Thursday, May 10, 2018

It's Not Even Past #20 - The Crisis of What is Art - Part 4 - Leonard Bernstein: The Delights and Dangers of Collaboration - Rough 35%

What a miraculously charmed life your faithful podcaster seems to lately lead. Just in the past few weeks, West Side Story in Houston and Candide in Washington, and in between, four performances of Mahler symphonies in New York by two of Europe's greatest orchestras and a live Hamlet from the Royal Shakespeare Company - and only one dud performance among them all. To say nothing of trips to galleries he's never experienced before and the first ever experience of Rothko Chapel, and an upcoming conference of new music in Boston, doubtlessly with lots of highly skilled performers. While at Lincoln Center for the Mahler, he very briefly, for one sentence each, met Tony Kushner, Salman Rushdie, and Wallace Shawn. Your faithful podcaster also saw Bjork, but in the face of a star that big, his confidence completely left him and he found himself unable to approach the Icelander in the raggedy pink dress.

His wallet will be spending the summer convalescing in a hospital bed from this surfeit of worthy performances of great works of art; one after the other coming at him seemingly as commonly as street signs from a car. So many great nights in various theaters and halls that he begins to wonder if the brain begins to shut down in the face of all this enlightenment. How can anyone possibly keep their perceptions sharp when it's one performance of cosmic insight in a theater after another after another - in the face of all this genius, spectacularly rendered, the problem is no longer the performance, the problem is you, no human brain can properly take in this much quality without the context of mediocrity to remind you how extraordinary is what you're experiencing. Every one of these performances was a miracle, probably each of them is the result of more than a million of hours of practice logged between all of its various collaborators, and while you objectively know that what you're experiencing is aesthetically cosmic, you find yourself distracted and no longer able to appreciate so much quality properly. 

It's precisely because the human mind is built for for ordinary that make extraordinary experiences extraordinary. You not only find yourself distracted, you also find yourself noticing all the various weaknesses of these works standing in bold relief, works of a creativity which your brain could never come close to achieving in a thousand years. 

And yet, when you're watching West Side Story and especially Candide, what can you do when you're faced with works that are both on a level of genius that might define the theatrical achievement of an entire country, and yet are so clearly so flawed. Yes, even West Side Story. Everybody who knows Candide knows how flawed it is, and we'll get to that in a minute, but just think about West Side Story for a moment. 

The fact remains, West Side Story is the Great American Show. The Citizen Kane of American theater – the summit to which every piece of theater before was leading, and every piece since was a reaction. The one-off moment when America’s three greatest young theatrical talents put their titanic egos aside to make a musical together. The result was a sublime achievement on a level that in so many ways has never been equaled in the history of America – a seemless fusion of dance and song, a perfect melding of grand opera with popular idiom, and most importantly, a piece that speaks to the entirety of the American experience; both native and immigrant, on a level that no other piece of theater ever equaled, and perhaps never could. It gives the poorest and crassest of America’s residents a high dignity that humanizes them to people who’d cross the street to avoid these characters. And yet, it’s also totally ridiculous… with gang members speaking in a mixture of slang that probably dated already in 1957 and bad love poetry. 
Such is the unfortunate, confused, ridiculous plight of American theater, which, thanks to movies, the ultimate American artform, still hasn’t found sure footing 236 years after the founding of the country.

The score is amazing, but it's schizophrenic - two musicals in one. Leonard Bernstein was fully able to create the jazzy Gershwin-like atmosphere of the streets, and when the play demanded Verdi-like operatic love, Bernstein provided the required over-the-top passion in spades. The problem is that this over-the-top passion has no place in a show like West Side Story. It is a pre-modern sentiment within an entirely modern story. In an era of arranged and shotgun marriages, when marriages of convenience were the norm, love as it’s experienced on the pre-20th century stage was the norm. Most people experienced (or expected to experience) a few days of true love in their lifetimes. So the immediate declarations and the extravagant sentiments of those scenes were probably much truer to their experience than it is to ours. But West Side Story demanded something much less mawkish than it was provided.

