Postmodern Jukebox in Atlanta: Craft Transcends Genre

Thanks to my friend Suzanne Swann, I was introduced to Postmodern Jukebox last night in Atlanta's Woodruff Arts Center Symphony Hall. She got tickets for my birthday in 2019, but COVID intervened not once, but twice.

She picked out the right show for me. I've always loved the music of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s -- listening to recordings, playing piano, singing -- and I've been teaching middle schoolers long enough to have picked up on pop and alternative music from Madonna to Adele. To have rock, disco, and rap performed by a jazz combo fronted by virtuoso vocalists was so much fun!

For me, the greatest pleasure was that this treatment reveals how songwriting craft transcends decades and genres. Melody, rhyme, structure: these elements align across the board, though the arrangements and riffs for this show all came from an earlier time. That brought out the polish and artistry in songs by artists who often have downplayed those elements in order to be "authentic."

I especially enjoyed hearing "Material Girl" as a Flapper song, "I Will Survive" as a big swing number, and "All About that Bass" as a hot trio for big-voiced women. "Old Town Road" began with a country swing, but the singing was blues -- Suzanne thought of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

The set-up itself was from the Vaudeville era. Along with a variety of singers, we had a comic emcee, a novelty performer who played instruments while she sang (I recall trombone, flute, recorder, bagpipes, and, for a finale, three trumpets simultaneously), and a tap dancer.

The self-aware pastiche of styles put a postmodern distance between the performers and their material, making it virtuosic but also funny. A singer on the verge of singing the last note of a passionate song paused to pump herself up for the high note - for a laugh. But there were a few numbers where the mood changed, the volume came down, and the performers sang with an earnestness.

[PHOTO: The cast posed with the audience for a selfie at the very end; Suzanne and I popped in a selfie of our own.]

Shakespeare on School Stages

Shakespeare's work is a creative playground for directors and actors.

I wrote that about Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth (see Macbeth for the Fun of It 01/2022), but it's true at school, too: I write from experience teaching drama in high school and middle school for 40 years.

Shakespeare offers a few advantages to school drama teachers. You have no royalty payments, you can access free scripts online, and you get lots of flexibility to cast roles for everyone in your club or class. With freedom to edit and with centuries' precedents for updates and reinterpretations, you can play to the interests and strengths of your students, whether they're 11 or 17.

Updating the Material
While I cut Shakespeare's scenes short, I never changed any words except the most obscure ones. But my actors and I enjoyed figuring out ways to transplant the stories to other times and locales.

• Setting Macbeth in the near-future, our 8th grade club made the title character a cyborg. Why? First, because it's cool! Then, making him more metallic as the play progressed was a visual analog for the character's decreasing humanity. We found modern-day analogs for other characters, too. Lady Macbeth was playing tennis at the country club when we first saw her. For her, being queen was all about being a celebrity: that was the young actor's idea. We used the school's big-screen TV to make the witches into TV pundits, and we simulated security camera footage to show the trees of Birnam Forest marching up the hill towards the castle.
• When we did Taming of the Shrew in the late-80s, Kate dressed like Cyndi Lauper, while her younger sister was the preppie cheerleader. Their music teacher was a country-western guitarist; the Latin teacher was modeled on our school's Latin teacher. Petruchio and his crew resided on a yacht. He arrived at the wedding, late, dressed (underdressed) like Rambo. I should've known better than to trust the 8th grade boys who asked if Jimmy Buffett would be okay for the music at the party scene in the final act. As Petruchio and Kate happily exited to their long-delayed honeymoon, we heard "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw?" Well, it certainly did fit the situation.
  
• We did two of Shakespeare's most popular comedies as 1920s musicals. That gave a dozen 6th grade girls roles as tap-dancing chorines, and gave student musicians a place on stage in costume to be the jazz combo. I wrote 20s-style music for songs in Midsummer Night's Dream, and made Twelfth Night a jukebox musical of early Gershwin songs. Since I made Duke Orsino a Broadway producer, we called the show First Night. Members of "his" theatre company sang songs that expressed the feelings of the dramatic leads. For instance, when young Viola is feeling helpless and alone, her double the Ingenue sang "Someone to Watch Over Me."
• Sixth graders did Julius Caesar ca. 1989 in the school library, where we used the library's heavy TV on rollers to show videotape of General Caesar arriving by jet while TV reporter "Flavia Octavia" interviewed his fans at the airport. Then Caesar and his entourage entered in fatigues and sunglasses: the actors loved it. Updating Shakespeare multiplies opportunities for girls to play big roles as soldiers, senators, doctors, reporters, etc.

