by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I
screened a film I’d recorded earlier in the day from TCM as the last in a
series of films from the 1940’s about the world of jazz and swing: Orchestra
Wives, the second and last of the two films Glenn
Miller made with his orchestra for 20th Century-Fox in 1942 just
before he broke up his band to go into the Army Air Force and set up his
military orchestra (and have the advantage of being able to get any musician he
wanted by having the power to have them drafted!). Miller’s first film, Sun
Valley Serenade, was a charming little
tale of a Norwegian skater (Sonja Henie) and Miller’s band manager (John Payne)
getting together, after some of the usual movie complications, at the famous
Sun Valley ski resort (one of the songs is even an ode to the place’s charms!),
and the band seems pretty much grafted on to a standard
romantic-misunderstanding plot. Orchestra Wives is a better movie by far; not only is it about a band (Miller plays bandleader “Gene Morrison,” and while the use of a
character name with the same initials as his own was obviously so they could use the “GM” ornamental bandstands the real Miller
traveled with, Miller proves to be a surprisingly good character actor with an
appealing deadpan delivery of his lines; as Charles pointed out, we’ve seen
actors playing bandleaders who delivered
worse performances) but it’s surprisingly dark both visually and thematically.
The plot centers around
Midwestern small-town girl Connie Ward (Ann Rutherford), who’s living with her
father Dr. Ward (Grant Mitchell) and dating a soda jerk (an uncredited Harry
Morgan; later Morgan would play Miller’s real-life right-hand man, pianist
Chummy MacGregor, in the 1954 biopic The Glenn Miller Story with James Stewart as Miller) but has a crush on Gene Morrison’s band
in general and its star trumpet player, Bill Abbott (George Montgomery), in
particular. (And Morgan isn’t the only TV legend who appears here, unbilled;
Jackie Gleason, then more bear than blimp and with a full head of hair but
still recognizable, plays “Morrison’s” bass player.)
When Morrison’s
band schedules a tour through the Midwest Connie gets her boyfriend to take her
there — and when she learns they have another appearance in the area the next
night she takes the bus out and goes alone, only to find that she isn’t
admitted because she doesn’t have an “escort” (back when the word meant
literally that and wasn’t a euphemism for prostitution). Nonetheless, she waits
outside through the whole concert, trying to hear as much of the music as she
can, and afterwards Abbott, who’d noticed her the night before, is awestruck
that she did that. He proposes marriage to her on the spot and they get legally
hitched, whereupon she joins the tour along with the other band members’ wives
as well as singer Jaynie Stevens (Lynn Bari, who’d also appeared as the
villainess in Sun Valley Serenade and
whose vocals were dubbed by singer Pat Friday in both films). Jaynie briefly
dated Bill before he broke it off, but she’s one ex who doesn’t want to be
quite so “ex.” When the band takes a run-out from Des Moines to Iowa City for
one gig, after which they’re scheduled to return to Des Moines, Bill tells
Connie not to come out but to wait for his return — and Jaynie sets it up to
make it look like she and Bill have resumed their affair, tricking Bill into
coming to her room by saying she needs to borrow some money from him, so when
Connie shows up to surprise her husband she gets the entirely wrong idea.
Out
of revenge, she decides to spill all the secrets she’s learned as an “orchestra
wife” on the second band bus — the script by Karl Tunberg (who later got sole
screenwriting credit for the 1959 Ben-Hur
even though a lot of other, more illustrious scribes, including Christopher
Fry, S. N. Behrman and Gore Vidal, worked on it) and Darrell Ware, based on an
original story by James Prindle, leaves the odd impression that the band
traveled on two buses, one for the members and one for their wives. Most of the
secrets are about who’s sleeping with whom, or at least who they want to be sleeping with other than the ones they’re married to, and they’re
told with surprising frankness for a Code-era film. The revelations get the
band members so upset with each other that they all quit en masse — only a repentant Connie and St. John “Sinjin” Smith (Cesar Romero),
the band’s pianist, trick the members into getting back together, “Gene
Morrison” gets the job opening the new season at the Glen Island Casino (a real
band spot where the real Glenn Miller had had some of his most successful and
remunerative gigs, and a name which reflects a time when a “casino” could mean
a fancy restaurant as well as a gambling parlor) and of course the
reconstituted band is a hit. It helps that they have the Nicholas Brothers on
hand to do a specialty number to the song “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo” — an
obvious follow-up to the big hit from Sun Valley Serenade, “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (the writers evidently looked for the name of
another obscure city that had lots of vowels in it so it would be easily
singable), which also featured the Nicholas Brothers coming on and doing a hot
dance after Miller’s band played its recorded arrangement of the song. Orchestra
Wives is a fascinating genre-bender, a surprisingly dark movie for a swing-band showcase — some of
the compositions from director Archie Mayo (who was put on the film after the
originally assigned director, John Brahm, turned it down, but it’s possible
Brahm storyboarded it) and cinematographer Lucien Ballard are almost noir — and the bitchiness of the writing for the wives makes one think one’s
watching The Women: The Musical.
It’s
also an indication of where Glenn Miller’s head was at just before he ended his
civilian band career; the opening song, “People Like You and Me,” is a typical
World War II flag-waver imploring its listeners to do everything they can to
support the war effort, and given what happened later it’s hard not to read it as a reflection of Miller’s restiveness, his anxiety to be
out there rallying the troops for real instead of merely playing a song about
doing so. It’s also an indication that Miller was evolving his style — and
oddly, at a time when a lot of the swing bands (notably Tommy Dorsey and Artie
Shaw) were adding string sections and moving their music more towards the
middle of the road, Miller was making it swingier. It’s still frustrating that
Miller’s own trombone playing is heard just in bits — his friend George Simon
once asked him why he didn’t feature himself more as a soloist and Miller
replied, “Who am I trying to kid? I don’t play ballads as well as Tommy Dorsey
and I don’t play jazz as well as Jack Teagarden” — but the Miller music on Orchestra
Wives features less of the so-called “Miller
voicing” (clarinetist Willie Schwartz doubling the saxophones an octave higher
— it was actually invented by Duke Ellington and used by him well before Miller
was anything more than a free-lance trombonist in New York, but because
Ellington was Black, Miller was white and Ellington used the gimmick as just
one of many dazzling colors in his musical palette, Miller got credit with
inventing it) even though Schwartz was still in the band, and more of the big,
loud brass and so-called “slurpy saxophones” (another voicing pioneered by a
Black band, in this case Jimmie Lunceford’s) Billy May, a Miller trumpeter and
arranger at the time, was introducing in his arrangements. (May would later go
on to become a bandleader in his own right, though mostly just in the recording
studios of Capitol Records, and would ramp up the screeching brass and slurpy
saxes to headache-producing intensity.)
Miller had also hired cornetist Bobby
Hackett — the best jazz musician he ever had in his band, though he made
surprisingly little use of him (Hackett took the solo at the end of one of
Miller’s biggest hits, “A String of Pearls,” and played it behind the beat;
just about everyone who’s copied the solo in the Miller clone bands plays it on the beat, to less effect), and instead the big featured trumpeter here
is Johnny Best, who doubles when George Montgomery is “playing” on screen and
who’s a flamboyant soloist in the Harry James mold. Miller generally avoided featuring star soloists; he didn’t want a band member who’d stand out
from the ensemble blend he was trying to achieve (and he probably didn’t want
to have to pay the kind of money a star soloist would have asked for, either!).
Orchestra Wives is that rarity among band
movies — one in which the plot is both as important and as entertaining as the
music itself — and while one could wish for even more intensity, more
understanding from the writers of the culture shock Connie would feel after her
whirlwind marriage and an even more despicable level of bitchiness from the
wives, the movie is quite good as it stands. It could also have used a stronger
leading man than George Montgomery, whose annoying prissiness is on full display
— Tyrone Power would have been ideal, but no way was Darryl Zanuck going to put
his biggest star into a cheap exploitation musical designed to cash in on the
popularity of a big band! (And besides Power, like Miller himself, was soon to
quit the entertainment business “for the duration” and actually fight in World
War II instead of just playing a servicemember in the movies.)
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Headline Bands (Warner Bros., 1946)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Orchestra Wives TCM filled out the time slot with a quirky 1946 Warner Bros. short called Headline Bands, actually a compilation of scenes from previously issued band shorts from the late 1930’s — which became apparent immediately when the opening band, Woody Herman’s, launched into an O.K. but not especially impressive version of the song “Carolina in the Morning.” At a time when Herman was leading the greatest band of his career, the explosive, bop-influenced “First Herd,” anyone who saw this expecting to see and hear “Apple Honey,” “Caldonia,” “Wild Root” or one of Herman’s other current hits must have been surprised to see instead Herman and his band plodding through a 1930’s arrangement of a 1920’s song and with Herman himself (as clarinetist and singer, and he readily admitted that as a clarinet soloist he was competent but nowhere near the league of Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw) as the only soloist. Herman’s number is cut off for one featuring Larry Clinton (who looks more like an undertaker than a bandleader) and his singer, Carol Bruce, doing an O.K. song called “Stop and Reconsider” noteworthy mainly for the freeze-frame effect done briefly every time Bruce sings the word “stop.” (Freeze-frames, and indeed any devices that called attention to the “movie-ness” of what you were watching, were extremely rare in Hollywood’s classic era.) Next up is Jimmy Dorsey doing “Dusk in Upper Sandusky” — ironically, a song he wrote in collaboration with Larry Clinton! — featuring some of his wonderfully acrobatic sax playing (he was probably the fastest alto saxophonist in jazz until Charlie Parker), and after that we get (in Monty Python’s words) “something completely different”: semi-classical violinist [David] Rubinoff doing a piece called “Fiddling on the Fiddle,” first in slow, pseudo-classical style and then as a jazz number (Rubinoff was an excellent technician but as a jazz violinist he was no Joe Venuti). The last number is the most grotesque spectacle in the film: Vincent Lopez and His Orchestra covering Louis Armstrong’s hit “Old Man Mose” featuring then-vocalist Betty Hutton, and if you think she’s overwrought in her later Paramount features you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Hutton delivers one of those Mack-truck attacks on this poor defenseless song, spicing it up with bird calls and weird squeaks and bouncing up and down and around as if she’s auditioning for a girls’ football team instead of singing a song. Jack Warner probably regretted having let Hutton get away to Paramount, where she became a huge star in the 1940’s, but if this is what he had to go on it’s no wonder Warner didn’t sign her — just as, if you listen to the Beatles’ audition tape for Decca Records from January 1962, you’ll probably think, “Gee, if this is what I’d had to go on, I probably wouldn’t have signed them either!”
