Colette Collected and Recollected: Sweet and Sour

(reflection on COLETTE, a musical entertainment by John Dankworth, original 1980 cast album released by Stagedoor Records, and THE COLLECTED STORIES OF COLETTE. edited by Robert Phelps.)

Singer / Actress Cleo Laine and her husband composer / lyricist John Dankworth opened previews of COLETTE in London the very week that my summer in England ended in 1979, and listening to it brings back that time sweetly. The sweetness is increased because their loving marriage came to an end with Dankworth's death from long illness just a few weeks ago.

I also caught up on reading the works of the eponymous writer, expecting to enhance the experience. But I wish I'd taken the sweet "musical entertainment" without the sourness of the writer.

Mr. Dankworth must have enjoyed writing this musical "entertainment" for his wife. It opens with a waltz set at a reflective tempo, with rich jazzy chords arpeggiated behind Cleo's smokey observations about the changing colors of seasons, and how "You Can Be Sure of Spring." Other numbers are spritely marches, a little girl ditty for little girl Colette, and more waltzes. It's a little jarring when sounds that were hip in 1980 intrude, sounding extremely dated. Dankworth arranges the songs the way he arranged his wife's concerts, saving her high notes for an anthem of self-assertion midway through the score.

The show originated at the summer arts camp that the Dankworths ran together for decades, and there's a little summer camp quality. The lyrics rhyme playfully and frequently without ever saying a whole lot. Dankworth settled for repetition and stereotyped lines ("He was a sight to see!" and lots of lines with "really" and "quite" filling out the meter). The story -- there is no script mentioned in the credits -- is about a country girl who marries an urbane young bounder who uses her talents for his own self-promotion. Later, she creates a line of cosmetics, she acts on stage, and she divorces number one and marries two more.

It's a pleasant relic from a time when Cleo's voice was at its peak of clarity, suppleness, range, and stamina. The show was light, and a way for Cleo to wear lovely costumes, show off in bright songs and in thoughtful ballads. It was a lovingly crafted gift from Dankworth to Cleo.

The real Colette comes across in her stories as a fine craftsman -- if one can judge from translations -- but also as disdainful of the people she describes. "Cheri" focuses on a narcissistic young man through the eyes of the older woman who keeps him. We read about his skin, his hair, his muscles, his pouting, his wearing her pearls, his dancing around the bedroom while she watches. One blogger observes astutely that this is a reversal of the usual point of view, and that's interesting.

In a suite of stories set backstage at a 1920s music hall in Paris, Colette evidently draws on her own experience as a "mime" to show us monstrous behavior, cheapness, drabness, and insecurity back stage. One portrait of "The Quick Change Artist" shows sympathy for the young woman who dances herself into a state of quivering exhaustion, runs backstage to change costume in under a minute, and runs back on stage for another desperate dance in another style.

Some other stories are brief glimpses of criminals: stupid men who have lashed out stupidly at girls we never see except as corpses. We see how these men self-destruct.

I don't have time to think this through right now, but I have observed many times in this blog that certain artists -- Updike, Sondheim, Shakespeare, Buechner, and mystery writer Sue Grafton -- feel a love or at least a sympathy for their characters, and they work hard to get us to appreciate them. Colette's ability to observe is as acute as anyone's, yet I feel from her only disdain, though she sometimes condescends to feel pity for someone.

After reading stories from each of the sections in this collection, I've had to give up. I was getting depressed.

Greece's Tantrum: When Safety Net Becomes a Crib

(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

(reflections on recent street demonstrations in Greece and health care debate in the US.)

In Greece, we're seeing lots of demonstrations. We're also seeing a demonstration of what happens when the State becomes Daddy for its people. Naturally, those people become like adolescents -- dependent, feeling entitled, petulant, short-sighted -- but without the charms of youth or the adolescent's excuse of a disconnected frontal lobe.

Today, the AP reports up to 30,000 demonstrators including masked "youths" who hurt people and property, while some units of the police, also dependent on government largesse, stood by in silent approval.

Earlier this week on NPR, I heard one of those demonstrators against the Greek government's austerity plans ask, "What will the government ration next? The air we breathe?" She thought she was making a clever rhetorical point about the current government's callousness, but she unwittingly demonstrated how decades of Greek voters' clamoring for more protections, more programs, more subsidies have made those same voters frighteningly dependent on their Daddy.

That image of the "safety net" has long since lost its original meaning. The acrobat who falls into a safety net is supposed to jump right out and get back up on the trapeze. But now, when liberals speak of "safety net," they're thinking of a floor beyond which no one can drop by reason of old age, disability, illness, location, temporary unemployment, chronic unemployment, unemployability... regardless.

Greece demonstrates that the safety net can become a crib, infantilizing its people. Where's security when a large chunk of the population is dependent upon the state for salary, health care, transportation, retirement income, utilities, and an ever-growing list of services promised to attract votes from an ever-larger chunk of the population?

A Greek union official, quoted on NPR, called the government "hypocrites" for making "the people" pay for the mismanagement of the previous government. Again, he's revealing something scary: In the birthplace of democracy, where voters chose the previous government on the basis of its promises of benefits, who's to blame for the mismanagement?

I've heard further analysis about the government's failure to collect taxes, because some 80% of the population is involved in some form of "black market," bypassing taxes. The Greek economist scolded his own people: "Corruption causes poverty, not the other way around."

While Greece is tangled up in its erstwhile "safety net," the US Congress is considering a federal mandate to purchase health insurance in order to spread risk for companies.

It's hard for me to see this as quite the threat that Republicans' rhetoric makes it out to be. Nor can I see the government takeover of GM and purchase of stock in AIG as creeping European Social Democracy. My very conservative Republican state of Georgia has long mandated that everyone purchase auto insurance for exactly the same purpose as the proposed health insurance mandate; and Ronald Reagan oversaw the buying up of Savings and Loans and the bailout of Chrysler -- temporary measures to stabilize the markets.

But it's easy to see how temporary "safety net" provisions have become permanent parts of everyone's plans for their own futures, Republicans' as well as Democrats'. That's how, thread by thread, the safety net becomes a different kind of net, a snare.

Theology of Crosswords: A Shortz Sermon

Will Shortz has two strong associations with Sundays: He's "Puzzle Master" on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, and, as editor of crosswords from the New York Times, he compiles the books of Sunday crosswords that I've worked for years.

[Photo: Will Shortz, by Diane Christensen]

The Sunday connection inspires me to reflect on theological insights to be learned from crosswords:


A Shortz Sermon
When you begin a new puzzle, it's the Creation all over again: a paradise of potential.

Inspiration comes amid the perspiration: You suddenly know that "_ _ _ _ _ R I N" must be MANDARIN, and out roll the words "muMs," "basAl," "eleNa,""larDs," and, fittingly, "ahA!"

Like the cornerstone that the builders rejected (Luke 20.17), a three-letter word can be the key to solving one-fourth of a puzzle

Little sins have consequences that spread wide: so many words "across" went awry because I misspelled "Omar Kaayyam!"

Sins can be erased, once you recognize that all of the "across" words make sense after you change your one bad answer "down"

How wonderful to perceive a pattern! ("Whoa! Birds are concealed in miCROWave and T. E. LaWRENce!")

Often words mean more than they seem to mean: "English channel" can be the BBC.

Reincarnation makes sense. How else could I, vegetable - challenged, know instantly that a "leafy vegetable" is chard?

Trust that the creator has a plan, even though you can't see it (and you won't peek in the back!)

Z: When you fit the final letter in place, it's time for renewal: Next page!

[Will Shortz appears frequently in Adrienne Raphel's Thinking Inside the Box, her book about the phenomenon of crosswords. Read about it here. Will Shortz's introduction to a book of cartoon-related puzzled inspired somewhat more serious reflections, detailed in a blog entry in 2007,The Real Intelligent Design ]

Learning to Love Verdi: Transcending his Time

(reflections on recently seeing productions of AIDA and SIMON BOCCANEGRA via HD broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, and AIDA last night performed by the Atlanta Opera. Also have heard STIFFELIO and ATTILA on the Metropolitan Opera's live radio broadcast.)

When I think of art, fiction, theatre and opera of the early - to - mid nineteenth century, I think of overripe scenery, plots contrived to force characters into sacrificing themselves for romance, and militaristically grand music that chugs along with "oom-pa" accompaniment overlaid with strings. Women are portrayed as collateral damage in conflicts between martial men. Verdi worked within the conventions of his time, but I'm struck by how he transcends them.