Even when my students and I didn't update Shakespeare, we did make our interpretations reflective of the young actors' own feelings.

• When I asked Thomas, a high school senior who had proven himself in many supporting roles, which part he wanted in Twelfth Night, I figured he'd go for one of the comic roles. Instead, he empathized with "Malvolio" for being conscientious, scrupulously honest, and under-appreciated. His belief in the character's basic goodness showed. We had great performances in the other roles, but the injustice done to Malvolio brought pain into the comedy.

• Some of those same actors presented Hamlet in rep with Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Bill, a senior who had played many roles on our stage, was eager to tackle the Prince. Bill told me that he saw the prince, not as a crazed or vengeful man, but a truth-teller and healer, a young man of faith seeking to redeem a sick and sinful situation. I edited and directed the show accordingly (and got it down to 90 minutes!).
• My very first Shakespeare production as director was The Tempest, performed on the tiny stage that our Episcopal middle school used for chapel services. We shaped the show for Episcopalian sensibilities. For a set, we hung images of nature that were mosaics in the manner of stained glass. Prospero was robed like a priest. The banquet in the middle of the play was staged as communion with a procession of spirits robed as acolytes who set the table as an altar with candles, bread, and goblets. When the guilty characters knelt to eat, Ariel commanded them to go, acknowledge their sins, and repent (cf. Psalm 24-25, "Let the table before them be a trap..."). While buddies John and Thomas clowned around in the comic subplot, student actor Peter brought out the dignity and anger of "Caliban."

[Images are my photo collages of middle-school and upper-school productions I directed at St. Andrew's Episcopal School from photos taken between 1983 and 1998. Actors include some people I've seen on Facebook: Emily Levin née Powell, Bill Hamilton, Leigh Ann Evans, Thomas Crockett, Brian Griffin, Caldwell Collins, Emily Vance. The Tempest pre-dated my practice of making photo collages. ]

[My students from St. Andrew's joined me for many summer seasons at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Read more (09/2021)]

Poem of the Week at First Verse: January - March

In January, when I started my blog First Verse with its banner promising a new poem each week, I thought that might take up an hour of each weekday morning. So it has, and more. Each poem raises its own problems that my mind works on even at night. Just this week, ideas for rhymes got me out of bed before 3AM a couple of days, and I'm writing and re-writing while I ride my bike or swim.

[Susan Rouse's discipline of painting a picture each week inspired me to start the blog, so I include one with each poem. This image is the latest posting.]

The blogging is part of the creation. Each poem has seemed settled before I've posted it; then, I've cringed at unclear connections, inconsistent rhythm, and missed opportunities for evocative words and detais. So I'm still tinkering with many of them.

Here's what I've written this year:

• Atlanta, Sunrise Saturday
• Swimming Lapse
• Ukraine, Second Week
• Microclimate
• Self Checkout
• Interview with Box Turtle
• The Kingdom of Heaven is like
• Fall Premiere
• Why Don't You Just Speak English?
• Mountaintop Experience

I hope readers of this blog, including you robots in Russia and Indonesia, will check out First Verse.

Pianist Jeremy Denk on Fresh Air

Jeremy Denk has given the perfect title to his memoir of learning piano between childhood and his mid-twenties: Every Good Boy Does Fine. Terri Grose interviewed him on WHHY's Fresh Air, and she played some tracks from his survey of 700 years of music. Both brought me new perspectives on stuff I've listened to and read about and done all my life.

Denk's recording of Bach's chromatic fantasy got him into the subject of learning scales, because the piece is all scales "with demonic little curlicues," he said. He took years to understand what repetitious playing of scales did for him; I never did learn. He says that every time you play the same thing, your body is teaching you how to do it better. In his description, the whole body is involved, not just the fingers.