Much has been made of the fact that Arthur Laurents's book (script) is not up to the standard of the rest of the show. The truth is, Laurents's book is great - except when it isn't. He has the full measure of these violence-crazed, oversexed street thugs who secretly harbor true intelligence, but when fancies turn to thoughts of love, he has no idea what to do. Tony has got to be one of the stupidest characters ever written by a playwright, and the script gives no indication that he was ever anything but a love-crazed wimp who fell for Maria because of some kind of supernatural sign. Maria is a much, much more well-developed character - always the more pragmatic-minded of the lovebirds. Laurents was the only member of the creative team who wasn't a certifiable genius. But what American playwright of the era could possibly have equalled the other three. Arthur Miller? Tenessee Williams? Neither would have been right for it - Miller would never have understood how to write about love, Tenessee Williams would never have understood how to write about street smarts. Maybe some of the golden-age Hollywood screenwriters could have done it. What about the Epstein Brothers who wrote Casablanca? There's a team who understood both love and the streets!

If West Side Story has coherence, we haven't found it yet. And like most great works, every performance has been stunningly inadequate to the task of capturing its full power. This is a show that is better than it can ever be performed. As Arthur Laurents said, the cast has to sing magnificently, act magnificently, dance magnificently, and be fifteen years old. 

The original cast album is still the best, but it feels like a rough draft. The performers are probably better than any since have been, but the details of Bernstein's writing are completely glossed over with bad cuts, shoddy playing from a too small orchestra, and tempos that are clearly faster than Bernstein and Sondheim intended. The movie versiongets lots of things more right than the original, with dancing that's even more involved than the original choreography, and but where it goes wrong it's a travesty. More about that in a few minutes. Bernstein's own recording of the complete score is both a miracle and a grotesque disaster. The sheer detail of the orchestral parts come through as never before, and the love music is so utterly beautiful that it's difficult not to be moved to tears by it. But Bernstein made a fatal decision - it would be sung by opera singers. Tony was sung by Jose Carerras with, believe it or not, a thick-as-oil Spanish accent, and Tatiana Troyanos sang Anita as though she's singing Brünhilde. Bernstein made two recordings of the Symphonic Dances - a suite of orchestral music from the score - the first was incredibly sloppy, the second was drained of vitality. Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Symphonic Dances much better than Lenny ever did. The 2009 revival at least doesn't rush the tempos and contains great dancing, but the orchestra's smaller than ever, and the singing is as bad as on Bernstein's recording. Rather than too operatic, the revival version sounds as though sung by the cast of Glee or Rent - with vibrato-less belting and sliding into notes galore. I have yet to hear much of the 1980 revival, but what I've heard has some enormous strengths. Maybe it succeeded where the others failed, but I doubt it. Two Bernstein proteges, Kenneth Schermerhorn and Michael Tilson Thomas, made their own hybrid half-opera/half-musical version of it that are thoroughly respectable, but what can they do to improve on a piece that rings in so iconically in so many ears that you can only hear how inadequate they are compared to what you hear in your head. And I guarantee I'm nowhere near alone in that regard. MTT's recording has surprisingly great singing actors, easily the best since the original cast, but it has an orchestra that sounds roughly half the size it should be, and the power of the singing is never equalled by the swells of orchestral passion Bernstein clearly intended. Kenneth Schermerhorn has a large enough orchestra to take on the entirety of the original score, but Tony and Anita are generic modern Broadway belters who have no idea why this musical is different from Andrew Lloyd Webber, and while Riff realizes that it should be different, he has no idea how and just sounds risible.  

Much, much more successful are the jazz takes on West Side Story. Bill CharlapDave Brubeck, Stan Kenton,Oscar PetersonShirley BasseyBuddy RichChick Corea. Save the original cast recording, every one of these covers is better than virtually any of the classical/Broadway versions we can hear (ok, not Chick Corea...). Jazz saw this score for what it was, a classical olive branch to jazz, and saw all the possibilities of building on Bernstein's achievement. 