In the hands of good musicians, Verdi's music is "transparent" and "modern." So said conductor Ricardo Muti, in an interview broadcast with ATTILA this afternoon. The "oom - pa" accompaniment doesn't have to be hokey.

Last night at the Atlanta Opera, I was thinking "modern" -- specifically, Bartok, "Music for Strings, Celesta, and Percussion" -- when the strings began their quiet statement of Aida's personal theme, immediately layering in occasionally dissonant counterpoint. The opening of the third act has a Phillip Glass-y ostinato that suggests to me, at least, the flowing of the Nile mentioned in the libretto. Other times, there were lovely stretches when accompaniment dropped down to just one instrument (a flute, a clarinet) or dropped out all together. These quiet orchestral moments were, for me, even more thrilling than the rousing martial music. There was more contrast of color and texture than I would expect from music of this time -- which may be Verdi, or it may give the lie to my conception of mid-19th century music.

While Verdi does choose stories that place women in the middles of conflicts of soldiers and men in authority, he chooses to emphasize the qualities of mercy. SIMON BOCCANEGRA and STIFFELIO both end with men of authority who choose forgiveness and mercy. Even Attila the Hun comes across as a man of action who has qualities of integrity and faithfulness; he is almost naive in his trust for the woman who seeks to kill him.

Last night's production of AIDA, unlike the Met's and an earlier Atlanta production that I've seen, left me thinking more for the regrets of jealous princess Amneres. The light lingered on her, after it faded on the tomb beneath her where her friend Aida and her fiance Radames have perished.

I've seen other Verdi operas on the Met HD series, and some at the Atlanta Opera. I've liked them all, but without being swept away. One reason is that I always feel like the story takes love for granted. Radames sings how "celestial" Aida is with great high notes, and that's fine, but, so far as we know, they hardly have had any contact with each other. My friend Mike leaned over to whisper to me after the duet last night, "All this trouble, just for hormones." Contrast that to the inchoate but affecting relationship of Peter Grimes to the school teacher.


I've heard often how Verdi had to persist to get his operas past government censorship, how he encouraged the unification of Italy during his lifetime, and how he declined offers of political power and authority.

I've also heard that his operas are unremittingly grim, except for a forgettable first comedy, and his final opera, FALSTAFF. I saw that in Atlanta, and remember little, except that I much preferred his version to Shakespeare's MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, and that it ended with a full - cast hymn to forgiveness and the pleasure of life that choked me up.

He's an artist whose work I should get to know more.

The Vulnerable Detective: Sweden's "Wallander" Series

photo of author Henning Mankell from Swedenabroad.com, site of the Swedish consulate

(reflections on two novels by Henning Mankell: THE MAN WHO SMILED (1994), trans. from Swedish by Laurie Thompson, and FIREWALL (2002), trans. by Ebba Segerberg. Vintage Crime / Black Lizard editions.)



In FIREWALL, the most recent of the novels by Henning Mankell that I've read, the title is ironic: In Mankell's world, which includes Sweden, Africa, and the USA, there is no firewall against the predators who use the internet, or international corporations to feed their appetites for domination.

Even being off the I.T. grid is no protection for detective Kurt Wallander. He can't open his own email, but his adversaries are watching him via internet, phone taps, and turncoats in his own police office.

Beneath all this, Wallander is insecure in himself. He is stalked in all these novels by age and its attendant infirmities, father's disapproval echoing even after death, loneliness, bleak prospects for retirement income, and the suspicion near - certainty that he is pursuing the wrong leads in his latest investigation.

There really is very little mystery in any of these novels. As with ONE STEP BEHIND (reviewed in June 2009), we have a pretty clear idea early on of what's up and who's doing it. Our sympathy is with Wallander as we root for him to figure out what we already know.

MUSIC MAN: Musical Comedy Tears Me to Pieces

(pictured, l-r: Alex Hawk, Ryan Selvaggio, Phil Feiner, Patrick McPherson, Colin Shirley, Max Vanderlip, Steven Touchton)
See video

(reflections on THE MUSIC MAN, with book, music and lyrics by Meredith Willson, based on a story by Willson and Franklin Lacey. Performed by students where I teach, at the Walker School, Marietta GA. Directed by my colleague Katie Arjona.)

Settling in my seat to see this high school production of a familiar show, I expected charm and chuckles; but I didn't expect to get choked up with emotion. How did that happen?

Full disclosure: At least some of my reaction must have come from having taught many of these kids when they were in Middle School. Like the proud parents depicted in the show itself, I spent the whole evening thinking, "That's my Steven! That's my Megan! That's my (fill in the blank)!" But I've been watching my alumni in other people's shows for decades, and haven't choked up at happy musical comedies before.

Megan Hilburn, Steven Touchton, and Kiwi Lanier

The moment that softened me up was when Steven Touchton, as "Professor" Harold Hill, examined a paper that Marian the Librarian (Megan Hilburn) handed to him. He realizes that she has seen through his false persona from the start, and that she has possessed the information to have him thrown out of town -- and yet, she didn't use it.

Why didn't she? When Marian asks the townspeople to remember what the town was like before he arrived, we know what she means: Snooty Mrs. Shin (played with abandon by Kiwi Lanier) and her gossips have broadened their minds; the squabbling school board men have become the picture of good-natured harmony as a barber shop quartet (Ryan Selvaggio, Chris Branham, Ryan Brush, and Kyle Kimrey).

But what strikes closer to home are a couple of cases where "Professor" Harold Hill has done what every parent and teacher and coach hopes to do. He rescues the rascally Tommy Djilas (Patrick McPherson) from arrest, and nourishes the boy's natural talents for handiwork and leadership. He also hands the Mayor's daughter to the boy along with some pocket change, so that he can escort her home by way of the candy shop. Later, when the boy is humiliated by the Mayor (played with imperious fastidiousness by Jordan Perry), Harold Hill predicts that the Mayor will one day stand first in line to shake Tommy's hand.

The other case is the boy Winthrop (George Litchfield), afflicted with a lisp, who is afraid to speak when we first see him. Encouraged by Hill's attention and by the dream of being a musician, Winthrop grows self-confident.

These stories all dovetail in the arc of the main plot: con artist Boy meets upstanding Girl, and Girl rejects Boy -- until she observes the effect that he has on her little brother Winthrop, on Tommy, and, not least of all, on Marian herself. "There were bells on the hill, but I never heard them ringing... 'til there was you," she sings, in the show's best - known love song.

When she hands Hill that paper, she effects a change in him. His affable confidant Marcellus (payed by big voiced Schuyler Richardson) urges him to escape with his ill-gotten money, but Hill won't. He admits, "For the first time in my life, I've got my foot caught in the door."

The creators of the play make little Winthrop the one to confront Hill with his lies. Stricken by the boy's disillusionment, Hill swears to tell Winthrop the truth from now on, and does: Yes, I've lied to you. But, yes, I do truly believe in you.

When a certain traveling anvil salesman (Phil Feiner) exposes the scam, and Hill stands in hand cuffs beside Constable Locke (played sternly by Max Vanderlip), it's Tommy Djilas who leads Winthrop and the band to his rescue. True to Hill's prediction, the Mayor grasps Tommy's hand at the show's very end.

So, seeing the story of a "Professor" who teaches the townspeople to disregard limits imposed on them by others' opinions, any parent, coach or teacher has to feel inspired. That's where the emotion came from.

Had the show been less than thoroughly imagined and produced, those deficits would have distracted from the story.

But the set itself inspired confidence. The backdrop that spanned the proscenium, bearing a meticulously rendered small town street in gentle pastel colors, would've sufficed for a set. But designer Bill Schreiner stretched the stage with a hundred platforms that extended nearly to the dimensions of a basketball court. The two - story home of "Marian the librarian" occupied the upstage left corner, with practical door. It split open at the corner to reveal her parlor, complete with actual piano. Portable lampposts with red, white and blue bunting helped to define spaces. The crowning piece of whimsical stagecraft was the somewhat distended gazebo built to house the straw-hatted, bow-tied band.

See video

That band, conducted by instructor Todd Motter in Sousa regalia, gave a full sound, with Willson's counter-melodies rising up clearly through the mix to support the familiar tunes. The big tunes were impressive enough, but the band also played more subtle accompaniment for the rhythmic patter that sets this score apart. Especially notable was the way that senior percussionist Bas de Vuyst kept the train scene chugging on its track, and also the off-beat chords and fills from the band that punctuate Willson's masterpiece of double-talking flim-flam, "Ya Got Trouble."