This got him into an observation about composers' use of rests. The Bach piece has no rests; Denk used a word like "majestic" to describe how Bach straps his music to the beat for his explorations of the harmony. But Mozart is so different, using pauses to punctuate and shape his musical thoughts. Yes! But I never thought of it that way.

I laughed out loud hearing Denk's recording of Piano-rag Music by Stravinsky. Denk sees it as a joyous piece in which Stravinsky takes all the characteristics of ragtime that he loved and "putting them in a blender."

When he went to Oberlin, Denk loved Brahms and rejected the ugliness of atonal 20th century composers -- until he joined the university's new music ensemble. Within a month, he saw Brahms as old-fashioned and sought the "crunchiest" chords he could find. Before playing some Stockhausen, Terri asked if Denk could honestly say he liked the music. Denk told her that, sure, Stockhausen avoids any kind of "home" -- home key, melody, repetition of rhythm -- but instead gives us little episodes and sounds that we just listen to and appreciate -- the way we see the colors in Jackson Pollack. (I thought maybe of fireworks.) With that in mind, I actually enjoyed the piece -- though I wouldn't have liked it much longer.

For fun, he coupled that with its opposite, Philip Glass's Second Etude.

We also heard how his mom, with no musical training herself, nonetheless shouted one critique to him while he practiced: "It doesn't dance! Make it dance!"

I've visited Denk's website jeremydenk.com, and look forward to exploring his work, maybe his book, for the rest of my life. I see he also premiered John Adams' latest piano concerto.

Death on the Nile: Film and Novel

The latest film version of Death on the Nile, directed by Kenneth Branagh, was so atmospheric that I wanted to stay in its world, so I read Agatha Christie's novel the same weekend. Now, I admire even more how Branagh and his screenwriter Michael Green treat Dame Agatha's work with the seriousness she intended even as they make major changes.

The core of Christie's novel is intact in the film. Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey) introduces her adoring fiancé Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) to her close friend, the fabulously rich and beautiful Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot). Six months later, it's Simon and Linnet who are honeymooning in Egypt with friends and family, and Jacqueline who crashes the party. Linnet engages the sympathy of detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh). Besides being rattled by her stalker, she confesses that she fears that everyone in the party hates her.

Though Christie's whodunnits have been criticized for being formulaic and shallow, I've found that she brings psychological and theological depth to her work. Poirot reminds Linnet of the Old Testament parable of the rich man who steals the poor man's ewe. Unlike King David, Linnet refuses to see herself in the story. But Poirot takes her fury at Jacqueline to be a sign that, deep down, Linnet knows that justice is on the side of her ex-friend. Then, confronting Jacqueline, Poirot urges her to use the power she has in this situation, to forgive. If not, he warns, the evil that you're allowing to grow will take you over. To both women, who each claim that they have no choice but to act as they do, Poirot says, "you do have a choice."

Branagh and Greene lop off parts of Christie's plot to focus on those relationships. Gone from the film are subplots that involve a secret agent, an alcoholic, a kleptomaniac, a jewel smuggler, a brutish engineer with a grudge, and three different romances that Poirot helps along as matchmaker.

What Branagh and Greene add is Poirot's backstory in a battle episode during the Great War. An explosion puts him in the hospital. Visited there by his fiancée Katherine, he tells her that he failed to save a close friend and that he is afraid to show her his own disfigurement. She delivers an intense sermonette on what love means that resonates throughout the movie, especially when the character Rosalie Otterbourne (Letitia Wright) accuses Poirot of self-absorption, arrogance, and inhuman coldness. Annette Bening's character Euphemia mocks the famous passage on love from 1 Corinthians 13, evidently from bitter experience with an ex-husband: "Love is NOT patient and kind...."

Branagh and Greene also alter Christie's original characters, combining some, reimagining others. The most inspired of these changes is to turn the character Salome Otterbourne from a dotty white English writer with a disapproving daughter to a canny black Blues singer with a disapproving daughter. A sexy dance between Jacqueline and Simon at Salome's jazz club sets the baseline for everything else that happens.