After Orchestra Wives TCM filled out the time slot with a quirky 1946 Warner Bros. short called Headline Bands, actually a compilation of scenes from previously issued band shorts from the late 1930’s — which became apparent immediately when the opening band, Woody Herman’s, launched into an O.K. but not especially impressive version of the song “Carolina in the Morning.” At a time when Herman was leading the greatest band of his career, the explosive, bop-influenced “First Herd,” anyone who saw this expecting to see and hear “Apple Honey,” “Caldonia,” “Wild Root” or one of Herman’s other current hits must have been surprised to see instead Herman and his band plodding through a 1930’s arrangement of a 1920’s song and with Herman himself (as clarinetist and singer, and he readily admitted that as a clarinet soloist he was competent but nowhere near the league of Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw) as the only soloist. Herman’s number is cut off for one featuring Larry Clinton (who looks more like an undertaker than a bandleader) and his singer, Carol Bruce, doing an O.K. song called “Stop and Reconsider” noteworthy mainly for the freeze-frame effect done briefly every time Bruce sings the word “stop.” (Freeze-frames, and indeed any devices that called attention to the “movie-ness” of what you were watching, were extremely rare in Hollywood’s classic era.) Next up is Jimmy Dorsey doing “Dusk in Upper Sandusky” — ironically, a song he wrote in collaboration with Larry Clinton! — featuring some of his wonderfully acrobatic sax playing (he was probably the fastest alto saxophonist in jazz until Charlie Parker), and after that we get (in Monty Python’s words) “something completely different”: semi-classical violinist [David] Rubinoff doing a piece called “Fiddling on the Fiddle,” first in slow, pseudo-classical style and then as a jazz number (Rubinoff was an excellent technician but as a jazz violinist he was no Joe Venuti). The last number is the most grotesque spectacle in the film: Vincent Lopez and His Orchestra covering Louis Armstrong’s hit “Old Man Mose” featuring then-vocalist Betty Hutton, and if you think she’s overwrought in her later Paramount features you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Hutton delivers one of those Mack-truck attacks on this poor defenseless song, spicing it up with bird calls and weird squeaks and bouncing up and down and around as if she’s auditioning for a girls’ football team instead of singing a song. Jack Warner probably regretted having let Hutton get away to Paramount, where she became a huge star in the 1940’s, but if this is what he had to go on it’s no wonder Warner didn’t sign her — just as, if you listen to the Beatles’ audition tape for Decca Records from January 1962, you’ll probably think, “Gee, if this is what I’d had to go on, I probably wouldn’t have signed them either!”
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Verdi: Rigoletto (Metropolitan Opera, February 16, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Met’s recent “Live in HD” telecast of Verdi’s Rigoletto showcased a new production by director Michael Mayer that moved the action of the opera from 16th century Mantua to Las Vegas c. 1960 — and after the horrible atrocities of the Met’s modern-dress Traviata and Parsifal this one was actually a relief: a modern-dress opera production that was internally consistent, made sense and actually found modern (or recent-past) equivalents to the character and class relationships of the original. In Mayer’s reading, the Duke of Mantua became Frank Sinatra — a highly charismatic character, a sex addict and sufficiently Mob-connected that even though he wasn’t a head of state he could still order, or even personally commit, a murder (he shoots Monterone right on stage with a small handgun!) without having to worry about legal consequences. Rigoletto became Don Rickles, a comedian whose stage act was vicious meanness (his tag line was “Hello, dummy!”) but was nice, kind and generous as could be off-stage. The various courtiers became the Rat Pack, with Borsa (Alexander Lewis) played as a combination of Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis, Jr.; Marullo (Jeff Mattsey) as Dean Martin; Countess Ceprano (Emalie Savoy), the only woman the Duke goes after in the story who eludes his grasp, as Marilyn Monroe; and her husband Count Ceprano (David Crawford) as Mafioso Sam Giancana, who reportedly shared his mistress Judith Campbell with both Sinatra and President John F. Kennedy. The between-acts interviews with the singers in these roles said they’d actually found it helpful when Mayer gave them real-life people on whom to model their characterizations, and as forced as some of the parallels got they did add depth and made the courtiers seem more like individual people and less like a generic opera chorus. Rigoletto (Zelijko Lucic) is still referred to as a hunchback but his only concession to “hunchicity” was to lean slightly forward as he walked, and the only reference in his costume to the usual image of a court jester was a vest that looked somewhat like a red-suit playing card. The opera purists would probably be outraged, but the spare costuming at least helped Lucic retain his dignity on stage; all too many baritones who play Rigoletto come scritto slouch around like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein. In addition to the visual updating of the opera, the subtitles on the broadcast were deliberately written in c. 1960 American English slang (and some of it actually seemed more recent than that; one of the lines in the Duke’s “Questa o quella” came out “Monogamy is monotony,” which predictably elicited a groan from Charles!), and in the last act Sparafucile dumps the bag containing Gilda’s body into the trunk of a blue Cadillac whose license plate reads “SPARFUC” — obviously a personalized license plate (an anachronism given that such things didn’t exist in the U.S. in 1960) for Sparafucile but also making the wicked pun, “Spare fuck,” a reference to the role played by Sparafucile’s sister Maddalena in the story.
For those who aren’t familiar with the basic plot of Rigoletto as Verdi and his librettist, Francisco Maria Piave, adapted it from Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’Amuse (“The King Amuses Himself”), here goes: 16th century Mantua is ruled by a licentious Duke (Piotr Beczala, a Polish tenor whose name I had always presumed was pronounced as it was spelled until Renée Fleming, introducing him, said something that sounded like “Bech-WAH-nuh”) whose principal avocation is getting himself into the pants (or whatever they wore back then) of any woman who’ll hold still long enough for him to get his rocks off. He introduces this side of himself in his opening aria, “Questa o quella” — meaning “This one or that one,” expressing the sentiment that women are completely interchangeable and he doesn’t care who he has sex with as long as it’s alive, human and female. He’s recruited equally morally despicable people as courtiers to help him recruit his victims, and he’s also hired a court jester named Rigoletto whose basic function seems to be to ridicule the husbands, boyfriends, parents, relatives or significant others of the Duke’s seducees. Rigoletto is a single father who is neurotically overprotective of his daughter Gilda (Diana Damrau), who since her mother died (giving birth to her? The libretto isn’t clear on that point but it’s entirely possible; in the 19th century women’s deaths in childbirth were all too common) has become Rigoletto’s only interest outside his job. He keeps her shut up in his little house, letting her out only to go to church and only in the company of her governess/nurse/chaperone Giovanna (Maria Zifchak), with the idea that by locking her in he can keep her from attracting the attention of the Duke or someone equally corrupt in his court. Alas, she’s already fallen for the Duke — she met him at church and has no idea who he is — and he’s taken enough with her to find out where she lives. (In this production there’s a neat little scene of the Duke slipping Giovanna some cash as a bribe to betray Gilda; I don’t remember Piave’s libretto being that obvious about it but it’s a neat gesture and ties in with the greed and lust that motivate the Duke and his entourage.)
Once the Duke finds out where Gilda lives he pays court to her, pretending to be a poor student named “Gualtier Maldé,” and after they sing their duet he leaves and she moons over him in her big aria, “Caro nome” (“Dearest Name”), now that she finally has a name (albeit a false one) to go with the face and bod she’s been fantasizing about. Meanwhile Rigoletto has been approached by Sparafucile (Stefan Kocán), a hit man who runs an inn on the outskirts of town and uses his sexually open sister Maddalena (Oksana Volkova) to lure his victims to the inn, where he kills them. Rigoletto tells Sparafucile he has no need for his services … yet, and after Sparafucile leaves Rigoletto sings a marvelously broken aria, “Pari siamo” (which basically means “We are the same” — Rigoletto reflects that Sparafucile kills people with a knife and Rigoletto himself destroys them with his wit). Monterone (Robert Pomakov) — who in this production is made an Arab sheik, a visiting high-roller pissed off at the Duke for seducing his daughter — pronounces a curse on the Duke and all the people in his court, but they laugh it off — all but Rigoletto, who’s sensitive and decent enough to be upset that he was cursed out by the grieving father of one of the Duke’s victims. (Indeed, Verdi was so taken with this plot element that his working title for Rigoletto was La Maledizione — “The Curse.”) The first act ends with the courtiers telling Rigoletto they’re going to kidnap Countess Ceprano (Emalie Savoy) and take her to the court so the Duke can amuse himself with her, only they’re really going to Rigoletto’s own house and want to trick Rigoletto himself into helping them kidnap Gilda, whom they think is Rigoletto’s mistress instead of his daughter. They blindfold Rigoletto and put plugs in his ears so he can neither see the woman he’s helping them abduct nor hear her voice (though a lot of modern productions, including this one, omit the earplugs and therefore leave us wondering how Rigoletto can be fooled when he would recognize Gilda’s voice the moment she cried for help).
At the start of act two, the Duke returns to Rigoletto’s house, expecting to meet Gilda for a hot afternoon, only he finds she’s gone and in the one decent thing he does in the whole opera, he sings “Parmi veder le lagrime,” noticing that she cried when they met and wondering if he could forsake all other women for her. Not that that lasts very long; he finds Gilda in his own court, where the kidnappers have brought her (concealed in a giant Egyptian sarcophagus, one of those transparently fake props Las Vegas hotels of the period constructed to establish some attempt at an atmosphere from antiquity), only Rigoletto finds her too, sends the courtiers away and in one of the high points of the score they sing the duet “Tutte le feste” in which Gilda explains how she met the Duke (and how he tricked her) and Rigoletto alternately comforts her and vows revenge. His idea of revenge is to hire Sparafucile to kill the Duke, and accordingly Sparafucile lures the Duke to the inn with Maddalena as his bait — while Rigoletto brings Gilda to the inn to eavesdrop on the Duke with Maddalena so he can convince her the Duke is a faithless, wanton seducer unworthy of her affections — and the scene culminates in the famous quartet, “Bella figlia dell’ amore,” in which the Duke woos Maddalena with his usual seduction lines while Rigoletto tries to tell Gilda what sort of man he really is and Gilda basically pouts in stunned disbelief. Only Maddalena decides the Duke is so hot she doesn’t want her brother to kill him; she suggests he kill Rigoletto instead but it’s not in Sparafucile’s moral code to kill a customer. Accordingly Sparafucile agrees to murder the first person who comes out of the inn, whether it’s the Duke or someone else — and Gilda, who’s in male drag as part of Rigoletto’s plan for them to flee after the murder goes down, overhears this and decides to sacrifice her own life to save the Duke’s. Rigoletto accepts delivery of the bag containing Gilda’s body, and he’s convinced his plan has succeeded — until he hears the chilling reprise of “La donna è mobile,” the score’s most famous aria, a marvelous bit of projection in which the Duke projects his own moral failings on the other gender (the opening line is usually translated as “Women are fickle, false altogether”). Hearing the Duke’s song makes him realize that the Duke has somehow survived the plot, and naturally curious as to just who’s in the body bag, Rigoletto opens it, sees his own daughter, and is horrified and overcome. She sings a marvelous final scene, “Lassù in cielo,” in which she looks forward to meeting her mother in heaven and praying for her father’s soul so that when he croaks he’ll be allowed to meet them there, and after Gilda finally expires Rigoletto looks skyward, recalls Monterone’s curse, and screams, “Ah, la maledizione!” Curtain.
Rigoletto is generally considered the beginning of Verdi’s middle or mature period, and it’s a far-reaching opera nothing like anything an Italian composer had ever written before. The Duke’s big arias are the score’s pop tunes, but the music for the other principals — especially Rigoletto himself — is nothing like the simple slow-fast cavatina-cabaletta formula previous Italian composers (including Verdi himself in his earlier works) had used. “Pari siamo” is a bit of jagged pieces of music, fitted together not to a musical formula but to express the torment gripping Rigoletto’s soul, his sense that by being the house comic at the Duke’s morally corrupt court he’s no better than a hired assassin. When Rigoletto discovers his daughter has been kidnapped, Verdi sets his rage not to a bouncy uptempo tune but to “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata,” a menacing, raging piece of music that expresses Rigoletto’s revulsion at the people he’s served and what he’s done for them, and also his anger that despite his incredible efforts to protect his daughter, she’s been swept up in his employer’s corrupt world anyway. (One thing this production blessedly didn’t do is give Rigoletto an incestuous itch for Gilda; it’s probably only a matter of time, though, before a modern director decides that the only thing that could possibly explain Rigoletto’s neurotic overprotectiveness of Gilda is if he had the hots for her himself.) What’s amazing about Michael Mayer’s production is that it works; the amoral atmosphere of Las Vegas c. 1960 is a close enough parallel to the setting Verdi and Piave had in mind (especially once they had to downgrade the tenor villain from a king to a duke at the insistence of the Italian censors, who behaved towards Verdi and the other composers of his time pretty much the way the staff of the Hays Office in Hollywood did in enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s) and the glittering neon of Act I is a powerful visual symbol for the real “city that never slept,” a place in which celebrities like Sinatra and his fellow Rat Packers could party to their heart’s content, indulge themselves in booze, women and drugs (though Sinatra was always anti-drug, to the point of staging an intervention with Sammy Davis, Jr. after Davis had got hooked on cocaine — a point blissfully ignored by Mayer, who has the Sinatra-esque Duke sniff coke in one scene; later he has the Duke swig from a bottle of amber fluid, a reference to Sinatra’s real drug of choice, Jack Daniels’ whiskey — the real Sinatra left instructions that he be buried with a bottle of it!) and be protected from any collateral damage they did, safe in the assurance from their Mafia buddies that whatever happened in Vegas, up to and including murder, really would stay in Vegas.