"Trouble" displayed the charm and musicality of leading man Steven Touchton. He missed not a beat as he built this proto-rap song gradually from its innocuous start to "mass 'steria" at the end.

As director and choreographer, Katie Arjona staged "Trouble" to blur the lines between acting and dancing. It was a wonder to see the people strolling by, going about their business, coalescing into a congregation in a giant gospel number. In "Marian the Librarian," Ms. Arjona used the books, the benches, the rolling carts, and even the date stamper to draw all the teens in town into an energetic dance with high kicks and even a hand stand -- always pausing instantly whenever the librarian turns around. Meanwhile, the band plays an insinuating little figure in the bass, and Touchton keeps his pitch and his cool as he sustains the first syllable of the name of the librarian "Marian."

Megan Hilburn played Marian with wry humor and a soaring soprano voice. Claire Golden was a warm and jovial presence as Marian's mother, and young George Litchfield made believable Winthrop's metamorphosis from timid to exuberant.

The chorus of singers and dancers were remarkable in many ways. First, they sang in tune and danced mostly in sync throughout. Then, every one of them was in character at every point of the show. Seated at the far end of the auditorium, I was one of the few who could see the faces of Patrick McPherson and Caroline Connell at their stage right table during the Library number, and they seemed wholly absorbed in each other, in the moment.

Finally, I have to remember what this school was like just ten years ago. Students from middle school on up expressed open scorn for musicals. Few girls and no boys sang music of any sort: music was just something they bought. I feared for awhile that everything I've ever loved in music and musical theatre was doomed. So if I choke up, it's partly because I've witnessed a rebirth of something I love.

Athletics, Aesthetics in Music: Rite and a Doo Wop Marathon

(reflections on two performances at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta during the past week: "Avenue X" with book and lyrics by John Jiler and Music by Ray Leslee, performed by the Alliance Theater, and "The Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky, performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Spano.)

Photo by Greg Mooney | Pasquale (Nick Spangler), Milton (J.D. Goldblatt) and Rosco (Lawrence Clayton) in the a cappella musical Avenue X, Jan. 13 – Feb. 7, 2010 on the Alliance Stage.

For two hours, eight actors perform a cappella music with hardly any dialogue to speak of. We watch and listen in a state of wonder and excitement in the moment. What voices! What mastery! What stamina! Athletics added to the aesthetics.

The plot is Romeo and Juliet, more or less, only it's a talent show and not marriage that joins the star-crossed buddies. One's of Italian descent, and his ilk see their Bronx neighborhood and their kind of music in decline; the other is black, his family having just moved up from Harlem. Each escapes the oppressive realities of his neighborhood into the comforting echoes of the sewer under the street, and they harmonize before they meet. It's clear from the way that "Milton" embroiders his soulful melismas over "Pasquale's" tenor lines that the two are destined to be friends.

But it's the musical numbers that sustain our interest. Besides doo - wop, the story gives us occasions to hear other kinds of a cappella singing. There's a pastiche of schmaltzy Italian pop songs of the early 1900s, accompanied by a band of vocals. There's Roman Catholic chanting, with the word "Gloria" tipping on the edge of the old doo - wop song of the same name. There's soul train singing.

Next door, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra played a program of luminous and dreamy works by Vaughan Williams (Fantasia on Tallis) and Golijov (film music from YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH). But after intermission, it was time for Stravinsky's biggest hit, which I've often heard and never seen live. We see the conductor's irregular beats with the right hand, sudden accents cued with the left. We see the string players growing red, lunging forward to turn pages, trembling their bows, beating the strings, plucking and, at odd moments, sawing their instruments with savageness. I couldn't see the woodwinds and brass, but I know that they were playing at the outer edges of their instruments' ranges. The drummers at the back were pounding furiously, as hard as they could.
Maidens cut down in the full bloom of ancient Russian springtime? Teenage boys longing to get out of the Bronx? Sure, sure, whatever. Heard live, the focused energy and virtuosity of the performers added pleasure to what the composers had conceived; and it strikes me that the composers probably knew what they would be forcing their performers to do.

Rosenkavalier Stops Time

(Reflection on DER ROSENKAVALIER by Richard Strauss and Hugo van Hofmannsthal, after seeing the HD LIVE performance from the Metropolitan Opera, starring Renee Fleming, Susan Graham, and Kristin Sigmundsson.)

All music and all drama are concerned with time. Composers mark time with musical events that develop through repetition, expansion, contraction. Playwrights often must find a way to compress a lifetime of story into a two- or three- act stretch of time. But time is both a theme of the libretto and a structural element in the music of DER ROSENKAVALIER in a way that never struck me before I saw the Met's HD Live production yesterday.

That's not entirely true, because I re-opened a recording made by Bernstein with Christa Ludwig back in 1971, and there in the liner notes is an essay, "Der Rosenkavalier: World without Time" by Robert Jacobson. He points to the anachronism of late-nineteenth-century waltzes in music for a comedy set a century earlier. Writing just as Modernism was beginning to look dated, he also suggests that, even to stage ROSENKAVALIER is anachronistic -- a view pretty laughable today.

The overall design of Act One plays with time. Young lover Octavian complains that morning has come, and he wants to extend the night by closing the drapes. The long twining lines of "his" duet with the Marschallin extend that mere moment of waking to some fifteen minutes. But day intrudes with the arrival of Baron Ochs and then a crowd of "riffraff," a scene of chaos meant to last the morning, tightly controlled by Strauss to last around ten minutes, a time marked by two attempts of "An Italian Singer" to finish the same verse of a love song about "love at a glance" over the chatter of gossips, orphans, hangers-on, and Ochs's bartering for his bride. The Marschallin listens to the song, is annoyed at Ochs's rudeness, all while watching the mirror as her hairdresser makes her up -- and she observes that he has made an old woman of her. Her patience at an end, she sends everyone out. Time stops again, while her sympathy for the young girl who'll have to endure marriage to Baron Ochs makes her think of time's passage in her own life:

I remember so well a young girl, straight out of a convent, who was ordered to marry. (Takes the mirror.) Where is she now? ... But how did it happen that I was the little Resi and suddenly I am the old woman! ... How does the Good Lord do it? I'm still the same, after all. And if he has to do it this way, why does He let me see it all happen with such a clear head? Why doesn't He hide it from me?

She concludes that God put us here to bear time, and how we do it makes all the difference. Just then, Octavian returns, and he tries repeatedly to embrace her, and she tells him with certainty that he cannot hold on to her, because he cannot hold on to time: "Sooner or later," she says to the boy, "[you] will leave me." He thinks she's rejecting him, and she explains:

When we [are young], time means nothing. But, then, suddenly, all we feel is time. It's around us -- it's inside us. Time shows in our faces ... and throbs in my temples. And between you and me time flows again.... Sometimes I can actually hear the time flowing....

Here, Strauss scores the chiming of a clock.

Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and stop every clock. Still -- one shouldn't be afraid of time. Even time is the work of God, the Creator of us all.

No wonder Octavian observes a moment later that "you sound like a Priest today." In Act Three, when the Marschallin again enters after an absence of nearly two hours from the action (and another hour more, if you count two intermissions), the young girl Sophie whom Octavian rescues from Baron Ochs comments that she feels like she's "in church" while the Marschallin preaches about time and the necessity of letting go.

Of course, the iconic moment of the opera, the one pictured in nine out of ten images at Google, is the presentation of the rose, when all time stops. Sophie sings a prayer quietly while her father's household fills with bustles and hustlers, anticipating the arrival of the young man who will bear the symbolic silver rose. All settles to tremulous strings and those crystalline chords, as Octavian and Sophie exchange formal dialogue, and the music expands the moment when their eyes meet for the first time.

The most familiar phrase of music is a song that Ochs sings in Act Two, and every other chance he gets, and it plays at Act Three's tavern, too. Its bawdy lyric is about time, ending, "With me, night will never end."

Act Three is all good Shakespearean / Falstaffian shenanigans. I enjoyed the busy-ness of the music accompanying the pantomime of setting up Act Three's Tavern to be a trap for Ochs (Susan Graham called it "a sting operation" in a backstage interview).

Once Ochs leaves the stage, however, time stops again, as the Marschallin helps Octavian to convince Sophie that he is for her, and, off to the side, she pronounces her benediction on the young lovers, "May they have happiness, or what men believe to be happiness. God bless them."

