September 9 - October 13
Kennedy Center is where I found my tribe. It was 2002, summer of the center's "Sondheim Celebration." Cycling around Atlanta this month, I've covered enough miles to take me to Washington, where I can virtually revisit this place and that time.
On the shuttle from the Metro to Kennedy Center, I overheard conversations among Sondheim fans from as far away as Australia who, like me, had donated $2000 to the Center in 2001 for the privilege of buying $500 seats to six Sondheim shows being staged at the center during the summer of 2002. I subscribed to The Sondheim Review and I checked out a couple of Sondheim web sites, but I still felt pretty isolated in my fandom. Sondheim himself called his work "caviar to the general," an acquired taste. So what a joy it was to be in a space where so many of us shared the same appreciation for his work.
We rose to our feet as one to roar our approval for Jonathan Tunick when he took the podium to conduct Company. The hall was filled with people who, like me, knew Tunick's orchestrations for 30 years of Sondheim shows, had probably read all the same interviews with him that I had read, appreciated the nuances of his work, and wanted him to know how much the music meant to us.
At Sweeney Todd, the plucky understudy who took Christine Baranski's role of "Mrs. Lovett" went up on a line during the song "A Little Priest." All of us shouted the cue; she said, "Thanks," and finished the song with applomb.
Seeing so much Sondheim back-to-back at one venue brought out some commonalities in his work.
- What was the same is how it was all so different in subject, look, sound, and tone.
- At least one number in every show challenged actors to perform some combination of multi-tasked staging, multi-layered character, rapid patter, and vocal athleticism that earned them huge heartfelt hands. I thought again and again how much Sondheim gives to the actor.
- Different as the shows are, one common theme emerged: we don't have a lot of time on earth to connect to others, so get to it. (Autumnal leaves in the otherwise summery setting for A Little Night Music tipped me off to this one. I'd thought of it as a romantic comedy. At Kennedy Center, I realized, it's about death!)
My Sondheim summer wouldn't have happened without Gloria Friedgen, a dynamic and innovative science teacher who had been my colleague at The Walker School in Marietta, GA. I'd taught her daughters Kristina and Katie in class, and had spent hundreds of hours with them in the after-school drama club doing Midsummer Night's Dream, Little Shop of Horrors, cabarets, and Into the Woods, Jr. which featured Gloria as the cow. For two weekends at different ends of the summer of 2002, Gloria hosted me at her home in Maryland, where I met her charming Italian mother and Coach Ralph Friedgen. While he worked with his team, Gloria and the girls took me to DC to see Sondheim shows.
The shows that we saw, though not the specific productions, are covered in other posts on this blog. Here are some samples: Company, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, and Passion. See my Sondheim page for a curated list of many, many articles about Sondheim, his shows, and his collaborators.
Since then, I've returned to the Washington area two more times for Sondheim shows. Read about those in my blog reflections Follies Haunting and Haunted, and Road Trip for Road Show.
More Kennedy Center connections: The center opened in 1970 with Leonard Bernstein's Mass, (11/2013) about which I have many very strong very mixed feelings. Then, for many years, my colleague Julia Chadwick and I took 8th graders to see the play Shear Madness on the rooftop theatre of the KC, a model for audience participation that I used in my own series of mystery dinner theatre plays (05/2014). Finally, Julia let me skip a night to go with student Buck C. to a concert hall nearby to see singer Cleo Laine (05/2009) whom I'd been trying to see for 20 years.
←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.
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