By chance I’d heard this performance of Rigoletto before I watched it, and in its audio-only incarnation, without Mayer’s exciting visuals, it was basically just another recording of Rigoletto — and I had not been particularly impressed by the principals except for Diana Damrau as Gilda (not surprisingly, the only cast member I’d heard of before). With the visuals, Damrau slipped a bit in my estimation — she still sang divinely but she’s well past her teenage years (Gilda is supposed to be a love-struck teenager) and she tried to bridge the gap between the character’s age and her own by acting like an annoying flibbertigibbet instead of, as John Ardoin described Maria Callas’s Gilda, “an innocent of whom circumstance makes a woman.” On the other hand, the rest of the principals seemed to gain when we could see as well as hear them; Zelijko Lucic portrayed a desperate dignity in the scenes with his daughter and a fearsome rage in the later stages, and though Piotr Beczala hardly had the charisma of the real Frank Sinatra (but then, who would?), he looks convincing as a lounge-lizard entertainer (there’s a neat touch in which a mike is thrust in his hand just before he starts “Questa o quella,” essentially portraying it as the sort of number the Duke sings in his Vegas act) and he’s got a strong voice well suited to the Duke’s music. He’s also hot-looking, though not so hot that we can readily believe he owes his life at the end to the actions of two women (ironic for such a misogynist character!) who both find him so irresistible that they won’t let him be killed, and one of them even gives her own life to save his — and I must say I found the Sparafucile, Stefan Kocán, to be the hottest guy in the cast (though maybe that was just how he was costumed: a purple suit and green tie in act one, a green leather jacket in act three). Damrau doesn’t quite achieve the remarkable feat Callas pulled off in “Lassù in cielo,” convincing us that she was half in this world and half in the next one, but she nonetheless phrases her part in the final duet quite sensitively and ravishingly (probably not a good word in this context!). She goes out with a quiet dignity and strength that ably caps a performance that triumphs vocally and overcomes her rather silly gestures and deportment on stage. And the production, it seemed to me, quite nicely reflected the growing darkness of the story, from the neon-lit party scenes in Act I to the aftermath of Act II (with the courtiers passed out in drunken stupors on a series of couches) and Act III, set in a strip club (Maddalena begins it by doing a pole dance) in which the tube lights are mostly blue except for flashes of white that animate across the stage to represent the storm that’s going on and mirrors the boiling human emotions of the story.
Michael Mayer’s “Vegas Rigoletto” seems to me to be an almost complete success, a shining example of how a standard-repertory opera can be updated without losing its essence — and one weird aspect of the opera scene today is how many productions there are that change the setting and major aspects of the story in pathetic attempts to make the piece more “relevant,” and how few of them pull it off. When Peter Sellars did his three stagings of the Mozart-da Ponte operas in the 1980’s, I loved The Marriage of Figaro because Sellars, like Mayer, found modern-day equivalents for the original characters and their class relationships, but hated the Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte because there Sellars didn’t seem to be bothering — he was doing them in modern drag just to be different. I also quite enjoyed the 1983 Frank Corsaro production of Bizet’s Carmen, which not only moved the opera’s setting to the 1930’s — the time of the Spanish Civil War — but incorporated the war into the plot: Carmen and her smuggler friends were running guns to the Loyalists, while José was in Franco’s army. (The more recent Met Carmen also updated the story to the era of the Civil War but did absolutely nothing creative with the revised setting — and the reviewers who praised it seemed oblivious to the existence of Corsaro’s production almost three decades earlier.) But most modern-dress productions have just seemed boring or silly, and the self-consciously “avant-garde” productions at the Met like the Willy Decker Traviata or the François Girard Parsifal have been downright offensive in their sheer perversity and disinclination to serve the original intent of the composer and librettist. I’m reserving judgment on the current Robert Lepage Ring at the Met until I see more of it — so far I’ve only seen the Walküre, which I thought worked even though some parts seemed risible (notably the appearance of the Valkyries on see-saws during the famous Ride at the start of Act III); at least Lepage was attempting with his up-and-down steel planks to reproduce the seismic activity that roils Iceland, part of the world that generated the Norse sagas Wagner adapted into his scenario for the Ring.
I’ve read enough on both sides of the debate over so-called Regietheater — productions in which, depending on your point of view, the stage director/designer either alters or updates the setting and story of an opera or a classic play to allow its message to come through more strongly to a modern audience, or arrogantly substitutes his (or, much more rarely, her) own vision for that of the creators of the original work — and generally I’d much rather watch either a tastefully done traditional production or a coherently stylized one like Wieland Wagner’s famous 1950’s restagings of his grandfather’s works at Bayreuth; but if all modern-dress opera productions were at the level of this Michael Mayer Rigoletto — coherent, sensible, aimed at translating the characters and their class and social relationships into modern equivalent instead of just moving them willy-nilly through the centuries to be “different” or to be outrageous — I’d like them a lot better!
The Met’s recent “Live in HD” telecast of Verdi’s Rigoletto showcased a new production by director Michael Mayer that moved the action of the opera from 16th century Mantua to Las Vegas c. 1960 — and after the horrible atrocities of the Met’s modern-dress Traviata and Parsifal this one was actually a relief: a modern-dress opera production that was internally consistent, made sense and actually found modern (or recent-past) equivalents to the character and class relationships of the original. In Mayer’s reading, the Duke of Mantua became Frank Sinatra — a highly charismatic character, a sex addict and sufficiently Mob-connected that even though he wasn’t a head of state he could still order, or even personally commit, a murder (he shoots Monterone right on stage with a small handgun!) without having to worry about legal consequences. Rigoletto became Don Rickles, a comedian whose stage act was vicious meanness (his tag line was “Hello, dummy!”) but was nice, kind and generous as could be off-stage. The various courtiers became the Rat Pack, with Borsa (Alexander Lewis) played as a combination of Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis, Jr.; Marullo (Jeff Mattsey) as Dean Martin; Countess Ceprano (Emalie Savoy), the only woman the Duke goes after in the story who eludes his grasp, as Marilyn Monroe; and her husband Count Ceprano (David Crawford) as Mafioso Sam Giancana, who reportedly shared his mistress Judith Campbell with both Sinatra and President John F. Kennedy. The between-acts interviews with the singers in these roles said they’d actually found it helpful when Mayer gave them real-life people on whom to model their characterizations, and as forced as some of the parallels got they did add depth and made the courtiers seem more like individual people and less like a generic opera chorus. Rigoletto (Zelijko Lucic) is still referred to as a hunchback but his only concession to “hunchicity” was to lean slightly forward as he walked, and the only reference in his costume to the usual image of a court jester was a vest that looked somewhat like a red-suit playing card. The opera purists would probably be outraged, but the spare costuming at least helped Lucic retain his dignity on stage; all too many baritones who play Rigoletto come scritto slouch around like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein. In addition to the visual updating of the opera, the subtitles on the broadcast were deliberately written in c. 1960 American English slang (and some of it actually seemed more recent than that; one of the lines in the Duke’s “Questa o quella” came out “Monogamy is monotony,” which predictably elicited a groan from Charles!), and in the last act Sparafucile dumps the bag containing Gilda’s body into the trunk of a blue Cadillac whose license plate reads “SPARFUC” — obviously a personalized license plate (an anachronism given that such things didn’t exist in the U.S. in 1960) for Sparafucile but also making the wicked pun, “Spare fuck,” a reference to the role played by Sparafucile’s sister Maddalena in the story.
For those who aren’t familiar with the basic plot of Rigoletto as Verdi and his librettist, Francisco Maria Piave, adapted it from Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’Amuse (“The King Amuses Himself”), here goes: 16th century Mantua is ruled by a licentious Duke (Piotr Beczala, a Polish tenor whose name I had always presumed was pronounced as it was spelled until Renée Fleming, introducing him, said something that sounded like “Bech-WAH-nuh”) whose principal avocation is getting himself into the pants (or whatever they wore back then) of any woman who’ll hold still long enough for him to get his rocks off. He introduces this side of himself in his opening aria, “Questa o quella” — meaning “This one or that one,” expressing the sentiment that women are completely interchangeable and he doesn’t care who he has sex with as long as it’s alive, human and female. He’s recruited equally morally despicable people as courtiers to help him recruit his victims, and he’s also hired a court jester named Rigoletto whose basic function seems to be to ridicule the husbands, boyfriends, parents, relatives or significant others of the Duke’s seducees. Rigoletto is a single father who is neurotically overprotective of his daughter Gilda (Diana Damrau), who since her mother died (giving birth to her? The libretto isn’t clear on that point but it’s entirely possible; in the 19th century women’s deaths in childbirth were all too common) has become Rigoletto’s only interest outside his job. He keeps her shut up in his little house, letting her out only to go to church and only in the company of her governess/nurse/chaperone Giovanna (Maria Zifchak), with the idea that by locking her in he can keep her from attracting the attention of the Duke or someone equally corrupt in his court. Alas, she’s already fallen for the Duke — she met him at church and has no idea who he is — and he’s taken enough with her to find out where she lives. (In this production there’s a neat little scene of the Duke slipping Giovanna some cash as a bribe to betray Gilda; I don’t remember Piave’s libretto being that obvious about it but it’s a neat gesture and ties in with the greed and lust that motivate the Duke and his entourage.)
Once the Duke finds out where Gilda lives he pays court to her, pretending to be a poor student named “Gualtier Maldé,” and after they sing their duet he leaves and she moons over him in her big aria, “Caro nome” (“Dearest Name”), now that she finally has a name (albeit a false one) to go with the face and bod she’s been fantasizing about. Meanwhile Rigoletto has been approached by Sparafucile (Stefan Kocán), a hit man who runs an inn on the outskirts of town and uses his sexually open sister Maddalena (Oksana Volkova) to lure his victims to the inn, where he kills them. Rigoletto tells Sparafucile he has no need for his services … yet, and after Sparafucile leaves Rigoletto sings a marvelously broken aria, “Pari siamo” (which basically means “We are the same” — Rigoletto reflects that Sparafucile kills people with a knife and Rigoletto himself destroys them with his wit). Monterone (Robert Pomakov) — who in this production is made an Arab sheik, a visiting high-roller pissed off at the Duke for seducing his daughter — pronounces a curse on the Duke and all the people in his court, but they laugh it off — all but Rigoletto, who’s sensitive and decent enough to be upset that he was cursed out by the grieving father of one of the Duke’s victims. (Indeed, Verdi was so taken with this plot element that his working title for Rigoletto was La Maledizione — “The Curse.”) The first act ends with the courtiers telling Rigoletto they’re going to kidnap Countess Ceprano (Emalie Savoy) and take her to the court so the Duke can amuse himself with her, only they’re really going to Rigoletto’s own house and want to trick Rigoletto himself into helping them kidnap Gilda, whom they think is Rigoletto’s mistress instead of his daughter. They blindfold Rigoletto and put plugs in his ears so he can neither see the woman he’s helping them abduct nor hear her voice (though a lot of modern productions, including this one, omit the earplugs and therefore leave us wondering how Rigoletto can be fooled when he would recognize Gilda’s voice the moment she cried for help).