So this opera that begins with two actresses in bed, two characters in adultery, a lecherous baron crudely boasting of his exploits among the lower classes, venal double-dealing gossips and a father blinded by his social - climbing, turns out to be religious in the broadest sense of the word, a meditation on time, and letting go, and responsibility for each other. It's beautiful on many levels.

My Favorite Fiction: THE BOOK OF BEBB

(Reflection on The Book of Bebb, omnibus of four novels by Frederick Buechner, pictured here in their original paperback editions from the 1970s. I wrote this in 2006.)

Reading the last words of The Book of Bebb, I immediately turned back 530 pages to start over. I didn't want to leave the world of that book, its places, its characters, and its author's way of looking at the world I live in. That was around 1987. I've reread the book two or three times since. What a pleasure it's been to revisit it again to write about it here.

I've scanned some blogs and discovered that I'm not the only one who feels this way. Bloggers swear that Bebb is a novel unlike any other, and a favorite. Here's a sample:

The Bebb books are hard to categorize. I always find myself describing them as hilarious and then go on to recount a plot that inevitably sounds terribly sad. So let me just avoid the whole thing this time and say that these are wonderful books and you'll live a much happier and richer life if you read them! (Ian Eastman, "I.E." at Blogspot, May 16, 2004)

The Story of the Story of Bebb
Like any great book, it tells a good story. All four novels developed from a single news item that Buechner spotted about a con man who sold phony credentials to make "clergy" of anyone who wanted to declare tax exempt status. Buechner imagined this scoundrel, called him Leo Bebb, and created a rootless free-lance writer named Antonio Parr to track him down intending to write an exposé. As Buechner describes in his foreword to the 1984 edition, the characters ran away with the novel. He had intended Bebb to be a villain, but the reality of that character became much more complex. And Antonio, like Raymond Chandler's detective Marlowe, becomes the perfect vehicle to take us into Bebb's territory.

The more Buechner wrote, the more he wanted to see what would happen next, and each novel carries the seeds of the next. LION COUNTRY begins as Antonio's investigation of Bebb, and ends with him absorbed into the family by marriage to Bebb's daughter. OPEN HEART follows Bebb out west to a new ministry among a very wealthy Indian tribe, and enlarges Antonio's family by the adoption of two sons (nephews of his late sister Miriam). In LOVE FEAST, crisis hits Antonio's marriage while Bebb enjoys his greatest success as a cause célebre taking the lead of a student protest movement at Princeton. TREASURE HUNT opens with a recorded message from Bebb, who has died. But by now the cast of characters, familiar to us as Dorothy, Scarecrow, et. al., load up a car and head to find Bebb's roots in North Carolina, guided by an elderly believer in reincarnation who hopes to find Bebb newborn as an infant.

Everyone likes a good story, but fiction can offer so much more. A great novel presents distinctive characters and makes us care about them. The writing conjures places we've never been, or makes familiar places new to us. The author expresses insights that we've never heard expressed, but they strike us immediately as true. There's also a texture to the best writing -- layers that tell us what's going on under the surface of the action, tying to other things in the novel, and tying the action also to the world outside the novel (history, myths, science, art), so that we're not just watching the action, we're immersed in it -- and, even better, our daily lives get worked into that texture during the days that we're reading in the book. Finally, there's a tone to the best writing that expresses its author's joy in its creation, and respect, if not love, for even the least of the characters.

On all these counts, Frederick Buechner's Book of Bebb gets five stars.

Cast of Voices
As narrator, Antonio is a kind of hard-boiled detective in his own life. He has blind spots about himself, but he's an acute observer of fascinating, funny, endearing characters:

• Leo Bebb reconciles elements of Norman Vincent Peale, used car salesman, and Martin Luther. He describes everything that happens in his life as part of God's universal plan, and even when he's down, he's orating.
• Lucille, in sunglasses, sundress, with a Vodka Tropicana clutched at the end of a scrawny bare arm, makes her observations short and bitter, and endears herself to us. (A highlight: Her written testimony and a letter to Jesus.)
• Miriam, near death when we meet her early in the first book, is the twin sister who haunts Antonio throughout the four novels. Her two sons come in a complementary set, one smooth, pink, small, the other rough, dark, and a brute -- reminiscent of Jacob and Esau. Unable to move, with no future to plan, she says only penetrating things about the way things are now.
• Sharon, Bebb's daughter, develops from outspoken young woman to independent responsible adult, through marriage and motherhood. Easy, breezy way of speaking, foul-mouthed, slangy -- and honest.
• Golden - an alien, maybe, shaped like a round wafer, and a relief every time we see him.
• Brownie, frail, in his sweat-stained Hawaiian shirts, and gargling with aftershave, he's relentlessly sad in demeanor, and relentlessly sunny in statements.
• Gertrude Conover, the elderly "theosophist" spends her fortune to realize Bebb's craziest dream.
• Herman Redpath, irascible Indian patriarch, and his "joking cousin" John Turtle.
  

Just writing their names conjures scenes and feelings.

New Places, Places New

Bebb says, "In just a single life there's so many worlds that a man's days stretch out like the Milky Way" (207). In notes I made on the book flaps, I'm reminded that some characters take a European tour. A trip to Paris might be a highlight in some fiction. But it isn't really glamorous or exciting "places" that make a difference in a book, but the worlds that the author creates for us.

So, years later, I carry with me impressions of sordid and ugly places in which Buechner found vitality, if not a kind of beauty. There's ticky-tacky Armadillo, Florida and a certain broken-down Edwardian home there. There's a grimy Manhattan coffee shop next to the entrance down to a subway where the stairs reek of urine. Under that, we learn later, there is "elevator territory," a netherworld that Buechner makes plausible. We visit the arid Red Path Ranch in Texas, and it somehow becomes a retreat for refreshment during the course of the four novels. There's a memorable scene in the over-the-top banquet hall at "Revonoc," home of loopy and generous Gertrude Conover. Finally, Buechner takes us off-road near Spartanburg, SC, to "the UFOrium," one of those unattractive tourist attractions.

Places like these are everywhere I go in Cobb County, Georgia, so I'm often reminded not to presume to think I know a place by its appearance.

Insights
When I contacted blogger Ian Eastman for permission to quote him here, he emailed this response: "My favorite thing about reading is the moment when I come across that One Perfect Line, full of meaning and written so beautifully that I have to read it over again solely for the sheer enjoyment of language. Frederick Buechner has the gift of writing those kinds of lines over and over again throughout a whole book. That's what keeps me coming back for more!"

Buechner has written collections of insights, such as his Alphabet of Grace and Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC. But in this novel, the insights are worked into particular situations. For example, during a lull in the mounting crisis of his marriage, Antonio lets his wife drive while he rests in contented silence. He comments to the reader, "I have a feeling it's the in-between times, the times that narratives like this leave out and that the memory in general loses track of, which are the times when souls are saved or lost" (181). He dreams of his late sister Miriam and observes something about our dreams of the dead that has since proven to be true in my own experience: "They don't even stop when you speak to them, just look back at you..." (189). Here are a few isolated pearls, notated during my reading of an especially dramatic scene out of the four novels:

• I sometimes think that all the major dramas of my life have taken place in kitchens, and maybe that's because in kitchens there's always something else to fall back on if the going gets tough, like cooking or eating or doing the dishes. And maybe that's the real drama after all -- just keeping yourself alive day after day and cleaning up afterwards (363).
• More even than to keep the weather out, the purpose of a house is to keep emptiness out (376).
• Keeping too sharp an eye on your own life can precipitate you prematurely into that geriatric state where life itself becomes a kind of spectator sport in which there is nothing much left either to win or to lose that greatly matters (377).

But more often Buechner's insights are like punchlines of jokes, and you can't "get them" unless you've "been there." I've made an index of such insights, and provide this sampling (with page numbers from the 1984 edition):

• 228, 298, 332, 336, 353, 361 Variations and explorations of the line from the Hebrew, "we are all strangers and pilgrims on this earth" and on 306, there's Bebb's sermon on homesickness
• 507 - There's no path that doesn't lead to Heaven
• 499 We don't know the past any better than we know the future
• 268 The point "that all authors make," that events have shape, and its opposite, that Antonio's A-shaped free-form sculpture from scrap metal and wood develops meanings without pre-conceived intention (142)
• 8 Preparing to die is compared to preparing to give birth
• 147 Bebb's parable of sin as the unharvested peaches fallen in the orchards of Spartanburg that grow so sweet that they make you sick. He concludes, "Sin is life wasted."
• 143 "Antonio," Bebb said. "I believe everything. . . [and it's hard]."
• 353 "You can't stay mad when you start thinking things like that. Once you commence noticing the lines a man's got round his eyes and mouth and think about the hopeful way his folks gave a special name to him when he was first born into this world, you might as well give up."
• At the climax of the sharpest scene in the book (the only one that might qualify as a plot twist -- because Antonio certainly doesn't see it coming -- so I'll be circumspect about who, what, when, and where), when a character wants to know how to atone so that it will be as if he'd never hurt Antonio, Antonio wisely says, without thinking, that the offender can't do that -- but Antonio can.