There is, unfortunately, something about West Side Story's importance which makes performers either too timid or too ego-driven to do justice to the piece. West Side Story was considered a classic from the moment that unfortunate movie was released. West Side Story has become the first and probably the most important of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of the American Lyric Theater along with Gypsy and A Funny Thing Happend on the Way to the Forum (no doubt a disputable claim) - as important to the American musical theater as The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute are to the European (and with Anyone Can Whistle and Candide possibly being potential additions to the center like Mozart's Magic Flute and Abduction from the Seraglio or Cosi fan Tutte - or at least they would be if anybody could find a way to stage them which covers up their very serious flaws). But what those three musicals achieved was something that was more than just the achievement of a great individual. It was a triumph, a short-lived triumph, of collaboration.

When talented people go into a room together, it's inevitable that they'll find something about which to disagree strongly. When a collaboration truly ignites, there is no way to keep it on the rails for long, eventually, the ignition explodes. But for those few years when collaborators of genius get together, the results are even better, but it is impossible for a tornado of resentment not to build, and the resentment usually kills the collaboration. Think of Lennon and McCartney, think of Monty Python, think of Gilbert and Sullivan.

But something was in the air at this moment of New York. America was just beginning to stretch its legs to their full cultural reach. The 1950’s was (relatively speaking) the most economically successful, peaceful, hopeful time in America’s history. And this hopeful, peaceful kingdom of happiness required entertainment. But the entertainment got so good that it became art of its own - pushing every conceivable boundary in content and form to which mere entertainment is never supposed to push. The other arts were learning the lesson of movies, and brilliant individuals pooled their talents to make something still more brilliant than any of them could do alone. But these writer’s rooms were so boiling over with talent that all those brilliant individuals could not possibly work together for long. Right at the same time that Robbins, Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents, Jule Styne, and Larry Gelbart were collaborating on musicals; Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly, Gil & Bill Evans were teaming up to make Kind of Blue; Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Woody Allen collaborated to make the original TV sketch comedy - Your Show of Shows; Rod Serling, John Frankenheimer, Franklin Schaffner, and Arthur Hiller joined forces to create Playhouse 90, a television show with the ambition of competing with the very best of Broadway Theater; Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller, and Phil Spector teamed up at Atlantic Records with a who’s who of Postwar musicians to literally create the music of the age; a group of famous actors and singers began hanging out at Humphrey Bogart’s New York house and would eventually become known as ‘The Rat Pack’; a group of gifted students who met at the City College of New York formed the basis of the ‘New York Intellectuals’ and shaped the intellectual discourse of the world by forming journals like The Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent; the Futurians, a group of science fiction afficianados who corresponded since their youths, practically took the science-fiction world by storm and included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Doc Lowndes, Frederik Pohl, and Donald Wollheim. All of these artists went on to brilliant achievements of their own, but it’s arguable that none of them ever achieved such universal appeal alone as they did together, and it’s arguable that never had cultural fare of such intelligence had such universal appeal. But right around the corner lay the 1960’s, John Kennedy, the Civil Rights Marches, the Great Society, the end of the Production Code, Bob Dylan, Lady Chatterly’s obscenity trial, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Beatlemania, and the triumph of individual expression. The classical age of American culture was drawing to a rather glorious end, and in its place would come the Romantic era with its individual expression and cultural scenes and niches. Emphasis in American life on importance of community was replaced with emphasis on the rights of the individual. What was once mass entertainment became Art with a Capital A. The energy which popular entertainment built up by the 1950’s was released in the 1960’s with an explosion of creativity and individuality - even the Movies became a cult of the director’s personality - but the energy released by that decade has subsided considerably. Eventually all that individuality got subsumed by mass entertainment’ more corporate, more generic, and dumber than ever before. It’s possible that more interesting art is being made than perhaps ever before in human history, but who can find the great stuff when there is so much shit around it? And even among the stuff that’s great, how much of it is truly cosmic? How much of it would court lastingness and universality of appeal if it were ever seen and publicized on a large scale? How much of it would still have meaning in 100 years? The difference in quality between West Side Story and even a show as good as The Book of Mormon is the difference between The Marriage of Figaro and Zampa. What... you’ve never heard of Zampa? There’s a reason for that... (nice overture though...)

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