At the start of act two, the Duke returns to Rigoletto’s house, expecting to meet Gilda for a hot afternoon, only he finds she’s gone and in the one decent thing he does in the whole opera, he sings “Parmi veder le lagrime,” noticing that she cried when they met and wondering if he could forsake all other women for her. Not that that lasts very long; he finds Gilda in his own court, where the kidnappers have brought her (concealed in a giant Egyptian sarcophagus, one of those transparently fake props Las Vegas hotels of the period constructed to establish some attempt at an atmosphere from antiquity), only Rigoletto finds her too, sends the courtiers away and in one of the high points of the score they sing the duet “Tutte le feste” in which Gilda explains how she met the Duke (and how he tricked her) and Rigoletto alternately comforts her and vows revenge. His idea of revenge is to hire Sparafucile to kill the Duke, and accordingly Sparafucile lures the Duke to the inn with Maddalena as his bait — while Rigoletto brings Gilda to the inn to eavesdrop on the Duke with Maddalena so he can convince her the Duke is a faithless, wanton seducer unworthy of her affections — and the scene culminates in the famous quartet, “Bella figlia dell’ amore,” in which the Duke woos Maddalena with his usual seduction lines while Rigoletto tries to tell Gilda what sort of man he really is and Gilda basically pouts in stunned disbelief. Only Maddalena decides the Duke is so hot she doesn’t want her brother to kill him; she suggests he kill Rigoletto instead but it’s not in Sparafucile’s moral code to kill a customer. Accordingly Sparafucile agrees to murder the first person who comes out of the inn, whether it’s the Duke or someone else — and Gilda, who’s in male drag as part of Rigoletto’s plan for them to flee after the murder goes down, overhears this and decides to sacrifice her own life to save the Duke’s. Rigoletto accepts delivery of the bag containing Gilda’s body, and he’s convinced his plan has succeeded — until he hears the chilling reprise of “La donna è mobile,” the score’s most famous aria, a marvelous bit of projection in which the Duke projects his own moral failings on the other gender (the opening line is usually translated as “Women are fickle, false altogether”). Hearing the Duke’s song makes him realize that the Duke has somehow survived the plot, and naturally curious as to just who’s in the body bag, Rigoletto opens it, sees his own daughter, and is horrified and overcome. She sings a marvelous final scene, “Lassù in cielo,” in which she looks forward to meeting her mother in heaven and praying for her father’s soul so that when he croaks he’ll be allowed to meet them there, and after Gilda finally expires Rigoletto looks skyward, recalls Monterone’s curse, and screams, “Ah, la maledizione!” Curtain.
Rigoletto is generally considered the beginning of Verdi’s middle or mature period, and it’s a far-reaching opera nothing like anything an Italian composer had ever written before. The Duke’s big arias are the score’s pop tunes, but the music for the other principals — especially Rigoletto himself — is nothing like the simple slow-fast cavatina-cabaletta formula previous Italian composers (including Verdi himself in his earlier works) had used. “Pari siamo” is a bit of jagged pieces of music, fitted together not to a musical formula but to express the torment gripping Rigoletto’s soul, his sense that by being the house comic at the Duke’s morally corrupt court he’s no better than a hired assassin. When Rigoletto discovers his daughter has been kidnapped, Verdi sets his rage not to a bouncy uptempo tune but to “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata,” a menacing, raging piece of music that expresses Rigoletto’s revulsion at the people he’s served and what he’s done for them, and also his anger that despite his incredible efforts to protect his daughter, she’s been swept up in his employer’s corrupt world anyway. (One thing this production blessedly didn’t do is give Rigoletto an incestuous itch for Gilda; it’s probably only a matter of time, though, before a modern director decides that the only thing that could possibly explain Rigoletto’s neurotic overprotectiveness of Gilda is if he had the hots for her himself.) What’s amazing about Michael Mayer’s production is that it works; the amoral atmosphere of Las Vegas c. 1960 is a close enough parallel to the setting Verdi and Piave had in mind (especially once they had to downgrade the tenor villain from a king to a duke at the insistence of the Italian censors, who behaved towards Verdi and the other composers of his time pretty much the way the staff of the Hays Office in Hollywood did in enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s) and the glittering neon of Act I is a powerful visual symbol for the real “city that never slept,” a place in which celebrities like Sinatra and his fellow Rat Packers could party to their heart’s content, indulge themselves in booze, women and drugs (though Sinatra was always anti-drug, to the point of staging an intervention with Sammy Davis, Jr. after Davis had got hooked on cocaine — a point blissfully ignored by Mayer, who has the Sinatra-esque Duke sniff coke in one scene; later he has the Duke swig from a bottle of amber fluid, a reference to Sinatra’s real drug of choice, Jack Daniels’ whiskey — the real Sinatra left instructions that he be buried with a bottle of it!) and be protected from any collateral damage they did, safe in the assurance from their Mafia buddies that whatever happened in Vegas, up to and including murder, really would stay in Vegas.
By chance I’d heard this performance of Rigoletto before I watched it, and in its audio-only incarnation, without Mayer’s exciting visuals, it was basically just another recording of Rigoletto — and I had not been particularly impressed by the principals except for Diana Damrau as Gilda (not surprisingly, the only cast member I’d heard of before). With the visuals, Damrau slipped a bit in my estimation — she still sang divinely but she’s well past her teenage years (Gilda is supposed to be a love-struck teenager) and she tried to bridge the gap between the character’s age and her own by acting like an annoying flibbertigibbet instead of, as John Ardoin described Maria Callas’s Gilda, “an innocent of whom circumstance makes a woman.” On the other hand, the rest of the principals seemed to gain when we could see as well as hear them; Zelijko Lucic portrayed a desperate dignity in the scenes with his daughter and a fearsome rage in the later stages, and though Piotr Beczala hardly had the charisma of the real Frank Sinatra (but then, who would?), he looks convincing as a lounge-lizard entertainer (there’s a neat touch in which a mike is thrust in his hand just before he starts “Questa o quella,” essentially portraying it as the sort of number the Duke sings in his Vegas act) and he’s got a strong voice well suited to the Duke’s music. He’s also hot-looking, though not so hot that we can readily believe he owes his life at the end to the actions of two women (ironic for such a misogynist character!) who both find him so irresistible that they won’t let him be killed, and one of them even gives her own life to save his — and I must say I found the Sparafucile, Stefan Kocán, to be the hottest guy in the cast (though maybe that was just how he was costumed: a purple suit and green tie in act one, a green leather jacket in act three). Damrau doesn’t quite achieve the remarkable feat Callas pulled off in “Lassù in cielo,” convincing us that she was half in this world and half in the next one, but she nonetheless phrases her part in the final duet quite sensitively and ravishingly (probably not a good word in this context!). She goes out with a quiet dignity and strength that ably caps a performance that triumphs vocally and overcomes her rather silly gestures and deportment on stage. And the production, it seemed to me, quite nicely reflected the growing darkness of the story, from the neon-lit party scenes in Act I to the aftermath of Act II (with the courtiers passed out in drunken stupors on a series of couches) and Act III, set in a strip club (Maddalena begins it by doing a pole dance) in which the tube lights are mostly blue except for flashes of white that animate across the stage to represent the storm that’s going on and mirrors the boiling human emotions of the story.
Michael Mayer’s “Vegas Rigoletto” seems to me to be an almost complete success, a shining example of how a standard-repertory opera can be updated without losing its essence — and one weird aspect of the opera scene today is how many productions there are that change the setting and major aspects of the story in pathetic attempts to make the piece more “relevant,” and how few of them pull it off. When Peter Sellars did his three stagings of the Mozart-da Ponte operas in the 1980’s, I loved The Marriage of Figaro because Sellars, like Mayer, found modern-day equivalents for the original characters and their class relationships, but hated the Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte because there Sellars didn’t seem to be bothering — he was doing them in modern drag just to be different. I also quite enjoyed the 1983 Frank Corsaro production of Bizet’s Carmen, which not only moved the opera’s setting to the 1930’s — the time of the Spanish Civil War — but incorporated the war into the plot: Carmen and her smuggler friends were running guns to the Loyalists, while José was in Franco’s army. (The more recent Met Carmen also updated the story to the era of the Civil War but did absolutely nothing creative with the revised setting — and the reviewers who praised it seemed oblivious to the existence of Corsaro’s production almost three decades earlier.) But most modern-dress productions have just seemed boring or silly, and the self-consciously “avant-garde” productions at the Met like the Willy Decker Traviata or the François Girard Parsifal have been downright offensive in their sheer perversity and disinclination to serve the original intent of the composer and librettist. I’m reserving judgment on the current Robert Lepage Ring at the Met until I see more of it — so far I’ve only seen the Walküre, which I thought worked even though some parts seemed risible (notably the appearance of the Valkyries on see-saws during the famous Ride at the start of Act III); at least Lepage was attempting with his up-and-down steel planks to reproduce the seismic activity that roils Iceland, part of the world that generated the Norse sagas Wagner adapted into his scenario for the Ring.
I’ve read enough on both sides of the debate over so-called Regietheater — productions in which, depending on your point of view, the stage director/designer either alters or updates the setting and story of an opera or a classic play to allow its message to come through more strongly to a modern audience, or arrogantly substitutes his (or, much more rarely, her) own vision for that of the creators of the original work — and generally I’d much rather watch either a tastefully done traditional production or a coherently stylized one like Wieland Wagner’s famous 1950’s restagings of his grandfather’s works at Bayreuth; but if all modern-dress opera productions were at the level of this Michael Mayer Rigoletto — coherent, sensible, aimed at translating the characters and their class and social relationships into modern equivalent instead of just moving them willy-nilly through the centuries to be “different” or to be outrageous — I’d like them a lot better!
Monday, March 18, 2013
Bellini: Norma — Act I (concert performance: Madrid, 1971)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a VAI (stands for Video Artists International) disc I’d got as a closeout from Daedalus Books: Montserrat Caballé in two performances from the Teatro Real in Madrid, one in 1971 and one in 1979. The 1971 show was a concert performance of Act I of Bellini’s Norma (though Norma is in just two acts and therefore Act I consists of more than half the opera!) and the 1979 one a recital of Caballé and pianist Miguel Zanetti in songs and opera excerpts by Handel, Vivaldi (who usually isn’t thought of today as a vocal composer, though he wrote quite a few operas and some of them have been revived lately — it was during the era that composers churned out opera after opera by recycling their own music, either from earlier operas or instrumental pieces, which was why, when one Vivaldi opera had its Los Angeles premiere, the L. A. Times critic warned audiences that two of the arias would be joltingly familiar because they were based on themes Vivaldi also used in The Four Seasons) and Granados. Charles noted that in 1971 dictator Francisco Franco was still the absolute ruler of Spain, and therefore suggested that Norma was a “safer” project for the Teatro Real in Madrid to perform than, say, Tosca. Also, Spanish TV was still in black-and-white in 1971, and between the rather murky lighting of the Teatro Real, the black dress Caballé was wearing as Norma and the black suits of the three male participants — bland tenor Robierto Merolla as Pollione, up-and-coming bass James Morris as Oroveso and an unidentified singer as Pollione’s servant and sidekick, Flavio — the singers tended to get lost among the orchestra members and the overall murk. The one who didn’t was the Adalgisa, Margreta Elkins (that odd spelling of her first name is correct), who was wearing a white gown and stood about a head taller than both Caballé and Merolla in their big trio at the end of the act. Norma is an extraordinary opera by the composer I consider by far the best of the three most commonly associated with the bel canto style; compared to Rossini and Donizetti, Bellini seems to have been the most dramatically and musically sophisticated — even Wagner admitted that he learned from Bellini (most notably ideas on how to use the brass instruments) and he carefully left Bellini out of his attacks on Italian composers, just as he carefully left Jacques Fromental Hálevy, who wrote La Juive (an attack on anti-Semitism and an opera Wagner loved despite his own anti-Semitic prejudices), out of his attacks on Jewish composers.