Bebb delivers whole sermons that catch the attention, always reversing what you think you know. The most elaborate of these is based on a word the "preachers aren't even supposed to know," s***, and he improvises this sermon in response to a bitter atheist historian named Virgil Roebuck [the man of the "hopeful" name in the last quote above, Virgil -- after Dante's guide to the underworld, the wise unbeliever] who develops his own anti-sermon about the damage done to humanity by religion and religious people (351), calling religion "s***." Bebb turns it around on Roebuck, saying that he's touched on only a millionth of what's been bad in the world by sticking just to the "religious s***." It's that in us that makes us all brothers, and it's mere waste unless it's used to help seeds to grow -- and that's where you're going to find God working, right in the center of it.

Layers on Layers
Buechner recycles the same images or motifs, never quite the same way twice, until events from one part of the story become analogies for appreciating other parts. For example:

• We keep re-imagining one moment in Bebb's life for which he was jailed, and that moment grows from being a repulsive image to being pathetic, to becoming a sign of something good expressed in the wrong way.
• We visit "Lion Country" park once in the first novel, where tourists watch wild animals from the safety of motor vehicles, but that idea of being spectators who shut themselves away from real life keeps popping up in the four books. (Naturally, Bebb gets out of the car!)
• Space aliens are part of the texture of this book -- literally living in a layer under our world, attainable by elevator, helping us like angels, if we can believe Bebb. His wife Lucille says often, "Sometimes I think he's a space alien himself."
• There's a motif of significant infants.
• Many times, we read about some kind of descent to the land of the dead, in dreams, in literature, and a grand opera.
• There's the motif of the shape "A." Like Antonio's A-shaped artwork, it suggests meaning without necessarily being intended in one way. I wonder if it's also the image of Alpha, in a book full of new beginnings. Of course, "Alpha" always goes with "Omega," and we certainly see as we read that ends of things grow from their beginnings -- in ways that Buechner himself hadn't planned.

Besides these, Buechner works outside references into the texture of his story. For those like Antonio who've studied literature, there are developments related to the Apocrypha, King Lear, Alice in Wonderland, The Scarlet Letter, Proust, Cocteau, the gospel parable of the wedding banquet, Donne, The Song of Solomon. From pop culture, Antonio refers to an old detective series from radio dramas, comic strips, and a song I don't know, "Chantilly Lace," by the late-Fifties singer known as the Big Bopper.

Most remarkable, there are some extravagant stories-within-stories that become a sort of private mythology in the novels, changing the way we see characters, and maybe changing the way we see the world.

• Antonio imagines Jesus in the underworld as a grand opera.
• Antonio relays Lucille's account of Bebb's story of what happens when the Indian patriarch Herman Redpath goes to the Indian afterlife -- all in response to a bizarre event at the funeral, when the tribe's "joking cousin" (a designated trickster that all tribes have, if Buechner didn't just make it up -- don't quote me) urinates in his grandfather's open coffin.
• A long detour during which Antonio's high school seniors work their way through a scene in King Lear.
• The story of the death and resurrection of Brownie (Bebb's gentle, ridiculous, pathetic assistant who gargles with cologne -- appropriate, as his glosses on scripture turn Jesus's hard sayings into comforting bromides).
• Bebb's exposition of the theory of Silvers and Goldens, aliens who inhabit our world, and his own visit to Mr. Golden's layer beneath the subways.
• Gertrude Conover's elaborate memories of her ancient previous life when she was Pharaoh's daughter and had an affair with Bebb when he was a priest of the Pharaoh, who turns out to be none other than Calloway, her sweet old black yardman.
• As narrator, Antonio sometimes plays the game, "What if?" and carries his musings to chapter-long stories of what might have happened if he had chosen differently -- and even those potential stories exert influence on later events.

Feast, Heart, and Treasure
As Mr. Eastman pointed out, it's a joy and a lot of laughs to read these books, but a summary sounds like tragedy. By the end, we've read about adultery, guilt, infanticide, suicide, lives wasted in envy or regret, violent death, death by painful terminal illness, the debilitation of old age. Buechner himself developed in a book-length theological essay his theory of how Scripture can be read as Fairy Tale, Comedy, and Tragedy. It's natural that his own novel would mix comedy, tragedy, and the fairy tale elements of aliens and Indian spirits.

In its abundance of images, both elaborate and incidental, and its abundance of memorable and distinctive characters, this book is a feast. In Buechner's own loving portrayal of these characters, I grow attached to them. Even the sedentary and taciturn Lucille Bebb, always sipping her vodka tropicanas and never moving, becomes someone I miss when she suddenly disappears. When I've encountered people who've shared the experience of reading these books, just swapping names was a satisfying form of communication.
- 8 April 2006

Forty-eight Hours, a Life

(reflection on Wendell Berry's ANDY CATLETT: Early Travels, a novel. Published in paperback by Counterpoint, 2006.)

Is it familiarity that makes each succeeding book by Wendell Berry seem better than the one before? This one, ANDY CATLETT: Early Travels, is much shorter than the others, and much more highly compressed in time. Yet it's told from the perspective of a much older man who has outlived every other character in the story, so the longview is here, too. The rich texture of the story makes up for the plainness of the plot.

The plot is this simple: ten year old Andy Catlett packs some clothes, a book, and a toothbrush, and travels ten miles by bus to visit his two sets of grandparents in the tiny Kentucky town of Port William. Over the course of forty-eight hours, he does what a grandson always does: He hangs around the old folks, eats, and sleeps. That's it.

But it's late December 1943, the Great Depression lingering, the Good Guys making no apparent headway against the Axis. Andy's uncle won't survive the year at war, widowing Andy's beloved young aunt Hannah. War time rationing, which preferred large businesses, has already begun to make people dependent on processed foods. Taxation and debt are making formerly independent farmers dependent on loans.

Sometimes, Berry isolates a moment that takes his narrator backwards and forwards in time simultaneously, as when young Andy watches his grandmother cutting the crust for a pie in winter, and the narrator conflates that with a pie she made the following summer, tears streaming, when news of her son's death reached the farm (35).

There's explicit reference to PARADISE LOST, and it's clear that Port William, especially in this tenth year of Andy Catlett's perceptions of it, is a paradise on the verge. Andy lives in two worlds: Hargrave, a medium - sized town with ambitions to be a bigger part of the wider World, and Port William, content to be concerned only with itself and its own. One will "consume" the other (17) in the years after the war.

The sadness of this doesn't intrude, but endows homely sights with a numinous glow of gratitude: "The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given...(p. 120)."

Dogs are Poetry

(reflections on A BIG LITTLE LIFE by Dean Koontz, and on writings published by the Monks of New Skete, whose ministry involves training dogs. Photos are my own dogs: Luis, born in 2000, and Bo, born in 1998.)


























The main difference between poetry and prose is compression: A good poem compresses a great deal of content into a succinct form. In its brevity is its power to affect us.

A good dog shows us the elements of good life, simplified and all too brief. In this is part of the joy and pain of loving a dog, and, as the country song says, the two feelings are intertwined like the bramble and the rose.

Dad has joked that, if he's to be reincarnated, he wants to come back as a Smoot dog. Certainly the dogs I've adopted in my adulthood have been blessed by me, but not so much as I have been blessed by them.

That same sentiment is echoed in two books I've read recently. One is by Monks in "New Skete," a community in upstate New York (http://www.newsketemonks.com/) where the monks train German Shepherds. Their books of photos and theological reflections on dogs include these thoughts:

"Nothing so captures the uninhibited, spontaneous nature of a dog as when it rolls on its back and becomes one with whatever scent has struck its fancy.... Dogs have no trouble seeing the best parts of ourselves; what would it be like if we actually believed them?"

