme: "If you gotta bump it, / Bump it with a trumpet."

[See my Sondheim Page for a curated list of my many, many posts relating to Sondheim, his collaborators, and his competitors.]