Its plot, relatively simple, derives from a French poetic drama by the now otherwise forgotten Alexandre Soumet, which in turn derives from the Medea myth: Norma is the high priestess of the moon in a Druidic religious cult during the times that the Romans were trying to conquer the British isles. However, despite her position of power with the Romans’ adversaries and her vow of chastity, she’s not only fallen in love with the Roman proconsul Pollione, she’s born him two children — even though the job includes having to make at least one big public appearance every month when the moon is in its crescent phase, and one would think people would notice if a pregnant woman were doing this. (Then again, maybe one of the justifications for casting zaftig sopranos like Caballé or Joan Sutherland in this role was to make it believable that Norma was a woman so large you wouldn’t notice if she were pregnant.) But Pollione has not only decided to dump Norma, he’s set his sights on her assistant priestess, Adalgisa, and wants her to break her vows and run away with him to Rome. The act we saw in this production starts with Norma’s father Oroveso assembling the Druids and demanding that they rebel against the Romans. Then we get Pollione’s aria about a dream he had in which he and Adalgisa were standing together on the steps of the Temple of Venus back in Rome, and his concern that Norma will somehow figure out what’s going on and queer the deal. At that point Norma enters and leads the Druids in the ritual prayer to the moon, “Casta diva” — one of Bellini’s (or anyone else’s) most ravishingly beautiful arias — which is also her plea to the Druids to keep the peace and not rebel. When the service is done (though Norma is still standing there in front of everybody) she sings a flashy cabaletta, “Ah! Bello a me ritorna,” in which she says she hopes Pollione will soon return to her. (Remember that this is intended to be an aside because the relationship between Norma and Pollione is supposed to be a big secret.) Then Adalgisa comes in to see Norma privately, and the two sing a lovely duet in which Norma says that she won’t hold Adalgisa to her vows but will set her free to join her beloved. Of course, Norma doesn’t yet know that her boyfriend and Adalgisa’s are one and the same — and when Adalgisa lets her in on the secret of just who the guy she has the hots for is, Norma is furious. Pollione enters and the three of them sing an angry, seething trio that ends Act I.
In Act II (not included here) Norma decides to avenge herself against Pollione by murdering the two children they had together, and in Soumet’s play she actually does so — but Bellini’s librettist, Felice Romani, had a better idea; Norma prepares to kill her kids but can’t go through with the deed. Instead she appears at the next Druid version of a general assembly, announces that she’s dropping her opposition to the Druids who want to rebel against the Romans, condemns both Pollione and Adalgisa, then has a turn of heart, announces that she is the traitor who betrayed her people for the love of the Roman general, and commits suicide by hurling herself off a convenient cliff, leaving the kids in the hands of her father Oroveso (as Anna Russell might have said, “Ya remember Oroveso?”) to raise. The Act I presented here is actually pretty dull; Caballé is in good form vocally and Elkins (a second-tier mezzo from La Scala’s 1950’s glory days who had previously sung with Maria Callas) is also good (their duet is radiant), but the guys aren’t all that interesting and conductor Enrique Garcia Asensio rather plods through the score, missing almost all the obvious opportunities for drama and intensity. Maybe it was because he was conducting it in concert — and the singers weren’t helping maintain the mood much by milking the audience applause after every aria and ensemble for all it was worth — but this Act I of Norma was surprisingly dull, and for that I tend to blame Garcia Asensio more than the singers or Bellini. (It was also amusing that the performance was filmed in Madrid but all the post-production work was done at studios in Barcelona.)
The recital presented on the rest of the disc was marked as a bonus item, but it was consistently more interesting than Norma, partly because Caballé seemed to have matured as an artist in the intervening eight years (it also helped that in between 1971 and 1979, Franco had fallen and, probably purely coincidentally, Spanish TV had adopted color) and partly because her accompanist, pianist Miguel Zanetti, seemed like a much more interesting musician than Garcia Asensio, coloring and shaping the music in ways the conductor had been unwilling or unable to do with his orchestra (“RTVE,” the initials of the network that had broadcast the show) in Norma. The repertoire wasn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill vocal recital program, either; it began with three selections by Handel — two from his Italian operas (the little-known “An, no son io che parlo” from Ezio and the well-known “Care Selve” from Atalanta — misspelled “Atlanta” on the on-screen credit!) and one, “O, had I Jubal’s lyre,” from the oratorio Joshua — which I found amusing because Caballé’s English diction, though no great shakes (and in an aria featuring lots of vocal ornamentation that tends to make the text indecipherable in any language), was at least better than Joan Sutherland’s even though Sutherland, unlike Caballé, came from an English-speaking country. Then she did five selections by Vivaldi, one a separate song (“Vieni, vieni, o mio diletto”) and the others excerpts from his operas, and though the historically-informed performance fascists would probably pick her to pieces, Caballé’s singing here was spirited and lively.
After a bit of Cherubini’s opera Demofonte (ironically Cherubini’s only opera even tangentially in the standard repertory, Medée, was written by an Italian composer living in France and was therefore in French, though virtually all modern performances are in an Italian-language adaptation by Franz Lachner, a German, who replaced the original’s spoken dialogue with sung recitatives) Caballé did three songs by Granados, “Cançi d’amor,” “L’oeil profeta” and “Elegia eterna.” I joked that we were finally hearing Caballé sing in her native language, Spanish — and Charles pointed out to me that the “ç” with a tail isn’t used in standard Spanish and therefore that song was either in Portuguese or a regional dialect of Spanish like Catalán or Galician. (I remember encountering a video in Catalán about a community doing their own water project — and the title spelled the word “agua” with an “i,” “aigua.”) Caballé seemed more at home in the music of Granados than she had in the Baroque arias of Handel and Vivaldi or the classical-era Cherubini selection, and she did her most spirited singing of the night in her two encores: “Carceleras” from Roberto Chapí’s Las Hijas del Zebedeo and “Me llaman la primorosa” from a version of The Barber of Seville by Gerónimo Giménez and Manuel Nieto. It’s interesting that there’s a zarzuela version of this story to set alongside the full-length operas by Paisiello and Rossini, and even more interesting that in these lighter zarzuela arias both Caballé and Zanetti seemed to be letting their hair down and really having fun with the music. Despite VAI’s decision to give us English subtitles only for Norma and not for the songs, this was an interesting disc and the song recital was especially commendable.
I ran Charles a VAI (stands for Video Artists International) disc I’d got as a closeout from Daedalus Books: Montserrat Caballé in two performances from the Teatro Real in Madrid, one in 1971 and one in 1979. The 1971 show was a concert performance of Act I of Bellini’s Norma (though Norma is in just two acts and therefore Act I consists of more than half the opera!) and the 1979 one a recital of Caballé and pianist Miguel Zanetti in songs and opera excerpts by Handel, Vivaldi (who usually isn’t thought of today as a vocal composer, though he wrote quite a few operas and some of them have been revived lately — it was during the era that composers churned out opera after opera by recycling their own music, either from earlier operas or instrumental pieces, which was why, when one Vivaldi opera had its Los Angeles premiere, the L. A. Times critic warned audiences that two of the arias would be joltingly familiar because they were based on themes Vivaldi also used in The Four Seasons) and Granados. Charles noted that in 1971 dictator Francisco Franco was still the absolute ruler of Spain, and therefore suggested that Norma was a “safer” project for the Teatro Real in Madrid to perform than, say, Tosca. Also, Spanish TV was still in black-and-white in 1971, and between the rather murky lighting of the Teatro Real, the black dress Caballé was wearing as Norma and the black suits of the three male participants — bland tenor Robierto Merolla as Pollione, up-and-coming bass James Morris as Oroveso and an unidentified singer as Pollione’s servant and sidekick, Flavio — the singers tended to get lost among the orchestra members and the overall murk. The one who didn’t was the Adalgisa, Margreta Elkins (that odd spelling of her first name is correct), who was wearing a white gown and stood about a head taller than both Caballé and Merolla in their big trio at the end of the act. Norma is an extraordinary opera by the composer I consider by far the best of the three most commonly associated with the bel canto style; compared to Rossini and Donizetti, Bellini seems to have been the most dramatically and musically sophisticated — even Wagner admitted that he learned from Bellini (most notably ideas on how to use the brass instruments) and he carefully left Bellini out of his attacks on Italian composers, just as he carefully left Jacques Fromental Hálevy, who wrote La Juive (an attack on anti-Semitism and an opera Wagner loved despite his own anti-Semitic prejudices), out of his attacks on Jewish composers.
Its plot, relatively simple, derives from a French poetic drama by the now otherwise forgotten Alexandre Soumet, which in turn derives from the Medea myth: Norma is the high priestess of the moon in a Druidic religious cult during the times that the Romans were trying to conquer the British isles. However, despite her position of power with the Romans’ adversaries and her vow of chastity, she’s not only fallen in love with the Roman proconsul Pollione, she’s born him two children — even though the job includes having to make at least one big public appearance every month when the moon is in its crescent phase, and one would think people would notice if a pregnant woman were doing this. (Then again, maybe one of the justifications for casting zaftig sopranos like Caballé or Joan Sutherland in this role was to make it believable that Norma was a woman so large you wouldn’t notice if she were pregnant.) But Pollione has not only decided to dump Norma, he’s set his sights on her assistant priestess, Adalgisa, and wants her to break her vows and run away with him to Rome. The act we saw in this production starts with Norma’s father Oroveso assembling the Druids and demanding that they rebel against the Romans. Then we get Pollione’s aria about a dream he had in which he and Adalgisa were standing together on the steps of the Temple of Venus back in Rome, and his concern that Norma will somehow figure out what’s going on and queer the deal. At that point Norma enters and leads the Druids in the ritual prayer to the moon, “Casta diva” — one of Bellini’s (or anyone else’s) most ravishingly beautiful arias — which is also her plea to the Druids to keep the peace and not rebel. When the service is done (though Norma is still standing there in front of everybody) she sings a flashy cabaletta, “Ah! Bello a me ritorna,” in which she says she hopes Pollione will soon return to her. (Remember that this is intended to be an aside because the relationship between Norma and Pollione is supposed to be a big secret.) Then Adalgisa comes in to see Norma privately, and the two sing a lovely duet in which Norma says that she won’t hold Adalgisa to her vows but will set her free to join her beloved. Of course, Norma doesn’t yet know that her boyfriend and Adalgisa’s are one and the same — and when Adalgisa lets her in on the secret of just who the guy she has the hots for is, Norma is furious. Pollione enters and the three of them sing an angry, seething trio that ends Act I.
In Act II (not included here) Norma decides to avenge herself against Pollione by murdering the two children they had together, and in Soumet’s play she actually does so — but Bellini’s librettist, Felice Romani, had a better idea; Norma prepares to kill her kids but can’t go through with the deed. Instead she appears at the next Druid version of a general assembly, announces that she’s dropping her opposition to the Druids who want to rebel against the Romans, condemns both Pollione and Adalgisa, then has a turn of heart, announces that she is the traitor who betrayed her people for the love of the Roman general, and commits suicide by hurling herself off a convenient cliff, leaving the kids in the hands of her father Oroveso (as Anna Russell might have said, “Ya remember Oroveso?”) to raise. The Act I presented here is actually pretty dull; Caballé is in good form vocally and Elkins (a second-tier mezzo from La Scala’s 1950’s glory days who had previously sung with Maria Callas) is also good (their duet is radiant), but the guys aren’t all that interesting and conductor Enrique Garcia Asensio rather plods through the score, missing almost all the obvious opportunities for drama and intensity. Maybe it was because he was conducting it in concert — and the singers weren’t helping maintain the mood much by milking the audience applause after every aria and ensemble for all it was worth — but this Act I of Norma was surprisingly dull, and for that I tend to blame Garcia Asensio more than the singers or Bellini. (It was also amusing that the performance was filmed in Madrid but all the post-production work was done at studios in Barcelona.)
