800 Words: Imperfect Shakespeare

"Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion."

- Dr. Samuel Johnson

“It must be own’d’, that with all these great excellencies, he has almost as great defects; and that as he has certainly written better, so he has perhaps written worse, than any other”.

- Alexander Pope

‘His is a fine but untutored nature: he has neither regularity, nor propriety, nor art: in the midst of his sublimity he sometimes descends to grossness, and in the most impressive scenes to

buffoonery: his tragedy is chaos, illuminated by a hundred shafts of light”.

- Voltaire

“Would he had blotted a thousand lines.”

- Ben Jonson

“[Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans] ne’er knew the laws of heroick or dramatick poesy, nor -- faith -- to write true English neighter. [Shakespeare] is many times flat and insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches and his serious swelling into bombast.”

- John Dryden

Those lips that Love's own hand did make

Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate,'

To me that languish'd for her sake:

But when she saw my woeful state,

Straight in her heart did mercy come,

Chiding that tongue that ever sweet

Was used in giving gentle doom,

And taught it thus anew to greet:

'I hate' she alter'd with an end,

That follow'd it as gentle day

Doth follow night, who like a fiend

From heaven to hell is flown away;

  'I hate' from hate away she threw,

  And saved my life, saying -- 'not you.'

- Sonnet 145

Thanks to Professor Taylor’s poetry class during my freshman year, the example of Sonnet 145 stands out in my mind as especially bad Shakespeare. Professor Taylor told us not to worry about writing bad poetry, because even Shakespeare could write verse of incredible badness. He was absolutely right - that sonnet sucks. Nobody, not even anybody in love, ever died a thousand deaths after hearing the person they love saying ‘I hate’ in the instant before wondering if she was about to say ‘you.’ And instead of her hating someone else, it’s just ‘not you.’ This is pure sentimental sop. I don’t doubt it made a thousand corseted ladies of Jane Austen’s generation swoon, but it’s still bad poetry.

In the Age of the Internet, three thousand years of literature seems in danger of death by neglect. Shakespeare is the only literary writer of eminence in the last three thousand years whose survival through it seems completely guaranteed, and in our demotic, egalitarian age, we think of Shakespeare as the pinnacle of literary refinement. But Shakespeare was considered anything but refined for most of the last 450 years. Even those writers who loved him acknowledged his faults. Many of them particularly loved him for his faults. His promotion to ‘Greatest… Writer… Ever...’ was done by critics of the German romantic movement like Goethe and Schiller, Schlegel and Tieck and Herder, and they loved him particularly for his barbarism and his lack of artifice - precisely the qualities which, in today's public imagination, he lacks.

The fundamental problem of Shakespeare in our day is absurdly simple: he’s overexposed. Anyone with even a modicum of aesthetic curiosity knows his plays so well that we can never be surprised by them, and so the wider public views them as effete and pretentious. If you were to compare Shakespeare to classical music, Shakespeare would be a vast plurality of ‘classical’ literature personified. The power he has over literature and theater is the power of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Verdi, and Brahms combined into one figure. Somehow, even in our amnesiac age, Shakespeare is still valued as one of the greatest cultural touchstones. Chekhov and Moliere don’t even have a chance in the theater against Hamlet and Midsummer, Don Quixote, Pantegruel, and Montaigne don’t have a chance against Malvolio, Falstaff, and Hamlet.  But such is his hold over the public’s imagination that surely a generation will one day rise up and say that Shakespeare holds a tyranny over us just as people used to say that classical music and Classical education once did. Furthermore, most contemporary actors sound hopelessly incompetent when speaking Shakespearean verse, and if you can’t make the verse sound natural, the plays fall flat as a pancake. Shakespeare is clearly dying the same death as most Western Art, even if his death is slower. And once he’s dead to the public, will any of the Western Tradition still live for people?

The Shakespeare skeptics are manifold and well known, most famous among them being: Dryden, Pepys, Pope, Voltaire, Darwin, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Tolkien, George Steiner. Some of them liked Shakespeare with reservations, many of them were legitimate. Others hated him. Tolstoy positively loathed him - he saw in Shakespeare, correctly, a base exploitativeness and lack of moral vision, with what he perceived as unbearable tedium in their place. He was particularly savage about King Lear. He regarded the character development as “artificial,” the plot “wholly unbelievable”, and the death scenes “absurd.” Ironically, four years after he wrote about King Lear, Tolstoy’s final act, spent as an 82-year-old man freezing to death in a train station after leaving his family in disgust, was an uncannily similar end to the famous King he so virulently dismissed.  