The film startles us more than once with shots of breathtaking beauty from the banks of the Nile, on it, and under it.

After I read the novel, I still wanted more and viewed Branagh's earlier Christie adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. I've been a lifelong fan of the 1974 version, so I approached it with some skepticism; it won me over.

[See my blogpost of 10/2014 about Christ in Christie. I compare Orient Express, Finney's film version, Suchet's TV film version, and the novel. In this article, I apologize for underappreciating the richness of Christie's work. See also my page Crime fiction.]

"Carving the Language": Sondheim Talks Poetry, and Other Surprises

What's left to learn about composer Stephen Sondheim after you've read everything published about him since 1974? (Don't believe me? See my Sondheim page) I've run across some bits I hadn't heard before in articles printed since his death in November, a lot of them in an interview by D. T. Max in The New Yorker (February 14, 2022). Sondheim met with Max over a period of five years.

For me, the headline is Sondheim's expressing appreciation for works that have appeared in previous interviews only to be dismissed along the lines of, "I know it's good, but it just doesn't interest me." I'm thinking poetry, opera, Mozart.

The conversation takes a surprising turn when Sondheim gives credit to Larry Hart, whom he has often called out for shoddy workmanship. Sondheim tells Max, "If you look at songs prior to the nineteen-twenties, it’s all artificial. The point is that he started to infuse popular songs with the kind of daily talk instead of fancy talk." Max suggests a correspondence to poetry. Sondheim gets excited: "Yes! Oh, yes, absolutely right. William Carlos Williams!" But when Max says it's "painful" to read 19th-century verse because "they tried so hard," Sondheim comes to the defense of "fancy talk". He says, "Tennyson and Keats ... made artifacts that have nothing to do with contemporary speech. That was not what they were interested in. Poetry was about carving and decorating the language—and still saying something, but lots of rhymes, you know, all the artificial stuff."

Sondheim volunteers that opera is like that for him, too artificial. "[W]hen opera works for people it’s much bigger than real life, in the sense that you get real life the way you’re supposed to out of artificial art." He lauds the operas of Berg, and he calls Puccini "a master at psychological songwriting," adding, "I believe his characters."

Here are the other bits that I picked up:

• Max contrasts the tranquility of Sondheim's converted farm in Connecticut to the convivial to-do at Sondheim's Turtle Bay condo, where assistants and friends kept interrupting.
• Sondheim says his father "was a swell guy" but left him "in the lion's den." When Sondheim says he's told the stories of his grasping ego-centric mother enough to feel no pain in them anymore, he likes Max's suggestion that she became "material."
• About the art of composing, Sondheim brings up a couple of composers that he hasn't mentioned in a lot of other places: What it amounts to is, music exists in time, so how do you make it cohere? ...I remember, [teacher Milton Babbitt and I] analyzed Mozart’s Thirty-ninth to see how he held it together. Why is this one symphony? We’re talking about different movements, so it isn’t like he’s using the same tune, and yet there’s a coherence. And, of course, Wozzeck and Lulu are great examples of that presented on the stage. Each one is one piece.
• I especially enjoyed hearing that Sondheim feels the way I do about everyone else's favorite opera, Carmen, "just twenty of the best tunes you’ve ever heard in your life, but they’re twenty different tunes, you know? With a little fate theme that pops up every five minutes."
• On collaborations with playwright David Ives, Sondheim discusses what I've heard before about the Bunuel project -- I'm not a fan of the source material -- but also that he and Ives got seven songs into another project based on a notion Sondheim liked, that any interaction of two people is really a meeting of competing committees. Sondheim regrets that he didn't develop the idea before the Pixar movie Inside Out did it. He was grateful to the film for the insight that sadness has to be in the mix.
• Sondheim has never had much to say about popular music because most of it doesn't interest him harmonically. "The Beatles are exceptional because they were so original and startling," he says, and Radiohead.
• Admitting that he feels old-fashioned, as he has done elsewhere, he hesitates to repeat a joke that his buddy Bert Shevelove made about their common friend Leonard Bernstein for imitating rock music in Mass: "Rip Van With-It." The joke's pretty mild; what's new here is Sondheim's scruple about repeating it.
• What musicians usually call "modulation" from one key to another, Sondheim's tutor Milton Babbitt called "tonicization." Babbitt told him that, after several measures of a piece, “You’ve gotta tonicize something new.” Sondheim explained the technique: "So here you are in the tonic of A major, and now you’re going to the tonic of A-flat. It seems like an academic distinction, but it lays out the path more clearly if you think of it that way: that you’re temporarily making a tonic out of a completely foreign key." Max asked if surprise was the purpose. "What it’s about is making things surprising, but inevitable. That’s the great principle of all art that takes place in time. That can be true in painting, which does not take place in time, but, you know: 'Goodness gracious! What is that red spot in the middle of this blue painting?!'”