The recital presented on the rest of the disc was marked as a bonus item, but it was consistently more interesting than Norma, partly because Caballé seemed to have matured as an artist in the intervening eight years (it also helped that in between 1971 and 1979, Franco had fallen and, probably purely coincidentally, Spanish TV had adopted color) and partly because her accompanist, pianist Miguel Zanetti, seemed like a much more interesting musician than Garcia Asensio, coloring and shaping the music in ways the conductor had been unwilling or unable to do with his orchestra (“RTVE,” the initials of the network that had broadcast the show) in Norma. The repertoire wasn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill vocal recital program, either; it began with three selections by Handel — two from his Italian operas (the little-known “An, no son io che parlo” from Ezio and the well-known “Care Selve” from Atalanta — misspelled “Atlanta” on the on-screen credit!) and one, “O, had I Jubal’s lyre,” from the oratorio Joshua — which I found amusing because Caballé’s English diction, though no great shakes (and in an aria featuring lots of vocal ornamentation that tends to make the text indecipherable in any language), was at least better than Joan Sutherland’s even though Sutherland, unlike Caballé, came from an English-speaking country. Then she did five selections by Vivaldi, one a separate song (“Vieni, vieni, o mio diletto”) and the others excerpts from his operas, and though the historically-informed performance fascists would probably pick her to pieces, Caballé’s singing here was spirited and lively.
After a bit of Cherubini’s opera Demofonte (ironically Cherubini’s only opera even tangentially in the standard repertory, Medée, was written by an Italian composer living in France and was therefore in French, though virtually all modern performances are in an Italian-language adaptation by Franz Lachner, a German, who replaced the original’s spoken dialogue with sung recitatives) Caballé did three songs by Granados, “Cançi d’amor,” “L’oeil profeta” and “Elegia eterna.” I joked that we were finally hearing Caballé sing in her native language, Spanish — and Charles pointed out to me that the “ç” with a tail isn’t used in standard Spanish and therefore that song was either in Portuguese or a regional dialect of Spanish like Catalán or Galician. (I remember encountering a video in Catalán about a community doing their own water project — and the title spelled the word “agua” with an “i,” “aigua.”) Caballé seemed more at home in the music of Granados than she had in the Baroque arias of Handel and Vivaldi or the classical-era Cherubini selection, and she did her most spirited singing of the night in her two encores: “Carceleras” from Roberto Chapí’s Las Hijas del Zebedeo and “Me llaman la primorosa” from a version of The Barber of Seville by Gerónimo Giménez and Manuel Nieto. It’s interesting that there’s a zarzuela version of this story to set alongside the full-length operas by Paisiello and Rossini, and even more interesting that in these lighter zarzuela arias both Caballé and Zanetti seemed to be letting their hair down and really having fun with the music. Despite VAI’s decision to give us English subtitles only for Norma and not for the songs, this was an interesting disc and the song recital was especially commendable.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Frankie Laine: An American Dreamer (JFM International Productions, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a quirky documentary called Frankie Laine: An American Dreamer on the Cox Cable’s own channel, Channel 4. This is a cut-down (to about 45 minutes, less commercials) version of a 90-minute documentary produced and directed by Jimmy Marino (who also did the interviews) and Don Wilson, written by Leslie Wilson, luckily produced while Frankie Laine was still alive and available to be interviewed (though many of the clips show him on various TV shows — still, this came out in 2006, a year before Laine’s death in San Diego at age 93), and the editing showed occasionally; for example, Laine talks about doing intermission work at Billy Berg’s nightclub in Los Angeles in 1946 and then “after Slim left” he was promoted to headliner — leaving the non-cognoscenti totally ignorant about who “Slim” was. He was Slim Gaillard, the African-American jive performer who did novelty songs like “Flat Foot Floogie,” “Cement Mixer (Put-ti, Put-ti)” and “Popity Pop (Go the Motorcycle),” titles which give a good account of his act (though he always hired good musicians; one 1945 date includes Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Jack McVea and Zutty Singleton!). According to the listing for the 90-minute version on imdb.com, Gaillard was actually shown in the film (I remember seeing him as a guest on the Flip Wilson variety TV show in the early 1970’s — Wilson was always interested in showcasing fellow African-Americans who hadn’t had much TV exposure, including one marvelous night when he had the Modern Jazz Quartet on), as were Louis Armstrong (whom Laine relied on quite a lot for material — his first album, Frankie Laine Sings!, recorded for Mercury in 1947, contained six songs, all of which Armstrong had recorded in the early 1930’s), guitarist Mundell Lowe and other important figures in Laine’s life, either as influences or collaborators.
Some things I didn’t know about Laine until I watched this show was that, like his contemporary and (first-)namesake Frank Sinatra, he was of Sicilian ancestry (I did know his real last name was “Lo Vecchio,” a weird moniker because it literally means “The Old One” in Italian); he was a champion marathon dancer before a sprained ankle led him to switch to a more contemporary and less strenuous sort of career (in fact, the show claims he still holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for the longest continuous marathon dance performance — during one dance from hell in which the promoter decided to award the prize in a sadistic fashion that makes the dance described in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? look like a New Age touchy-feely exercise by comparison: the people were told that they had to continue dancing nonstop, without the usual breaks, and wouldn’t be allowed food, drink, or bathroom breaks, and Laine won when the other male contestant wet his pants, thereby disqualifying himself and bringing the ordeal, which should have been forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, to an end); and he got his stage name from WINS radio in New York when he auditioned there and won a job as a radio singer. The station manager said “Lo Vecchio” wouldn’t do for a name and wanted to call him “Frankie Lang.” Laine thought he would be confused with the great jazz guitarist and Bing Crosby accompanist Eddie Lang (who’d actually died two years before this happened; Lang died in 1933 of a botched tonsillectomy and Laine got his radio job in 1935), and offered “Lane” as a last name instead. Then Laine got worried that he might be confused with Frances Lane, another singer on the station, and each might get the other’s fan mail (“Fan mail? I hadn’t even started yet and I was already worried about fan mail!,” the older Laine joked about his younger self), so he added the “i” to his new name.
The show also goes over much the same ground as the interview he did with George Simon for Metronome in the early 1950’s — which describes his early years as a singer in singularly miserable terms: he kept showing up at benefits and club dates asking if he could be put on to sing a number or two, and he kept being told no — in one benefit he was put off until the very end, when he was promised a song just before the concert was over, only Roy Eldridge went into his spectacular extended version of “Body and Soul” and no one was going to ask him to cut it short to put on an unknown singer to a jazz audience. Laine finally broke through when he hired a new manager, Sam Lutz, who got him a job singing at Billy Berg’s nightclub even though Berg’s initial response was, “Why should I pay him? He already sings here all the time for free!” While there he got presented with the song “That’s My Desire” and decided to announce it as “a new song” even though it had been written in 1931 (by Irving Berlin’s musical secretary, Helmy Kresa — that’s right, the world’s most popular and successful songwriter couldn’t actually write music and needed someone to take down his songs in notation, and Berlin hired Kresa after he decided the first person he auditioned for the job, George Gershwin, was overqualified and should be writing songs of his own instead of taking down Berlin’s) and had just been recorded in Laine’s then-home town, Los Angeles, for the Modern Records label by Black singer-pianist Hadda Brooks. (Laine never acknowledged Brooks for reviving “That’s My Desire” and thereby putting the old song back on the musical map, but it’s hard to believe someone with as much of an ear for Black music as Laine’s — he always named Bessie Smith as the biggest influence on his style and one can hear much more of Smith in him than one can in Billie Holiday! — hadn’t heard Brooks’ recording, especially since he was living in the same city as she.) Laine signed with the young, hungry Mercury label and “That’s My Desire” was his first record and his career-establishing hit, and he followed it up with a cover of Claude Thornhill’s “A Sunday Kind of Love” (Laine’s vocal is hardly as mellow as Fran Warren’s on the Thornhill version, but his record is still beautiful), and his records not only sold well to white audiences but dominated what were euphemistically called the “Harlem Hit Parades” until his manager unwittingly let slip to a jukebox operator whose clients were in the Black communities that Laine was white — whereupon all his records disappeared from the “Harlem Hit Parades” overnight.
The rest of the show’s account of Laine’s career was familiar — though it also covered his brief career as a songwriter (he placed “It Only Happens Once” with Nat “King” Cole — who’d had one of the biggest hits of his career with another song written by a singer, Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song,” and though the magic didn’t strike twice “It Only Happens Once” is a hauntingly beautiful song in both Laine’s and Cole’s versions — and “We’ll Be Together Again” is a great song that was buried as the flip side of Laine’s record of “Shine,” one of his audition pieces for WINS, and didn’t really become a standard until Frank Sinatra revived it on the Songs for Swinging Lovers album in 1956; this show has a marvelous montage of various high-powered singers, including Holiday, Sinatra, Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, doing “We’ll Be Together Again”) — including his meeting with Mitch Miller at Mercury, their spectacularly successful collaborations on “That Lucky Old Sun,” “Mule Train” and “Cry of the Wild Goose” (Miller was actually interviewed for this show but, alas, was not asked about the long-standing rumor that he himself supplied the famous bullwhip sound effects on “Mule Train”) and Miller’s decamping to Columbia Records in 1950 — Miller had told Laine that he would sign him to Columbia if he chose not to renew his Mercury contract when it expired, and Laine stashed away a song he’d been presented called “Jezebel” and didn’t tell anyone at Mercury it existed, so it could be his first Columbia release.
“Jezebel” is one of Laine’s finest records, featuring some spectacular register shifts that clearly influenced Elvis Presley (and Elvis wasn’t the only white rocker from the 1950’s Laine influenced: Buddy Holly actually covered “That’s My Desire”!), and though Miller’s influence on his career moved him away from his jazz roots and towards a more dramatic, emphatic style that might be considered overwrought and corny, it also moved a lot of records then and holds up surprisingly well. Laine was one of the key figures in the prehistory of rock ’n’ roll: he emerged as a star the year after the release of The Jolson Story, which led young record buyers tired of the “crooning” style of Crosby, Como and Sinatra to a ballsier, more intense “belting” style of singing with direct roots in African-American music, and between them Jolson and Laine pretty much killed the “crooning” style for young, upcoming white pop singers (though Tony Bennett managed to launch his career around this time with a style midway between the crooners and the belters) and blazed the trail for the early white rock ’n’ rollers. (They also briefly killed Frank Sinatra’s career until Sinatra decided that if he couldn’t beat them, he’d join them; aided by Nelson Riddle’s powerhouse arrangements, Sinatra showed on his Capitol records that he could belt with the best of them, and his tumultuous relationship with Ava Gardner and the aftermath of its end made Sinatra’s ballads less prayerful and more emotionally wrenching than they’d ever been before.)