Dean Koontz, famous for supernatural thrillers, memorialized Trixie, a Golden adopted as daughter by Koontz and his wife Gerda, who have had no other children. His memoir of the dog begins with a unique moment in his life with Trixie, when he said aloud, "I know your secret. You're not a dog; you're an angel." He tells how she became uneasy and left his company in a hurry -- as if, he thought, Trixie had been found out.

Among the best anecdotes in the book are ones that show a dog's character. Trixie, always friendly, responded with uncharacteristic hostility to an acquaintance of Koontz who, shortly, revealed himself to be some kind of psychopath / stalker. There's also the story of how Trixie called a Rottweiler's bluff and silenced the bully by facing him down.

Koontz, like the monks, also observes that dogs can bring out the best in us: Their greatest gift is the tenderness they evoke in us, he writes.

These comments by others bring to mind repeating but fleeting moments with Bo and Luis:

• When I begin even the first syllable of the phrase, "Do you want to go for a walk?" they caper and jump and head for the exit; yet they're all seriousness and concentration when we walk, as if they were on patrol. I can't help but laugh when I see their rears sway in tandem, and their two noses often converge on the same shrub. Then Luis sprays, and Bo waits. Then he fusses to find the exact correct angle. He's an artist, I suppose, but Luis is already tugging to move on to the next shrub.
• Bo scarfs down his meals in a hurry, and rushes in to grab his toy, a black tire with a rope protruding. He tosses it up, catches it, and then prances towards me, chest out, tail high, chin up, tire encircling his snout. We tug of war, and growl, and sometimes I let him win. Then I throw it, he chases. We do this three or four times, until I throw, and he suddenly seems unsure what's supposed to happen next. Luis, who hangs in the background while his bigger companion plays rough, immediately moves in for affection.
• If I say, "Squirrel," Luis and Bo both jump up, wherever they are, and tear down to the patio, barking, giving the squirrels fair warning. Luis even does a victory lap around the sofa before heading out to the deck, and the squirrels usually wait until he arrives, just to tease him.
• Bo warms my spot on the bed, and moves only at the last second ... guarding that spot from Luis.
• When the two dogs are feeling affectionate, Bo always turns his rear to me, and looks forlornly over his back, hoping for a rub. Luis aims for my face: he wants to look in my eyes, and he licks my most ticklish spots, under the jawline and in the corner of my mouth, just every so often, whenever his tummy rub abates.

I could go on. I'm motivated by the same impulse that Koontz has, to preserve these personalities in their uniqueness. Inevitably, his book ends with a struggle to keep a dog alive, and a painful decision that most dog owners I know have had to make.

Those monks deal with that, too, in a moving and wise observation:

Dogs possess an indomitable spirit for life that teaches right up to their last day.
It is as if they stubbornly refuse to concede that life can be anything other than a gift to which they must respond. The wagging tail gives it away: Even an illness as serious as cancer has no effect on them when a favorite ball is involved…at least for a while.

Crime Fiction by James and Grafton: Night and Day

(Reflections on two detective novels: THE PRIVATE PATIENT by P. D. James (Vintage Paperback 2008), and U IS FOR UNDERTOW by Sue Grafton (Putnam, 2009))

Whodunnit is almost beside the point by the time we get to the ends of these novels, and good thing, too. We love an intriguing situation, we love atmospherics, we love characters that we can despise whole-heartedly, and we love to anticipate a confrontation. Best of all, investigation provides urgency for the exercise of unearthing the past. While both novels have these characteristics, they are night and day: James is grim, autumnal, dark. Grafton's tale of crime has its share of ugly behavior, deception and death, but its outlook is sunny.

In THE PRIVATE PATIENT, it’s victim number one whose past pulls us in. A notoriously ruthless investigative reporter, single and successful, Rhoda Gradwyn carries a deep scar across her face from an incident of parental brutality. She tells her high society plastic surgeon that she “no longer needs” her scar. We know from the novel’s first sentence that this decision will cost her her life, and we even know the date of her murder. As we learn more about her past, and as she begins to anticipate change, it’s a little as if we were to be told that Ebenezer Scrooge will die on Christmas morning on the cusp of a new life.

James has said often that her process of writing a novel begins with a place. Here, it’s an ancient manor house in the country, where druids’ stones mark the boundary, where the surgeon has set up shop for his more private and wealthy clients. For some characters, it’s a place to hide; for others, its past is an obsession; of course, there’s money and inheritance involved, too. James soaks the place in atmosphere, as several characters hear the shriek of some meadow creature being found by some night time predator, and others tell of the supposed witch who was executed on those druids’ stones. She builds suspense very well in a chapter where two women search a building for some sign of a young man who’s missing, as they, no less than we, gradually come to realize that they’re liable to find a corpse. They do, in a memorably horrific context.

Sue Grafton said in an interview recently that she begins at least some of her novels with a social problem in mind. "T" began with the notion of elder abuse. For "U," she started with the phenomenon of grownups who claim to have just remembered sexual abuse from childhood. A boy who once cried “wolf” gets detective Kinsey Millhone into an investigation of the past, and her ambivalence about him keeps this novel rich in possibilities and ambiguities.

Grafton is using elements recently used in others of her series. “S is for Silence” also alternated chapters in the present (ca. 1987) with chapters decades before. “T is for Trespass” gave us chapters from the bad guy’s perspective. And Grafton took us into the time of extreme social flux, 1967-1968, in “Q is for Quarry.”

Grafton once again mines that Summer of Love and strikes gold. We get the social milieu of suburban parents, imbibing martinis at the yacht club. We get their incredulity when their clean – cut college drop out son arrives with an appalling hippy girl friend and her two children, parking their ratty school bus in the back yard to freeload. It’s those two children who become most vivid to me. Their story is ancillary to the main narrative, but I found myself most interested in their progress. I was rooting for the grandparents to save those children from their clueless, self-indulgent parents – who call themselves “Creed” and “Destiny,” their daughter “Rain.” After a day with his grandmother, the boy “Shawn Dancer” has his eyes opened to what he’s been missing. It’s also very real of Grafton to show us how the boy also never lets go the lie that his mother loves him.

Aside from the story itself, I enjoyed once more how Grafton weaves a texture with parallel plotlines and shared themes. A guilty man feels the “undertow” of his past, and literal undertow took one of the past characters out to her death. A climactic scene takes place on a promontory formed by undertow. A continuing subplot in the series involves Kinsey’s own abandonment by family in her childhood, here made to parallel the virtual abandonment of the little girl “Rain.”

I devoured this one in a single weekend, half of it late on a Saturday night.

Night Music and South Pacific: Revelatory Revivals

(Reflections on the revivals of A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, directed by Trevor Nunn, currently playing at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York, and of SOUTH PACIFIC, directed by Bartlet Sher, playing at the Lincoln Center's Vivien Beaumont Theatre.)

Angela Lansbury, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Keaton Whittaker in A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC. Joan Marcus, photo

At fifteen, I turned down a chance to see A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC when it was on Broadway the first time. I've regretted it ever since. Around the same age, seeing SOUTH PACIFIC at a dinner theatre, I judged it harshly for alternating cute numbers with tediously earnest ones. This past weekend I saw the first Broadway revivals of both shows, and I'm ready to right some old wrongs.

A LITTLER NIGHT MUSIC
Stephen Sondheim's score for NIGHT MUSIC intricately weaves horizontal elements of melody and story with vertical elements of rhyme and character in ways that inspire awe, not to mention laughter and satisfaction. Most astonishing is the intersection of three distinct musical numbers, "Now," "Soon," and "Later" early in the show.

Sondheim's work fits in neatly to the work of his original collaborators Harold Prince and Hugh Wheeler. Together, they chose the waltz itself as a metaphor for the show, and everything happens in threes, not just the meters of the songs. Besides that suite of three numbers to introduce the Egerman family, there is the opening waltz that gives us a visual preview of the story, as couples flirt with third parties and change partners. Two characters sing of a third (Fredrika and Mme. Armfeldt comment on the "Glamorous LIfe" of Desiree, who duets with Fredrik about his wife; Carl-Magnus sings of his mistress Desiree and his wife Charlotte; Charlotte sings to Anne about Carl-Magnus; Fredrik and Carl-Magnus sing of Desiree). Soloists sing of three lovers ("Liaisons" and "The Miller's Son"). The summer night smiles three times, for three sets of characters - the young, the fools, and the old.

The standout song, "Send in the Clowns," is the exception, being the only song in NIGHT MUSIC for one character to address another directly: "Just when I'd stopped / Opening doors / Finally knowing the one that I wanted / Was yours...."