After I read that interview, I ran across another surprise at a classical music forum where an erudite string player traced Sondheim's lifelong relationship with the music of Ravel. The surprise for me had to do with Sondheim's accompaniment for the song "Liaisons" in A Little Night Music. For a grand Victorian woman recalling her flings with royalty, Sondheim wrote a colorful chord arpeggiated in different registers for each beat of a slow sarabande -- giving the effect of a ghostly procession of memories. Now I learn that Sondheim took that chord from the opening of Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, Ravel's tribute to the grand waltzes of the early 19th century.

In comments after the Ravel article, a troll sneered that Sondheim was an "amateur" who wrote ugly music. Remembering Peter Sagal's dictum that you don't change an idiot's mind by calling him an idiot, I thought through what this man could possibly mean. I myself have composed several hours' worth of music in my years, and I know there are only a few things that a composer must do. These are things Sondheim does so well, all discussed in Max's interview. Sondheim worked with tunes, harmony, variety, unity, structuring surprise so that it feels inevitable; he draws on a wide range of musical tradition. There are only two aspects of composition that didn't interest Sondheim: orchestration (because, why? The great Jonathan Tunick did that for him) and the human voice. If that, for the troll, makes Sondheim an amateur, well, I won't say what that makes the troll.

Quebec Summit with Bicycle

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Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and I all stayed at the Hotel Frontenac when we visited Quebec City years ago. I was there as a tourist; they were there with Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King to plan Allied strategy, their second summit.

Designed in the late 19th century to resemble both a fortress and a chateau, Hotel Frontenac tops a literal summit high above the St. Laurence River. My room on the eighth floor was a tight squeeze that formerly may have been a broom closet. Still, I felt like a prince just stepping into the lobby.

My exploration of Quebec City started from the terrace outside the hotel where the leaders posed for this picture. Churchill seems to be asking FDR where to get some snug spandex shorts for himself.

While I enjoyed the city's old-world charm and fantasized about someday returning to write a novel in some Bohemian garret there, my greatest excitement was to speak French -- I'm such a word geek!

So Quebec City is one of the places I've "lived or loved" where I pause for reflection in my virtual bike tour of the world.

275 miles from Bar Harbor ME to Quebec City, Quebec
February 24 - March 4 2022

I'm 8942 miles into my second virtual bike trip around the world.
Riding on trails around Atlanta, I've cycled 275 miles in 2022, average speed 15.5

I revisited Hotel Frontenac in my dreams, and posted some color pictures. See Montaigne's Mountain (06/2021).

See my page with photos of all the virtual stops of my second world tour, from New York's Stephen Sondheim Theatre in June 2020 to now.

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

The "Secret" of Ash Wednesday

Fr. Daron Vroon, associate rector of St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, highlighted the familiar reading for Ash Wednesday in an unfamiliar and wonderful way.

When Jesus tells his disciples in Mt. 6.1-6,16-21 not to show off their piety in public, he promises "the Father who sees in secret will reward you." Fr. Daron was struck by the "intimacy" of the image, as "secret" has to do first with being set apart, before we add the connotations of concealment.

While we usually read this passage through the lens of morality and reward, when we read it with the lens of love, the reward is not something after you die, but the immediate continuing relationship of the believer and God. Daron suggested that it's like the delight of a husband and wife in each other during a quiet moment; to broadcast such a moment to the world would be to cheapen it and destroy it.