The show demonstrated Laine’s success doing theme songs for Western movies and TV shows — Clint Eastwood was one of the interviewees because of the Laine-Eastwood connection via the TV show Rawhide (Laine recorded the theme song and Eastwood was one of the stars — though he was actually billed second to the now nearly-forgotten Eric Fleming; when Sergio Leone wanted an American star for his “spaghetti Western” A Fistful of Dollars he initially offered it to Fleming, then gave the part to Eastwood when Fleming turned it down … and the rest, as they say, is history) — and though Tex Ritter actually sang the theme song for the film High Noon on the actual soundtrack (and, to my mind, did it better than Laine: Ritter’s quiet, matter-of-fact understatement sounds far more ominous and appropriate than Laine’s strained, almost operatic belting) Laine got the nod for quite a few other Western film soundtracks, including Man Without a Star and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as well as the one that reinvigorated his career after it went into the doldrums in the 1960’s: Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’ outrageous Western spoof for which, as part of the joke, Brooks wanted a big, stentorian theme song just like a big-budget 1950’s Western and wanted Laine to sing it. The show was rather breathless in covering the last few decades of Laine’s career — there’s an interesting clip of Patti Page saying that both she and Laine kept their audiences in Britain and elsewhere in Europe even once they were largely forgotten in the U.S. because fans there are much more loyal and don’t stop liking their favorites and replace them with newer performers the way American audiences tend to — but overall Frankie Laine: An American Dreamer was a nice, if rather tackily edited (I’d love to see the long version sometime!), documentary about a very interesting and unique singer who may not have achieved the lasting superstardom of Crosby or Sinatra but nonetheless made his mark on American popular music.
I watched a quirky documentary called Frankie Laine: An American Dreamer on the Cox Cable’s own channel, Channel 4. This is a cut-down (to about 45 minutes, less commercials) version of a 90-minute documentary produced and directed by Jimmy Marino (who also did the interviews) and Don Wilson, written by Leslie Wilson, luckily produced while Frankie Laine was still alive and available to be interviewed (though many of the clips show him on various TV shows — still, this came out in 2006, a year before Laine’s death in San Diego at age 93), and the editing showed occasionally; for example, Laine talks about doing intermission work at Billy Berg’s nightclub in Los Angeles in 1946 and then “after Slim left” he was promoted to headliner — leaving the non-cognoscenti totally ignorant about who “Slim” was. He was Slim Gaillard, the African-American jive performer who did novelty songs like “Flat Foot Floogie,” “Cement Mixer (Put-ti, Put-ti)” and “Popity Pop (Go the Motorcycle),” titles which give a good account of his act (though he always hired good musicians; one 1945 date includes Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Jack McVea and Zutty Singleton!). According to the listing for the 90-minute version on imdb.com, Gaillard was actually shown in the film (I remember seeing him as a guest on the Flip Wilson variety TV show in the early 1970’s — Wilson was always interested in showcasing fellow African-Americans who hadn’t had much TV exposure, including one marvelous night when he had the Modern Jazz Quartet on), as were Louis Armstrong (whom Laine relied on quite a lot for material — his first album, Frankie Laine Sings!, recorded for Mercury in 1947, contained six songs, all of which Armstrong had recorded in the early 1930’s), guitarist Mundell Lowe and other important figures in Laine’s life, either as influences or collaborators.
Some things I didn’t know about Laine until I watched this show was that, like his contemporary and (first-)namesake Frank Sinatra, he was of Sicilian ancestry (I did know his real last name was “Lo Vecchio,” a weird moniker because it literally means “The Old One” in Italian); he was a champion marathon dancer before a sprained ankle led him to switch to a more contemporary and less strenuous sort of career (in fact, the show claims he still holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for the longest continuous marathon dance performance — during one dance from hell in which the promoter decided to award the prize in a sadistic fashion that makes the dance described in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? look like a New Age touchy-feely exercise by comparison: the people were told that they had to continue dancing nonstop, without the usual breaks, and wouldn’t be allowed food, drink, or bathroom breaks, and Laine won when the other male contestant wet his pants, thereby disqualifying himself and bringing the ordeal, which should have been forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, to an end); and he got his stage name from WINS radio in New York when he auditioned there and won a job as a radio singer. The station manager said “Lo Vecchio” wouldn’t do for a name and wanted to call him “Frankie Lang.” Laine thought he would be confused with the great jazz guitarist and Bing Crosby accompanist Eddie Lang (who’d actually died two years before this happened; Lang died in 1933 of a botched tonsillectomy and Laine got his radio job in 1935), and offered “Lane” as a last name instead. Then Laine got worried that he might be confused with Frances Lane, another singer on the station, and each might get the other’s fan mail (“Fan mail? I hadn’t even started yet and I was already worried about fan mail!,” the older Laine joked about his younger self), so he added the “i” to his new name.
The show also goes over much the same ground as the interview he did with George Simon for Metronome in the early 1950’s — which describes his early years as a singer in singularly miserable terms: he kept showing up at benefits and club dates asking if he could be put on to sing a number or two, and he kept being told no — in one benefit he was put off until the very end, when he was promised a song just before the concert was over, only Roy Eldridge went into his spectacular extended version of “Body and Soul” and no one was going to ask him to cut it short to put on an unknown singer to a jazz audience. Laine finally broke through when he hired a new manager, Sam Lutz, who got him a job singing at Billy Berg’s nightclub even though Berg’s initial response was, “Why should I pay him? He already sings here all the time for free!” While there he got presented with the song “That’s My Desire” and decided to announce it as “a new song” even though it had been written in 1931 (by Irving Berlin’s musical secretary, Helmy Kresa — that’s right, the world’s most popular and successful songwriter couldn’t actually write music and needed someone to take down his songs in notation, and Berlin hired Kresa after he decided the first person he auditioned for the job, George Gershwin, was overqualified and should be writing songs of his own instead of taking down Berlin’s) and had just been recorded in Laine’s then-home town, Los Angeles, for the Modern Records label by Black singer-pianist Hadda Brooks. (Laine never acknowledged Brooks for reviving “That’s My Desire” and thereby putting the old song back on the musical map, but it’s hard to believe someone with as much of an ear for Black music as Laine’s — he always named Bessie Smith as the biggest influence on his style and one can hear much more of Smith in him than one can in Billie Holiday! — hadn’t heard Brooks’ recording, especially since he was living in the same city as she.) Laine signed with the young, hungry Mercury label and “That’s My Desire” was his first record and his career-establishing hit, and he followed it up with a cover of Claude Thornhill’s “A Sunday Kind of Love” (Laine’s vocal is hardly as mellow as Fran Warren’s on the Thornhill version, but his record is still beautiful), and his records not only sold well to white audiences but dominated what were euphemistically called the “Harlem Hit Parades” until his manager unwittingly let slip to a jukebox operator whose clients were in the Black communities that Laine was white — whereupon all his records disappeared from the “Harlem Hit Parades” overnight.
The rest of the show’s account of Laine’s career was familiar — though it also covered his brief career as a songwriter (he placed “It Only Happens Once” with Nat “King” Cole — who’d had one of the biggest hits of his career with another song written by a singer, Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song,” and though the magic didn’t strike twice “It Only Happens Once” is a hauntingly beautiful song in both Laine’s and Cole’s versions — and “We’ll Be Together Again” is a great song that was buried as the flip side of Laine’s record of “Shine,” one of his audition pieces for WINS, and didn’t really become a standard until Frank Sinatra revived it on the Songs for Swinging Lovers album in 1956; this show has a marvelous montage of various high-powered singers, including Holiday, Sinatra, Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, doing “We’ll Be Together Again”) — including his meeting with Mitch Miller at Mercury, their spectacularly successful collaborations on “That Lucky Old Sun,” “Mule Train” and “Cry of the Wild Goose” (Miller was actually interviewed for this show but, alas, was not asked about the long-standing rumor that he himself supplied the famous bullwhip sound effects on “Mule Train”) and Miller’s decamping to Columbia Records in 1950 — Miller had told Laine that he would sign him to Columbia if he chose not to renew his Mercury contract when it expired, and Laine stashed away a song he’d been presented called “Jezebel” and didn’t tell anyone at Mercury it existed, so it could be his first Columbia release.
“Jezebel” is one of Laine’s finest records, featuring some spectacular register shifts that clearly influenced Elvis Presley (and Elvis wasn’t the only white rocker from the 1950’s Laine influenced: Buddy Holly actually covered “That’s My Desire”!), and though Miller’s influence on his career moved him away from his jazz roots and towards a more dramatic, emphatic style that might be considered overwrought and corny, it also moved a lot of records then and holds up surprisingly well. Laine was one of the key figures in the prehistory of rock ’n’ roll: he emerged as a star the year after the release of The Jolson Story, which led young record buyers tired of the “crooning” style of Crosby, Como and Sinatra to a ballsier, more intense “belting” style of singing with direct roots in African-American music, and between them Jolson and Laine pretty much killed the “crooning” style for young, upcoming white pop singers (though Tony Bennett managed to launch his career around this time with a style midway between the crooners and the belters) and blazed the trail for the early white rock ’n’ rollers. (They also briefly killed Frank Sinatra’s career until Sinatra decided that if he couldn’t beat them, he’d join them; aided by Nelson Riddle’s powerhouse arrangements, Sinatra showed on his Capitol records that he could belt with the best of them, and his tumultuous relationship with Ava Gardner and the aftermath of its end made Sinatra’s ballads less prayerful and more emotionally wrenching than they’d ever been before.)
The show demonstrated Laine’s success doing theme songs for Western movies and TV shows — Clint Eastwood was one of the interviewees because of the Laine-Eastwood connection via the TV show Rawhide (Laine recorded the theme song and Eastwood was one of the stars — though he was actually billed second to the now nearly-forgotten Eric Fleming; when Sergio Leone wanted an American star for his “spaghetti Western” A Fistful of Dollars he initially offered it to Fleming, then gave the part to Eastwood when Fleming turned it down … and the rest, as they say, is history) — and though Tex Ritter actually sang the theme song for the film High Noon on the actual soundtrack (and, to my mind, did it better than Laine: Ritter’s quiet, matter-of-fact understatement sounds far more ominous and appropriate than Laine’s strained, almost operatic belting) Laine got the nod for quite a few other Western film soundtracks, including Man Without a Star and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as well as the one that reinvigorated his career after it went into the doldrums in the 1960’s: Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’ outrageous Western spoof for which, as part of the joke, Brooks wanted a big, stentorian theme song just like a big-budget 1950’s Western and wanted Laine to sing it. The show was rather breathless in covering the last few decades of Laine’s career — there’s an interesting clip of Patti Page saying that both she and Laine kept their audiences in Britain and elsewhere in Europe even once they were largely forgotten in the U.S. because fans there are much more loyal and don’t stop liking their favorites and replace them with newer performers the way American audiences tend to — but overall Frankie Laine: An American Dreamer was a nice, if rather tackily edited (I’d love to see the long version sometime!), documentary about a very interesting and unique singer who may not have achieved the lasting superstardom of Crosby or Sinatra but nonetheless made his mark on American popular music.
Hubble: 15 Years of Discovery (ESA/Hubble, 2005)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles, our friend Garry and I watched a DVD he’d brought over of a 2005 German documentary called Hubble: 15 Years of Discovery, an interesting if somewhat disappointing and rather lumbering documentary about all the cool stuff the Hubble space telescope has shown us about the universe. It was directed by Lars Lindberg Christensen and written by him with Stuart Clark and Stefania Varano, and it was a bit disappointing in that though it promised actual images from the Hubble telescope, most of what was really shown was computer animations and simulations of what merging galaxies and the like would theoretically look like (though since their interactions would take place over a period of billions of years this is really time-lapsed time-lapse photography!). I joked that since the show described galaxies as encountering each other in space and their gravitational fields pulling them together and merging them into super-galaxies, some Ayn Rand Libertarian at a science-fiction convention would probably cite that as yet more “evidence” that lassiez-faire capitalism is the one good, true and moral economic system: “You see, even in outer space galaxies do mergers and acquisitions!” I had expected this to be about 45 minutes (the usual length of an hour-long TV program less commercials) but it was nearly an hour and a half and it did tend to drag.