How director Trevor Nunn handled that number shows how he achieves fine effects through elegant simplicity. He and his designer David Farley presented all the action within a demi-lune of cream - colored panels, mostly covered with smokey mirrors. Panels could open outward to suggest walls, or they could slide to reveal countryside. Only once, a panel opened to reveal an ante room beyond the one that we could see, and it's for the climactic scene when Fredrik knocks at the door to Desiree's bedroom, intending to tell her that he will leave her. Before the final verse, he rises, turns his back on Desiree, and exits, closing that door behind him.

Nunn also re-imagined the opening sequence of numbers, downplaying the comic operetta elements to highlight the mood of Sondheim's haunting "Night Waltz." Henrik in dark shadow sustains the first pitch on cello at stage center, and the voices of the quintet float in from offstage before we see the singers. As other characters enter in shadow, the Quintet sings, "Remember." It merges into the aforementioned "Night Waltz," before the lights come up full for the first time on the words "Bring up the curtain, la - la - la," for a rousing finish.


In the compressed space of this setting, the vocal Quintet doubles as scenery. They are the acting company with suitcases and trunks, riding with Desiree on trains and arriving at stages in "The Glamorous Life." They are servants standing by in Madame Armfeldt's chateau. At the first word of the song "Remember," the baritone and the mezzo stand behind Fredrik and Desiree, identifying their reminiscences with Fredrik's and Desiree's. In fact, the quintet is dressed and groomed to resemble the lead characters whom they shadow at various times.


Musically, the cast possesses fine voices that seem to handle all the demands of their parts effortlessly, and listening to them is pure pleasure. A salon ensemble of eight covers all the layers of the score so well that I did not miss having a full orchestra.

Dramatically, the actors don't blend so well as their voices do. Leigh Ann Larkin as "Petra" literally sounded some jarring notes in "The Miller's Son," when she purposefully distorted ends of phrases in some kind of exaggerrated mockery of the higher classes. Ramona Mallory would seem to have been born to play "Anne," being the daughter of the original cast's "Anne" and "Henrik," but she, too, seemed to exaggerrate the extremes of her character without giving us the center.

She could take lessons from Aaron Lazar, who plays another character who bounces comically between extremes. But Count Carl - Magnus doesn't seem cartoonish, as Lazar always made clear the character's thoughts and feelings, even in the transition between, "I'll kill him! / Why should I bother? / The woman's mine!"

Angela Lansbury earns the star on her dressing room door in the role of Madame Armfeldt. She gets double the laughs on some Wildesque epigrams by suggesting punchlines before she even completes the sentences. Pause for laugh; complete the joke; pause for bigger laugh. But she seemed truly affectionate for her granddaughter "Fredrika," played believably by young Keaton Whittaker, and sincerely tender reminiscing about the duke "who was prematurely deaf, but a dear." In an interview, Lansbury comments that Mme. Armfeldt is shaken when she sees her daughter in love, an experience that the elder woman never has had. Over the course of the drama, Lansbury conveys increasing frailty, confusion, and awareness of her profound loneliness.

On the spectrum between those actors whose characters seem real, and those who seem to be auditioning for their parts, the leads Catherine Zeta - Jones as "Desiree" and Alexander Hanson as "Fredrik" are close to the real end, best when they're joking with each other. Best of all is the moment that provokes "Send in the Clowns," when, mid-smile, Desiree realizes that Fredrik is rejecting her.

At the very end of the show, a reprise of the Night Waltz, each character is with his or her true romantic partner -- and Nunn adds little Fredrika to Fredrik and Desiree to complete a family. It's fitting, it's warm, and isn't it rich!

ISLANDS OF SOUTH PACIFIC



Photo: Sara Krulwich, NY Times

In Bartlet Sher's production of Rodgers' and Hammerstein's SOUTH PACIFIC, songs I've known and even sung since adolescence suddenly connected to each other in that same vertical - and - horizontal way that I've admired in NIGHT MUSIC. If the waltz is a central metaphor for ALNM, the isolation of "islands" is the metaphor for all of SOUTH PACIFIC.

The set is a vast sandy beach rising to a dune upstage. Beyond that is the image of blue water, blue sky, and, sometimes visible through a mist, the island of Bali Hai. The characters Nelly and Emile sing of each other in parallel verses, isolated. The signature songs "Some Enchanted Evening" and "Bali Hai" are about crossing a distance, water or "a crowded room" to connect with a special someone, a special island. Even the children's ditty "Dites - Moi" echoes the same theme. Nelly sings of her "faith in romance" despite what everyone else says, and Cable sings "My Girl Back Home" about his alienation from his old life. Far from being cute, the song "Happy Talk" is painful to watch, as Bloody Mary is desperate for Sgt. Cable to commit himself to her trusting daughter Liat. He expresses his anger at the social forces that would make misery out of her life with him in America -- and anger at himself for not bucking those forces -- in the song "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught." It links musically and thematically to the next song, Emile's "This Nearly Was Mine." Both songs are in three-quarter time, each sung in turn by a man who has missed an opportunity to connect to "his special island." By the end of the two songs, they are two guys with nothing left to lose, and they are motivated to risk their lives on their mission to the island.

Like all the classic musicals, this one has its older couple (Nellie and Emile), its young couple (Liat and Cable), and its comic Luther Billis. All their stories converge on a distant island where the US armed forces can spy on Japanese movements to turn the failing war effort around.

Famously, there's also the theme of artificial barriers to connecting. That's not only the divide between "white" and "colored" on which the stories hinge, but also the class tension between the enlisted men and the officers. In the larger context, the second act's show - within - a - show, featuring the 20s pastiche number "Honey Bun," becomes not a mere comic relief, but an emotional moment when such barriers drop.

While I enjoyed the entire show, it was the very first scene that captivated me. The setting was simple, an inner and outer wall of slatted blinds between the viewer and the shore, and some furniture. For a stretch of fifteen minutes or more, the setting doesn't change, but the story moves forward and moves deep, too. The children's "Dites-Moi" leads to the entrance of Nellie and Emile. Actress Kelli O'Hara, whom I saw in this same theatre in THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, shows Nellie's enthusiasm, humility, sensuality, reticence all at the same time, different emotions shimmering like an opal in her face, her eyes, her hands, and her voice. As "Emile," Paulo Szot was more steady, and clearly focused on winning Nellie. "Cockeyed Optimist" blends into "Twin Soliloquies" which lead naturally to "Some Enchanted Evening." I'd have been happy enough if the show had ended right there.

Bonus photo: The marquee of the Walter Kerr Theatre as the "Blizzard of 2009" began. Photo by my friend Suzanne Swann.

RED ORCHESTRA Plays; No One Listens

(reflection on RED ORCHESTRA: The Story of The Berlin Underground and The Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, by Anne Nelson, Random House, 2009.)

This chronicle of heroic risks taken to undermine Hitler's regime by a group of artsy - lefty friends and acquaintances, tragic as it is, verges chapter by chapter on black comedy.

The Red Orchestra, a term for a very loose group of Communists who opposed Hitler, fought him with mimeographed sheets of information, plus radio broadcasts of useful information about troop preparations on the Russian border. Gullible Stalin swallows Hitler's assurances that reports of his gathering troop strength on the Russian border for attack (including intelligence from members of the Red Orchestra) were all "foolish rumors" (178). When Stalin's faithful Communists send him intelligence via radio, their equipment is faulty, and no information gets out.

Through it all, there are men and women who disappear, who die in torture, officially suicides in custody or victims of accidents. When the loose circle of friends is finally caught, it's through bungling of Soviet "professionals" (262).

Trying as early as 1933, Ambassador William Dodd couldn't alarm an American journalist who wanted an interview with Hitler because "the facts of perfect order and absence of crime in Germany" made some "well - to - do Americans" eager to try having "a sort of Hitler" in the states (108). Dodd abhorred the Nazis, but he saw favorable press for them in the US, including a favorable view of the Hitler Youth. The "America First" movement made the Roosevelt administration leery of strong anti - Nazi rhetoric or action (124). 22,000 American Nazis rallied at Madison Square Garden in February 1939.

Most foolish of all are the dictators Hitler and Stalin. A German officer writes to Hitler in horror at "atrocities and abuses" in Poland, receiving Hitler's response that "You can't wage war with salvation Army methods" (180). Hitler is shown to be stupid in most things, but right often enough, with an early "string of victories" (240) to appear prescient. He's anything but. Hitler interrupts his invasion of the Soviet Union, postponing it to winter -- obviously a stupid choice -- in order to punish Yogoslavia for its disrespect of Hitler's representatives (193).

