by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the American Masters special on Bob Hope KPBS showed the Great Performances New Year’s Eve concert by the New York Philharmonic,
conducted by a Britisher named Bramwell Tovey (aside from “Elizabeth Windsor,”
it’s hard to think of a more quintessentially British name than that!) and
dedicated specifically to Leonard Bernstein’s work for the musical theatre. Of
course, for most people think “Leonard Bernstein” and “musical theatre” and the
show that immediately comes to mind is West Side Story, by far his most successful Broadway musical (and the
source for a multi-Academy-Award-winning film). If you think harder maybe
you’ll come up with On the Town,
and if you’re even more familiar with Broadway trivia you might remember Peter
Pan (the 1950 version starring Jean Arthur
and Boris Karloff, who weren’t exactly two of the greatest singers of all time,
so Bernstein’s contribution was cut to five songs in the stage production and
then, on the original-cast album, even further to just a few burbles of
“incidental music” under what was otherwise a spoken-word album of a cut-down
version of Sir James M. Barrie’s source play), Wonderful Town (the 1953 Tony Award-winning adaptation of My
Sister Eileen, with Rosalind Russell
repeating her role of Ruth McKinney from the 1942 Columbia film) and his last
work for the Broadway stage, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a badly-reviewed 1976 show about the history of the
White House that contains one great ballad, “Take Good Care of This House,”
that the producers of this concert would have done well to include.
I couldn’t
help but mentally compare this show to the one aired in Paris nine days
earlier, Noël à Broadway, which
wasn’t exclusively a Bernstein tribute but contained quite a lot of his music,
at least partly because they began with the same selection. It was the overture
to the 1956 musical Candide,
which has had a star-crossed history in toto and whose overture has had far more enduring success
than the play. (Charles pointed out that that’s true of Rossini’s William
Tell as well.) From the opening bars of the
Candide overture, I figured we
were in for a great evening — Tovey played the piece with far more power, drive
and rhythmic snap than Mikko Franck had managed in Paris nine days before — but
as the concert wound on I felt Tovey and whoever else might have been involved
in programming it was emphasizing the brash, loud, percussive style of
Bernstein’s fast musical songs over the rich lyricism of his ballads. The four
vocal soloists — “straight” soprano Laura Osnes, comic singer Annaleigh
Ashford, tenor Aaron Tveit and baritone Christopher Jackson — all had the right
sort of voices for this music but weren’t always well served by the song
selections. Indeed, some of the songs, including “Come Up to My Place” from On
the Town for Tveit and Ashford and “Ohio”
from Wonderful Town for Ashford
and Osnes — were such relentlessly ugly, staccato patter songs they were more a
tribute to their lyricists, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, than their composer.
From On the Town Tovey played
“Come Up to My Place” (which wasted the sheer beauty of Tveit’s voice — but
then that was also true when Frank Sinatra did it with Betty Garrett in the
1949 film of On the Town, and
it’s a pity both Sinatra in the film and Tveit in last night’s concert were
deprived of the ability to do the show’s beautiful ballad, “Lonely Town”) and
“Lucky to Be Me” (sung by Christopher Jackson in the role of Gabey, played by
John Battles in the original stage production and Gene Kelly in the film),
which was a male song in the original musical but whose first recording was
made by Mary Martin for Decca (and she’s unsurpassed in it), followed by a
suite of “Three Dance Episodes” that Bernstein later assembled as a concert
instrumental and recorded himself in the 1940’s for RCA Victor. Wonderful
Town was represented by “Ohio,” “It’s Love”
and “The Wrong-Note Rag,” the last piece seemingly being an attempt by
Bernstein literally to write a
wrong-note rag, throwing in modern classical dissonances into something that
otherwise sounded like traditional ragtime. After the intermission — during
which Tovey told a story of being called in at the last minute to conduct a
concert of Bernstein’s music in London in 1986 when the original conductor,
Lukas Foss, called in sick; he was told that Bernstein himself was to attend
the dress rehearsal, and he came in with an entourage of about five people plus a gang of paparazzi photographing virtually his every move, a story that
would have been a more engaging anecdote if Tovey hadn’t told it twice — Tovey played a set of three dances from Fancy
Free, the 1944 Jerome Robbins ballet that
would eventually become the basis for the plot of On the Town. Then Ashford sung a lovely ballad called “Dream
with Me” from Bernstein’s 1950 Peter Pan score (and it wasn’t her fault that her opposite number from the Noël
à Broadway concert, Deborah Myers, had sung
an even more beautiful ballad from that show, “Build My House”) and we finally
got an impression of Bernstein the lyrical composer. Alas, the next number up was
the inevitably percussive “Mambo” from West Side Story, which was also represented by Christopher Jackson
singing “Cool,” Aaron Tveit singing “Maria” (and singing it well, far better than just about anyone since Larry Kert on
the original 1957 Broadway cast album) and he and Ashford duetting on
“Tonight.”
Then there came an odd piece, an instrumental orchestration by Sid
Ramin and Michael Tilson Thomas of the vocal trio from Bernstein’s 1952 one-act
opera Trouble in Tahiti — which
has nothing to do with Tahiti but tells about the bored lives of suburban
couple Sam and Dinah (Bernstein wrote his own libretto and used the names of
his actual parents), and which used three singers in the style of the Andrews
Sisters as a sort of Greek chorus commenting on and explaining the action. In
1982 Bernstein wrote another opera called A Quiet Place, which incorporated Trouble in Tahiti and also contained a sequel in which the main
characters were Sam and Dinah’s Gay son, their straight daughter and Junior,
the Bisexual man who has affairs with both of them. Bernstein worked with
various writers and did one version in which Trouble in Tahiti was the first act and the new material followed, and
another in which Tahiti was a
flashback in the middle of the piece. When he rehearsed the premiere it was so
unpopular with the cast and musicians that when one of the people involved
overheard Bernstein saying, “I don’t want to be remembered just as the man who
wrote West Side Story,’ he said,
“Better that than being remembered as the man who wrote A Quiet Place.” The program concluded with a novelty number from On
the Town, “I Can Cook, Too” (also recorded
by Mary Martin in the 1940’s), done to a turn by Osnes, and then Ashford and
Tveit closing the program with the beautiful final duet “Make Our Garden Grow”
from Candide (and hearing it in
this context made it even clearer than before that Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins ripped off the ending of the
final Hunger Games book, Mockingjay, from Voltaire’s Candide: the two protagonists reunited, definitively out of
public life, living together on a farm, baking bread and literally making their garden grow). The encore was the only
non-Bernstein music of the night, an audience sing-along on “Auld Lang Syne.”
Overall, the Bernstein tribute was a quite good concert, but I’d have preferred
more of Bernstein at his most lyrical and less of him at his bombastic, raucous
attempts to bring together Broadway, classical and jazz, which are fun but a
little bit of them goes a long way!
