Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Gershwin and The Heat

Last Thursday we enjoyed a wonderful evening of Gershwin at the Baltimore Symphony playing at Strathmore in North Bethesda.  First of all, the hall and its acoustics are superb. Second, the orchestra and soloist did a magnificent rendition of Rhapsody in Blue.  This was the high point of the evening--all of the themes were presented with precision and brio by all of the orchestra's sections.  The opening number was a suite of Leonard Bernstein's music from On the Town, which provided a nice start.

The rest of the Gershwin program, though never less than pleasing, was somewhat anticlimactic, partly because the orchestra did such a fine job on Rhapsody in Blue and also because the rest of the pieces were either not up to it musically or the selection could have been better.  This was especially the story with the suite from Porgy and Bess. Yes, it had a few of the great songs, including Summertime, I'm On My Way, Bess, You Is My Woman Now, and I Got Plenty o'Nuttin.  But where were Sportin' Life's two terrific numbers--It Ain't Necessarily So and There's a Boat Leavin' Soon for New York? And alas, after the rhapsody, An American in Paris is a slighter composition.  I almost missed not only Gene Kelly's dancing his way through the movie but George Guetary's cornball "I'm on a Stairway to Paradise."

Then a few nights later, we took in a summer movie, The Heat. If you haven't seen it, it's a girl-buddy vehicle for Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, one a sleek, uptight FBI agent and the other an out-of-shape, totally street-smart Boston cop. Lots of character and lots of conflict follow. The idea was good, some of the lines and scenes are funny, but on the whole, it is written and played far too broadly (no pun intended) and descends into all-too-typical Hollywood silliness.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Why FDR Deserves Praise

Two reviews in today's NY Times book review discuss recent studies of FDR's battle against the isolationists and other "anti-interventionists" in 1939 and 1940 before Pearl Harbor brought us into World War II. FDR, the reviewer noted, learned from the disastrous court-packing fight of 1937 and the failure to defeat the Southern Democrat-Republican reactionaries in the 1938 midterm.  He drew from those setbacks the principle of not getting ahead of the American public; instead, he did what he could to move that public toward more progressive positions and in the interim, designed and passed Lend-Lease to keep the British in the fight until we could join them.

So when I read all the recent denouncing of FDR for not advancing the battle to save or rescue the Jews of Europe that a variety of so-called historians are propagating, I recognize that we risk making major errors when we charge historical figures with espousing and acting on all of our current values. Of course, it would have been better if we had bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz and if FDR had cracked down on the anti-Semites in the State Department who kept Jewish refugees out of the U.S.  But FDR understood--as it is mighty hard for us to appreciate today--that there were strong forces in the U.S. then who both favored isolationism and were defiantly anti-Semitic.

1940 was not the same as 2013.  Lindbergh--portrayed as a potential candidate who might well have defeated FDR in the 1940 election in Philip Roth's masterful novel, The Plot Against America--came out and accused FDR of "warmongering" because of Jewish influence. Roosevelt understood that if the effort to prepare the nation for war was perceived as based on any interest in helping the Jews, the whole campaign would be doomed from the start.

We don't encounter this kind of situation today. Of course, some might say that world antagonism to the right-wing Israeli government's policies is Anti-Semitism, but this is nothing close to the real Anti-Semitism and appeasement of the Nazis that was a powerful force in the pre-World War II U.S. Today's right-wing Jewish supporters of Bibi have made it hard for Jews to oppose Israeli government policy but many of us who love Israel despair for its future if these misguided policies continue. But back in 1940, there were real, rootin-tootin Anti-Semites whom FDR had to take on.

We know from Ira Katznelson's wonderful recent history, Fear Itself, about the deal FDR had to make with the Southern Democrats to get the New Deal enacted into law: he abandoned any effort to desegregate the South or give blacks civil rights. Bad deal? Absolutely. Did he have a real choice? Probably not. So when you read this tripe about how FDR let the Jews down, take a look at the histories reviewed today--one is entitled Rendezvous With Destiny, a title previously used for the wonderful history of the New Deal by Eric Goldman--and try to imagine an America in the pre-WW II period when even shrewd and progressive politicians like Franklin D. Roosevelt saw how they needed to bring the U.S. public along for the crucial fight--the war against the Nazis and Japan, and that that was no easy challenge.

Friday, July 5, 2013

When Art, Music, and Design Joined Dance

There's a marvelous exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington--and it will be there until early September. It's dedicated to a dance troupe which managed to draw on the greatest artists, composers, and costume designers of the early years of the 20th century to create masterpieces of the dance repertory that remain ornaments of the culture today.

