Ibsen and Inge at the Shaw Fest

It turned out that the plays we wanted to see on the day we had to go to the Shaw Festival were Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba; both productions were terrific, although the weight of the combined drama for the day did make us consider whether we might have lightened the atmosphere by seeing an adaptation of the Howard Hawks movie, His Girl Friday, which itself was an adaptation of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur classic play, The Front Page.

This year's Shaw, which was playing the next day, seemed less world-shaking: The Millionairess and Misalliance. Normally, had they been on the day we were available, I might have opted for at least one, having seen neither previously. But, of what we could choose from, we felt very pleased with the quality of the acting and the continued shine of the two works.

Even in our age of instant obsolescence, Ibsen remains. to use the cliche, relevant.  I felt Hedda was the flip side of Nora in A Doll's House, in that she is a spoiled, arrogant, and yes, somewhat evil, version of the bored Madame Bovary. Yet she never loses our interest because she seems so much more clever than the members of the rather unimpressive society we meet in the town where she is stuck. Only Judge Brack, whose role anticipates Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, is on to her, and yet he too would enjoy the chance for a fling, even at his comparatively advanced age.

Doc and Lola in Sheba are closer to us in time--around 1950 in some Midwestern city. Inge was the voice of the disaffected in the Midwest, just as his contemporaries Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller dealt with the South and the Northeast, respectively. People seethe beneath the veneer of politeness and their pretense of caring for one another. Old grievances fester and emerge with application of stimulants such as alcohol. Sex also rears its head--the complications are intensified by our knowledge that Inge was gay and in the closet and that his depression, also brought on heavily by his repeated failures to replicate the wild success on Broadway of his four best plays, of which this was the first, led to his suicide.

This was our first trip to this festival, situated in the incredibly twee little town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, which is just up the road a piece from the Canadian side of the Falls. The main drag reeks of gran turismo but after a day or so, it becomes pleasant. The floral displays are marvelous and some of the restaurants are excellent. The Canadian chain, Tim Horton's, is far superior to its closest U.S. equivalent, Dunkin Donuts. They had wonderful hot apple cider, for example. This is also a wine region, with wineries lining most of the main routes between the border crossings and the town.

I'm not entirely clear as to how they came to hold an annual celebration of G.B.S. but as a Shavian--in that I've enjoyed seeing his plays over the years, I'm glad they decided to do it.  After all, what they call "the other festival" has no more connection with its honoree than the name of his birthplace. Driving through central and western, heck, all of upstate New York in the summer is always delightful, anyway. We passed through Geneseo for the first time on the way back, where the now highly-regarded state university is heralded as one of the nation's best smaller campuses.

Deerslayers Lost in the Stars

Cooperstown is no longer just about baseball.  Now, a walk down Main Street might persuade you that baseball in this burg isn't everything, it's the only thing.  Lots of souvenir shops beckon, but try as I might, I failed to find one where I could buy a Vic Raschi jersey--and none online so far either. But the Baseball Museum is terrific--exhibits much improved, lots of controversial issues are included, although the party line can still rankle, e.g., the theme that baseball expansion beginning in the early 50s was a good thing. And don't get me started on the designated hitter.

Anyway, it's lots of fun. They still show "Who's on First" over and over, and it's still better than their big new baseball celluloid extravaganza.  But you can also listen to Mel Allen or Bob Prince or Red Barber call some innings--and clearly no one has yet figured out what to do about the steroids issue.  The Hall of Fame itself--all those plaques--is frankly of little interest; the only importance of course is whether someone's in or out of it.  It perfectly reflects the underlying chicanery and corruption that permeates the history of the game, so that's why Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver and Pete Rose should be there. Heck, they finally let Leo Durocher in, but only after he was dead long enough so they didn't have to see him standing up on the podium.