Voltaire liked Shakespeare, at least when the former was a young man, but constantly bemoaned his ‘barbarism.’ It’s true that Shakespeare emits gales of violence as the sea does waves, and uses his violence as a crutch so that we don’t have to consider deeper issues, but it’s better to accept melodramatic stage violence than to indulge real-life repression. Shakespeare’s fare is clearly unfit for the artifices of Rococo court life, and the artifices of the French court were repressive enough that it caused the entire continent to erupt in unprecedented violence a mere decade after Voltaire’s passing.

Bernard Shaw agreed aboiut the base exploitativeness, and even if Shaw was wrong about Shakespeare, he made his point well.

“Search [in Shakespeare] for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank verse.”

Shaw was a realist who had nothing but contempt for the irrational, considering it a vestige of a bygone era (imagine the invective he’d pour on Game of Thrones…). But Shaw’s own life was an eloquent testament to the limits of rationality. He was as fierce a political polemicist as he was effective a playwright, and unlike many of his plays, he was distinctively idiotic as a newspaper columnist. He called the smallpox vaccination ‘a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft,’ he was a fierce supporter of Stalin and repeatedly called reports of the Soviet famine ‘slanderous,’ he endorsed eugenic projects, and loudly advocated for the exoneration of Nazi War Criminals. Without the humility which irrational speculation provides, these are the types of conclusions toward which pure rationalism leads us.

Some people call Shakespeare’s moral autism ‘cosmic artistry.’ They say that Shakespeare exists beyond worldly concerns, and perhaps they’re right. But we can’t deny that Shakespeare lacks the quality that makes so many other great artists great - a moral sense. Shakespeare is what Ferdinand Schiller would call a ‘naive’ poet, who derives his gift purely from nature and practices his art without any concern for what happens in the world around him. More ‘sentimental’ contemporaries of Shakespeare, who gained their artistic strength from observing the affairs of the wider world, met with terrible fates. Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s great rival as a comic playwright, was tortured. Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great rival as a tragic playwright, was murdered. Shakespeare clearly commented upon world events, but did it so abstractly that no reader or audience member of his time could swear that the situation in his plays were analagous. How can anyone read Hamlet or King Lear and not see the elderly Queen Elizabeth in her declining years. How can anybody read King Lear or Macb*th and not see the specter of the Scottish King James VI; soon to inherit England’s throne and thought by many to have obtained it through corrupt means? How can any audience member of his time see The Tempest and not think of the first colonial settlers leaving for the New World.

But there’s little evidence that Shakespeare was issuing a critique of world events, even an allegorical one. Rather, he was shrewdly playing upon the fears and imaginations of his public as any master showman would, presenting an England and Scotland yet again torn apart by war, or presenting an entirely new world populated by all the magical beings which Francis Bacon’s science was disproving within their own.  

Indeed, to me, Shakespeare is at his best when he preserves the magic and mystery of the universe. In the high tragedies, his psychological insight is so keen that it’s almost clinical. The ferociousness of the characters are almost matched by their need to let us know every nuance of their thought. It is an unbelievable triumph of characterization but also its own worst defect, couching the excitement of the melodrama within pedanticism, crudely juxtaposing a scene of high tragedy with a scene with a scene of low comedy. In life, comedy and tragedy intermingle from the angle of viewpoint, and there are some artists: Mozart, Chekhov, Jean Renoir, Rembrandt, Stephen Sondheim, Kafka, who can blur the distance between comedy and tragedy with effortless ambiguity - every action can seem equally funny and sad. Compared to them, Shakespeare can be downright clumsy, because Shakespeare does not seek to create characters to whom we can relate. His characters may be ‘realer than us,’ but they are not lifelike.

He is, at heart, a completely unspoiled nature. His real identity has to be William Shakespeare, because no nobleman could write with Shakespeare’s lack of artifice. Only a man hugely acquainted with nature could write A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night. Only a man acquainted with earthy lowlives could write the Falstaff plays. Only a man well acquainted with uneasy access to sex could write Romeo and Juliet or As You Like It. And only a man well-acquainted with peasant superstition could have written Macb*th (surely his most effective tragedy) and The Tempest.