The company was the Ballets Russes and its creator and impresario was Serge Diaghilev.  The show at the National ranges from the elaborate and imaginative costumes, to the creative posters and playbills, and even some of the massive backdrops for the sets of the great dance programs the company presented.  Most fascinating, though, are the videos, most from presentations of these ballets by companies like New York's Joffrey Ballet in the 1980s, of the greatest conceptions. 

Diaghilev was an admitted failure as singer, composer, or artist, but he ranks as the foremost impresario of our times.  Not only did he obtain the contributions to the dance programs of artists such as Picasso, Rouault, Modigliani, Goncherova, and Matisse; along with music composed for the company by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Satie; costumes by Bakst, Roerich, and Coco Chanel; his choreographers, beginning with the fabulous Fokine (who gave us Petrouchka), and then Massine, and ending with Balanchine, who then went on to build the renowned New York City Ballet; but he managed to find a dancer often regarded as the greatest ballet has ever known--Vaslav Nijinsky, who also choreographed (and starred in) Afternoon of a Faun (to Debussy's music) and The Rite of  Spring, the Stravinsky composition that revolutionized dance in 1913 just as the Armory Show did for art that year.

The impresario's most redoubtable accomplishment, though, was not merely in convincing these premiere artists to work on his projects: he managed to inspire them to produce some of their best work.  The several videos shown in the exhibit, along with a half-hour video that covers the twenty-year span of the company's existence (1909-1929), attest to the brilliance of his performances.

It's so rare that we can point to a specific company and declare without reservation that it set the standard for its art. Not only did Ballets Russes attain this acclaim but the company succeeded--as hardly any other arts endeavors can claim to have even tried--in bringing together the best of what was then the avant-garde but now are seen as the pre-eminent standouts in art, music, costume design, and, yes, dance.


Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Showbiz Stuff

Recently, two compelling obits appeared in the Times.  The two men chronicled both died at 93, lived in Studio City, California, but otherwise had nothing to do with each other except for their involvement in Broadway theater.  Donald Bevan was the caricaturist for Sardi's, the Broadway restaurant for theatrical people, for many years. His fame followed his being noticed drawing pictures on war planes by a United Press correspondent named Walter Cronkite. Apparently, his drawings. while satirical, were kindly, except where critics were concerned.

This was because Mr. Bevan was also a playwright, one who co-wrote only one successful play.  It's not clear whether he ever wrote another--the obit says he tried to write a musical but it doesn't say whether it was ever completed. But the play he did write was a masterpiece, Stalag 17.  Most of you may know of it as a famous, dramatic movie about American prisoners of war in a German World War II POW camp--William Holden won the Best Actor Oscar.  But it previously ran for a year on Broadway in a production directed by Jose Ferrer, who won a Tony for it.

There were wonderful supporting players in it: the camp commandant, played by Otto Preminger; two comic-relief dogfaces, Harvey Lembeck and Robert Strauss; and the principal guard was played by the Marx Brothers' foil in A Night at the Opera, Sig Ruman. One part of the story not mentioned in the Times which my dad told me was that Stalag 17 premiered not at a Broadway theater but at the wonderful theatre on the third floor of The Lambs, now a restaurant but then a theatrical club.

The other 93-year-old who died at an assisted-living home in Studio City was Elliot Reid, who played opposite Jane Russell in the film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Mr. Reid had a distinguished if unheralded career in films and television--he had started out (as Ted Reid) playing Cinna (according to the Broadway database IdBd) in Orson Welles's renowned 1937 production of Julius Caesar.  The Times said that he played Cinna, the Poet--a role that is more famous if smaller than merely Cinna.

Mr. Reid turned up on many, many TV shows--from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to All in the Family.  You might find him anywhere, from Fred MacMurray's rival in The Absent-Minded Professor to the small-town prosecutor in Inherit the Wind, or as an Edward R. Murrow look-alike on I Love Lucy. Once again, however, I remember him best from co-starring on Broadway in 1960 in a revue that only played for a month, From A to Z.

To my teenaged sensibility, it was the epitome of sophisticated stage comedy. And while it did not play for long, the lead writer was a then-unknown named Woody Allen. Reid's co-star was Hermione Gingold. Imagine her playing the famed Mary Martin/Julie Andrews role of Maria in The Sound of Music, only re-dubbed The Sound of Schmaltz: "oodles of noodles, and pockets of posies, and cute little boys with runny noses/these are a few of my favorite things" and right there on stage with her was the ubiquitous Elliot Reid--as Baron von Klaptrap, of course.