I confess that, reading this book over several months, half a chapter here and there, I lost track of who was who. The bravery and futility of it all, along with stupidity at the highest levels -- these are what I take away from the book.

JAYBER CROW, part II: Deep Rivers

Illustration is a detail from the front cover of the book as displayed on Amazon.com

Even before the first page of JAYBER CROW, Berry pays homage to Mark Twain. In a "NOTICE" that parodies Twain's warning at the top of Huckleberry Finn, Berry exiles to a desert island anyone who attempts to "deconstruct or otherwise 'understand'" his novel. Cognizant of the risk, I proceed with my second reflection on it. (See Part I, "More Fun in Port William KY".)

That warning isn't the only nod to Twain, here. Like Huck, Jayber is witness to, and sometime participant in, slapstick pranks and incidents involving a plumber's plunger, a drunk’s confrontation with a truck, a ferry boat on ice, and a blind man's opportunistic dog. Jayber comments that knowledge of a town -- including that of "unauthorized" familial relationships -- comes to a barber the way stray cats come to a barn (94).

The river runs through Berry's novel, as the Mississippi runs through Twain's, becoming something more than a backdrop. Like Huck, Jayber lives his earliest years at a landing on the river. During his travels as a young man, he glimpses a whole house floating in the flooded river, reminiscent of Huck’s encounter with the "house of death.” Unlike Huck, who heads West in the end, Jayber follows the river back to his point of origin, to stay.

Jayber reflects often on the river itself. Is the "river" the water? the ditch in the earth etched by the water? the landscape that the river creates? Doesn’t a river embody time and memory (24)? Finally, Jayber decides that Port William is "a little port for the departure and arrival of souls" (301). The river’s beauty, unaffected by the trashiness of speedboating tourists who are "in an emergency to relax" (331), is that the river "keeps to its way" (310).

There's a theology implicit, here, as in all of Berry's works that I've read. Unlike those other works, there's some explicit theology, too, thanks to Jayber Crow's stint at a preachers’ college, ended when he loses his feeling of being called. "I assumed that since I didn't have the religion of Pigeonville College,” Crow tells us, “I didn't have any religion at all" (68). But a new theology grows on the foundation of the old one, beginning where the Bible does, in a chaos of deep waters and darkness. While the river floods, he feels the longing to return home “rising" in him like the water.

Working his part-time position as sexton to Port William’s little church, Jayber keeps to himself a theology that turns that of the preachers on its head: “They [have] a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works.” He doubts that any of the hearers of those sermons believed what they heard.

The people who heard those sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries. While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children.

The preachers themselves, he observes, would be invited to dinner after their world-condemning sermons, and they would eat good food with “unconsecrated relish” (161). (I should add that Jayber’s theology strikes me as perfectly Episcopalian.)

Jayber’s world has its saints and its devils, too. A central figure in this novel, a sort of Beatrice to Jayber’s Dante, is the girl Mattie Keith, glimpsed through the barber’s window as she walks home from school, often in the company of her popular classmate Troy Chatham. Not just because of jealousy, Troy comes to embody for Jayber everything wrong with the world we live in, everything that pulls Port William apart. Former high school basketball star, Troy “was all show, and he had the conviction, as such people do, that show is the same as substance. He didn’t think he was fooling other people; he had fooled himself” (177). Mattie’s father Athey Keith is set up as his son in law’s opposite: “There was never much room between what he said and what he thought,” and he operates his farm on the principle, “Wherever I look.. I want to see more than I need, and have more than I use.” Troy, enamored of expensive new machinery and agri- business says instead, “Never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle. Use it or borrow against it.” Troy exhausts his credit while he exhausts his father – in – law’s land (179) all in a futile effort to “make something of himself.”

Near the end of his story, Jayber Crow admires the Branch family: “The Branches seemed uninterested in getting somewhere and making something of themselves. What they liked was making something of nearly nothing.”

That strikes me as Jayber’s ideal, and Wendell Berry’s, too. The author has made a world out of nearly nothing, and he has not seen the need to go anywhere else to find stories worth telling.

Wendell Berry's JAYBER CROW: More Fun in Port William, KY

(reflections on the novel JAYBER CROW by Wendell Berry.)

Stories by Berry, and a novel of his that I've commented on here at this blog, have been beautiful, funny, thought-provoking, occasionally annoying when Berry turns his characters into mouth pieces for his political views. But JAYBER CROW is the first book that struck me as "fun."

[See about the other books at my Wendell Berry page.]

Small town barber Jayber Crow is a kind of priest. In the town of Port William, KY, invented by Wendell Berry to be core of his stories and novels, others are the creators and shakers and prodigals; bad boy Burley Coulter is a prophet, and Mat Feltner is a kind of judge. But Crow, handling the heads and locks of the male population for decades, noticing some "unauthorized" family relationships among boys and men of different families, is a kind of father confessor and, as part - time grave digger, he even administers some last rites.

Detail from the cover illustration to Jayber Crow

His story, contrived to make him both an orphan and a boy dedicated to the Church, takes him through orphanage and educational institutions, through flood and voyage, to Port William, where Burley Coulter is the first person he sees.

From then on, he's witness to and party to the horse play and bad behavior of the male half of the population of small town Port William, KY.

As observer and ex-religious, Jayber Crow is an enthusiastic convert to Burley Coulter's idea of "The Membership," a tight bond of personal responsibility for each other that characterizes the best people in Port William.

I made enough notes about themes in this book, and techniques in this book, to have two or three more commentaries.Read my follow-up to this article, Deep Rivers.

Meta-Savannah

(reflections on John Berendt's MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL.)

When you visit a city that you've seen in a movie, there's this effect that the sights are somehow more real for having been on the screen. The same holds true with cities you've seen in your mind's eye through reading. I read that idea in Walker Percy's novel THE MOVIEGOER, set in New Orleans, and my first visit to that city was enriched by the meta-New Orleans of Percy's telling that I carried around with me to each location. I say "enriched," but it also probably falsified the experience, too. Was I walking around like Dorothy in Frank Baum's original book, seeing Oz through emerald-colored lenses?

The same effect obtains in Savannah GA, now that I've seen it in some movie clips, and I've read about it in John Berendt's MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL.

Nothing in Berendt's work of creative non-fiction tops the author's evocation of Savannah as he first glimpsed it around the year 1980 (a year when I visited it, myself, as a college student). He's listening to the radio, driving the highway south from S.C., when...

Abruptly, the trees gave way to an open panorama of marsh grass the color of wheat. Straight ahead, a tall bridge rose steeply out of the plain. From the top of the bridge, I looked down on the Savannah River and, on the far side, a row of old brick buildings fronted by a narrow esplanade. Behind the buildings a mass of trees extended into the distance, punctuated by steeples, cornices, rooftops, and cupolas. As I descended from the bridge, I found myself plunging into a luxuriant green garden. (28)

Deftly, he introduces us to characters who introduce us to the city, and that city is itself the main character. "We have a saying," one character tells him.

If you go to Atlanta, the first question people ask you is, "What's your business?" In Macon they ask, "Where do you go to church?" In Augusta they ask your grandmother's maiden name. But in Savannah the first question people ask you is, "What would you like to drink?" (31)

We learn the history of the place, how it was once a place of importance to the world, site of the first steam ship to launch into the Atlantic back in 1819, site of America's first golf course in 1796, and a key location in the Civil War. But the boll weavil and industrialization stripped Savannah of its main source of wealth and its labor force. Hard to reach by train or plane, the town is "gloriously isolated" (29) but also insular.

While living in Savannah, author Berendt stumbled into a salacious criminal trial: Jim Williams, leading figure in restoring Savannah to tourism-worthy architectural glory, is on trial for killing the young hustler who sometimes lives with him. Berendt uses this story as his scaffolding to show behind - the - scenes rivalries, sniping, back-stabbing, corruption, and flamboyant behavior of Savannah's eccentrics.

In the end, I'm afraid that the goodwill generated in the first half of the book is all but depleted by the end, though Berendt tries to liven the proceedings with some scenes of voodoo in Bonaventure Cemetery, that eponymous garden.

Happily, I finished reading the book while I was actually in Savannah, enjoying its sights, imbibing its almost Mediterranean sense that real life is what happens after work, when you're with your friends at some table, drinking and dining. But that may have been my colored glasses.