Charles, our friend Garry and I watched a DVD he’d brought over of a 2005 German documentary called Hubble: 15 Years of Discovery, an interesting if somewhat disappointing and rather lumbering documentary about all the cool stuff the Hubble space telescope has shown us about the universe. It was directed by Lars Lindberg Christensen and written by him with Stuart Clark and Stefania Varano, and it was a bit disappointing in that though it promised actual images from the Hubble telescope, most of what was really shown was computer animations and simulations of what merging galaxies and the like would theoretically look like (though since their interactions would take place over a period of billions of years this is really time-lapsed time-lapse photography!). I joked that since the show described galaxies as encountering each other in space and their gravitational fields pulling them together and merging them into super-galaxies, some Ayn Rand Libertarian at a science-fiction convention would probably cite that as yet more “evidence” that lassiez-faire capitalism is the one good, true and moral economic system: “You see, even in outer space galaxies do mergers and acquisitions!” I had expected this to be about 45 minutes (the usual length of an hour-long TV program less commercials) but it was nearly an hour and a half and it did tend to drag.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Shine On, Harvest Moon (Warner Bros., 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Shine On, Harvest Moon (actually the title doesn’t have a comma, but the name of the song the film was named after does), a Warner Bros. musical from 1944 that purported to be a biopic of Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes. In case you haven’t heard of them, they’re the husband-and-wife vaudeville team who introduced the song “Shine On, Harvest Moon” and quite a few other standards from the first decade of the 20th century. From other sources I’ve learned that Norworth and Bayes were the Sonny and Cher of their day; when they met he was an established star and she was a nobody, he coached her and built their act into a major attraction, then they broke up and she ended up a bigger star than he was. It got worse when Norworth thought, “If I did it once, I can do it again,” and picked up (though he did not get romantically involved with) another young female singer-dancer of potentially great talent, worked with her, shaped her, helped her project her gifts, then saw her leave him and become an even bigger star on her own. Her name was Ginger Rogers! Instead Shine On, Harvest Moon, directed by David Butler from a committee-written script (story by Richard Weil, screenplay by him with Sam Hellman, Francis Swan and James V. Kern), was an engagingly dark-ish musical in which Norworth (Dennis Morgan) is a vaudevillian who’s playing support to singer Blanche Mallory (Irene Manning). Also on the bill is magician The Great Georgetti (Jack Carson — this is early in the attempt of Warner Bros. to convert Morgan and Carson into a singing/comedy team on the order of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope at Paramount), a friend of Norworth’s and another client of manager “Poppa Carl” (S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall at his most avuncular). Mallory asks Norworth to team up with her but he declines, saying that he works solo and doesn’t want to be part of a partnership. Mallory has lost her job at Milwaukee’s Crystal Theatre because the big new trend is sister acts.
Georgetti tells Norworth that there’s a particularly good singer at the local sleazy nightclub doing an especially good version of one of Norworth’s songs (both Norworth and Bayes wrote quite a lot of their own material, jointly and severally), and they go to scout her. Of course she’s Nora Bayes (Ann Sheridan, though imdb.com lists Lynn Martin as her voice double), and when Norworth and Georgetti arrive the club’s owner, Dan Costello (Robert Shayne), is literally pimping her out to his principal backer, Tim Donovan (William B. Davidson), in a scene written surprisingly brazenly for a film from the era of strict Production Code enforcement. When Norworth asks her to come with him instead, Costello grabs her arm, Norworth tries to wrest her from his grip, and the scene ends up in a free-for-all fight that ends up with Norworth, Bayes and Georgetti all arrested (though Georgetti, an experienced magician, works free from his handcuffs). The three are freed in a wild production number that takes place in night court, with the police officers and even the judge joining in — throwing us a curveball in what we thought was originally going to be a “normal” backstage musical, with the characters singing and dancing only when they were doing so professionally in performance or rehearsal. Norworth tries Mallory and Bayes as a faux-“sister” act after Bayes’ audition as a solo fails (courtesy of a claque Costello has hired to disrupt it) but Mallory bails on it after Bayes’ solo number, “How Can They Tell That I’m Irish?,” goes over with an audience composed mostly of members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. In desperation Norworth goes on stage with Bayes and the two are instant stars, and while they’re on a carriage ride on the night of a full moon the two work out That Song and he proposes marriage to her, at least partly because if they’re going to be traveling together it’ll be easier to need only one room and bed instead of two. As husband and wife they go to New York, expecting to make it into the vaudeville big-time — only Dan Costello has blacklisted them and purchased all the vaudeville chains to make sure their career can’t go anywhere. Their privations as they can’t find work and he can’t even place “Shine On, Harvest Moon” with a publisher unless he can get Blanche Mallory to sing it — which she won’t unless he divorces Nora and marries her — reach depths unplumbed in a major musical since the early days and films like Applause, Burlesque and Lord Byron of Broadway. Even when Georgetti finds a vaudeville theatre so small Costello hasn’t bought it yet, Costello strikes again by telling anyone who plays on a bill with them that he’ll never hire them in any of his theatres.
They finally get their break when a burlesque house books Norworth as a single and he’s bombing — until Nora shows up in the audience — and then suddenly he regains his voice and sings his heart out, a scout for Ziegfeld is in the audience, and in a final color sequence (the rest of the film is in black-and-white) they’re shown in a Ziegfeld extravaganza not only of “Shine On, Harvest Moon” but of Jack Norworth’s entire song catalogue (or at least as much of it as Warner Bros. could get in one reel). The transition is done more neatly than it usually was in black-and-white films containing one color sequence — a close-up of a stage light before it’s turned on cuts to a close-up of another stage light, this one with colored gel filters in front of it. Shine On, Harvest Moon is a surprisingly dark musical — when I saw cinematographer Arthur Edeson’s name on the credits I though it was an odd choice given that his best-known films were All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1931 Frankenstein, the 1941 Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, but in fact his rich, chiaroscuro style was just right for a film that keeps its central characters in penury for so long (and runs them through a dilemma that would become all too real for many Hollywood people after the House Committee on Un-American Activities struck in 1947) — and it’s engaging, sometimes annoying (all the repetitive jokes about the dumbness of Marie Wilson, playing Georgetti’s girlfriend, really get old after a while, especially when Jack Carson sings a whole song about how dumb she is!), sometimes surprisingly moving and not at all the mindless “fun” musical one might expect from the title, the subject (as predictably bowdlerized by the writing committee) and the stars!
The film was Shine On, Harvest Moon (actually the title doesn’t have a comma, but the name of the song the film was named after does), a Warner Bros. musical from 1944 that purported to be a biopic of Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes. In case you haven’t heard of them, they’re the husband-and-wife vaudeville team who introduced the song “Shine On, Harvest Moon” and quite a few other standards from the first decade of the 20th century. From other sources I’ve learned that Norworth and Bayes were the Sonny and Cher of their day; when they met he was an established star and she was a nobody, he coached her and built their act into a major attraction, then they broke up and she ended up a bigger star than he was. It got worse when Norworth thought, “If I did it once, I can do it again,” and picked up (though he did not get romantically involved with) another young female singer-dancer of potentially great talent, worked with her, shaped her, helped her project her gifts, then saw her leave him and become an even bigger star on her own. Her name was Ginger Rogers! Instead Shine On, Harvest Moon, directed by David Butler from a committee-written script (story by Richard Weil, screenplay by him with Sam Hellman, Francis Swan and James V. Kern), was an engagingly dark-ish musical in which Norworth (Dennis Morgan) is a vaudevillian who’s playing support to singer Blanche Mallory (Irene Manning). Also on the bill is magician The Great Georgetti (Jack Carson — this is early in the attempt of Warner Bros. to convert Morgan and Carson into a singing/comedy team on the order of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope at Paramount), a friend of Norworth’s and another client of manager “Poppa Carl” (S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall at his most avuncular). Mallory asks Norworth to team up with her but he declines, saying that he works solo and doesn’t want to be part of a partnership. Mallory has lost her job at Milwaukee’s Crystal Theatre because the big new trend is sister acts.
Georgetti tells Norworth that there’s a particularly good singer at the local sleazy nightclub doing an especially good version of one of Norworth’s songs (both Norworth and Bayes wrote quite a lot of their own material, jointly and severally), and they go to scout her. Of course she’s Nora Bayes (Ann Sheridan, though imdb.com lists Lynn Martin as her voice double), and when Norworth and Georgetti arrive the club’s owner, Dan Costello (Robert Shayne), is literally pimping her out to his principal backer, Tim Donovan (William B. Davidson), in a scene written surprisingly brazenly for a film from the era of strict Production Code enforcement. When Norworth asks her to come with him instead, Costello grabs her arm, Norworth tries to wrest her from his grip, and the scene ends up in a free-for-all fight that ends up with Norworth, Bayes and Georgetti all arrested (though Georgetti, an experienced magician, works free from his handcuffs). The three are freed in a wild production number that takes place in night court, with the police officers and even the judge joining in — throwing us a curveball in what we thought was originally going to be a “normal” backstage musical, with the characters singing and dancing only when they were doing so professionally in performance or rehearsal. Norworth tries Mallory and Bayes as a faux-“sister” act after Bayes’ audition as a solo fails (courtesy of a claque Costello has hired to disrupt it) but Mallory bails on it after Bayes’ solo number, “How Can They Tell That I’m Irish?,” goes over with an audience composed mostly of members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. In desperation Norworth goes on stage with Bayes and the two are instant stars, and while they’re on a carriage ride on the night of a full moon the two work out That Song and he proposes marriage to her, at least partly because if they’re going to be traveling together it’ll be easier to need only one room and bed instead of two. As husband and wife they go to New York, expecting to make it into the vaudeville big-time — only Dan Costello has blacklisted them and purchased all the vaudeville chains to make sure their career can’t go anywhere. Their privations as they can’t find work and he can’t even place “Shine On, Harvest Moon” with a publisher unless he can get Blanche Mallory to sing it — which she won’t unless he divorces Nora and marries her — reach depths unplumbed in a major musical since the early days and films like Applause, Burlesque and Lord Byron of Broadway. Even when Georgetti finds a vaudeville theatre so small Costello hasn’t bought it yet, Costello strikes again by telling anyone who plays on a bill with them that he’ll never hire them in any of his theatres.
They finally get their break when a burlesque house books Norworth as a single and he’s bombing — until Nora shows up in the audience — and then suddenly he regains his voice and sings his heart out, a scout for Ziegfeld is in the audience, and in a final color sequence (the rest of the film is in black-and-white) they’re shown in a Ziegfeld extravaganza not only of “Shine On, Harvest Moon” but of Jack Norworth’s entire song catalogue (or at least as much of it as Warner Bros. could get in one reel). The transition is done more neatly than it usually was in black-and-white films containing one color sequence — a close-up of a stage light before it’s turned on cuts to a close-up of another stage light, this one with colored gel filters in front of it. Shine On, Harvest Moon is a surprisingly dark musical — when I saw cinematographer Arthur Edeson’s name on the credits I though it was an odd choice given that his best-known films were All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1931 Frankenstein, the 1941 Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, but in fact his rich, chiaroscuro style was just right for a film that keeps its central characters in penury for so long (and runs them through a dilemma that would become all too real for many Hollywood people after the House Committee on Un-American Activities struck in 1947) — and it’s engaging, sometimes annoying (all the repetitive jokes about the dumbness of Marie Wilson, playing Georgetti’s girlfriend, really get old after a while, especially when Jack Carson sings a whole song about how dumb she is!), sometimes surprisingly moving and not at all the mindless “fun” musical one might expect from the title, the subject (as predictably bowdlerized by the writing committee) and the stars!
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