Eight miles or so up Otsego Lake--the Glimmerglass of the Fenimore Cooper novels--the Glimmerglass Opera Festival resides in a delightfully-sized theater. The highlight of our visit was the production of Kurt Weill's last musical work, Lost in the Stars, drawn from Alan Paton's novel of the immediate pre-apartheid times in South Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country.  It's a magnificent piece of musical theater--denominated "musical tragedy" by Weill. The summer's artist-in-residence, baritone Eric Owens, played the lead and brought the whole show to the emotional heights it clearly could attain. He has both a fantastic voice and magnificent presence, both celebrated in the past few years as he has made his mark at the Met playing Alberich in two of Wagner's Ring operas--Das Rheingold and Goetterdaemerung. 

The same night he was Amonasro in the "chamber opera" production of what usually is regarded as the last truly grand opera in the standard repertoire, Aida.  While he was also wonderful in this traditional baritone role, he just blew the audience away as Stephen Kumalo in Lost in the Stars. The Aida production took up on the war theme, which is usually kept offstage in the opera. So there are uniformed soldiers all over the place and a unit set serves well to focus attention on the violence underlying the love triangle between tenor, soprano, and mezzo. 

All the voices were fine, as was the conducting by the director of the Cairo Opera. We had earlier heard the Weill conductor, John DeMain, discuss how the production had restored some of Weill's original songs and added a reprise of the title song.  Weill remains a fascinating 20th century composer--both for his work in Germany, such as The Threepenny Opera, written with Brecht's lyrics, and then after he fled to the States, his several Broadway shows, plus movie scores and other work. He was a major player in the movement of the 40s and 50s that brought operatic voices into Broadway musicals and created musicals than verged on the operatic. Gershwin really began this effort with Porgy and Bess, and Richard Rodgers built on that, especially with Carousel, as did Weill; the latter two produced great work despite the vast stylistic differences.

Books and lyrics were always the big problem, in my view, and George Gershwin, aided  by his superb lyricist, his brother Ira, might have been the luckiest. I find that Oscar Hammerstein's words still seem heavy-handed and I expected little better from Maxwell Anderson's work here for Weill. Anderson was a major American playwright who is just about forgotten today, and surprisingly, he did a nice job with Paton's classic. Weill was well-served on an earlier musical, Lady in the Dark, by securing the services of Ira Gershwin for the first time since George's death.

As out-of-towners hitting two performances on the last day of the festival, we were invited to a picnic with the artistic director and some heavy hitters, that was moved indoors by a sudden shower but which was enjoyable anyway. We sat with a delightful lady who hosts the all-night classical music program on WQXR in New York and had delivered a lecture on Aida's relevance to the current Egyptian political  currents.

By the by, should you find yourself in Cooperstown any time soon, and need to dine in what may be the most thriving metropolis in upstate New York, I'd recommend the New York Pizzeria, which is a short ride from the center of town. On the way north, we passed through Richfield Springs on U.S. 20, the old east-west route across New York State.  Not only is the breakfast great at the Tally Ho, but there's even a branch of the New York Pizzeria down the street.

The Phoney War

You can't turn on your TV these days without being deluged by the Super PAC ads and the DNC and RNC ones too. Most are awful but the big money is as always with the GOP as it always has been, since the media was mostly print and it supported the Republicans just as the corporate titans do now.  What's in it for them? More of the don't-let-anything-trickle-down stuff we had with Bush Junior.  

Our pundits act like Ryan has "new ideas"--none but Paul Krugman will say that they are terrible ideas, that all they will do is transfer even more to those that already have the most, not for their work but for their influence. As the late Jimmy Cannon would put it, it's a game only for suckers. People who believe they will win the lottery so they want to get rid of one of the few tools to even things up--the estate tax. We already give Medicare to the millionaires, who of course don't need it but take every red cent they can put their hands on.

Obama brought some of this on himself by trying to work with people who only want to destroy him and ignoring those who wanted to help him achieve his promise and his promises. But now he's the only game in town--sit it out and you get the worst of the worst. You can see it already in Rove's ads and the Supreme Court majority and Mitch McConnell trying to keep the political arena big bucks spenders from having to disclose what they're shelling out their millions for.

Of course the paid media are far more effective now than Hearst or the Chandlers or Col. McCormick were at their worst.  We fall victim to news on the net that focuses of fashion victims rather than real ones.  And the big money feeds lies that there's not enough opposition to fight when the "news" shows treat every issue as having two legitimate sides.