The German Romantics were right, Shakespeare’s greatest gift was for his portrayal of nature and the irrational. His greatest psychological portrait is, in fact, in one of his last and slightly less known plays - The Winter’s Tale. Far more than Hamlet or Iago, Leontes is a true portrait of human beings - working themselves up into a fury over completely irrational fears which they acquired for completely irrational reasons. It was as though Shakespeare finally gave up in trying to explain human behavior, and showed us in all our irrational, messy glory. Shakespeare’s irrationality, not his rationalism, was his greatest gift. If we can compare him to a contemporary figure, it would not be a refined artist like Stephen Sondheim or Martin Scorsese or Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe, it would be to an impeccable showman whose theatrical magic always plays to the gallery even as he tries (and often fails) to please the highbrow critics. It would be Steven Spielberg. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare dispenses of twenty scenes in the time it takes most playwrights and directors to get through a single scene. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare has an uncanny eye for melodrama and the cosmically irrational while more fastidious playwrights and filmmakers are hung up on the particularities of their characters’ behavior. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare raised the technique of his particular craft, be it theatrical language or cinematic visuals, to its absolute zenith. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare has an odd double taste for both excessive violence and excessive sentimentality. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare had little taste for polemic or social critique and practiced his art as a master showman. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare excelled in nearly every genre to which he put his hand. Like Spielberg, Shakespeare is endlessly discussed, but ultimately unknowable, seeming to have no personality outside of his work. And like Spielberg, Shakespeare was far better loved as an entertainer than respected as an artist in his own day. Who knows what Spielberg’s reputation may be in two-hundred years time (or twenty..)? But it’s entirely possible that critics living in a less ironic age will find in Spielberg a cosmic artist for all-time - certainly he’s already the most influential artist of our day, and the artist whose absolute genius is agreed upon by the largest number of audience members.

Is Shakespeare the ‘Greatest… Writer… Ever…’? Well..., no. He’s certainly in the first rank, but is there truly justification for calling him a greater writer than Chaucer, or Chekhov, or Moliere, or Cervantes, or Montaigne, or Tacitus, or Kafka, or Ovid, or Homer, or Tolstoy, or Rabelais, or Joyce, or Voltaire, or Aristophanes, or Turgenev, or Pushkin, or Yeats, or whoever wrote certain books of the Bible, or surely many others whom I’ve either not yet read or don’t yet see them for the proper value? How can you possibly rank giants like these? Surely there isn’t such a thing as the ‘Greatest’ in Art. You can’t quantify artistic greatness, you can only qualify it and say ‘this is why it’s great.’ In Shakespeare’s case, he surely designed the greatest linguistic tapestry I’ve ever read, and put it in the service of creating characters of stupendous interior life, placed in scenarios of unbearable excitement, juxtaposing pathos with humor as only a master showman could. Even if he was too bombastic and melodramatic, even if he padded his plays with boring passages, even if he’s over-exposed, even if he gravitates too readily to emotional extremes, even if his fans obsess over him to the point of a cult, even if his plays aren’t particularly relatable, even if he wrote much clearly bigoted material, even if he mistakened psychological insight for moral vision, even if he so often exploited our baser instincts, we should forgive him all his gaucheries. Like we would any greatly valued friend, we forgive Shakespeare his flaws and celebrate his strengths, because a person of such cosmic value should be appreciated for exactly who he is.  

800 Words: Gerard Mortier and the Plight of Opera In Our Time

I.

With the possible partial exception of chamber music, classical music as completely autocratic an artform as exists. Composers dictate to instrumentalists, solo instrumentalists dictate to conductors, conductors dictate to orchestras and choruses, section leaders dictate to rank-and-file members, rank-and-file members dictate to their students, who then grow up to take their place in the same hierarchy, or to leave the field altogether.

But there is a dictator even above the composer, and that dictator is money - whoever can provide the money, whoever can locate the money, whoever can charm or bully the money out of those who already have money. The human imagination is limitless, but reality has very precise limits on what we can make, and those limits are determined by what we can spend. In some artforms, we call them producers, in others, we call them artistic administrators. Either way, they are the true dictators of the arts - they may not be immortal creators, but only a Medici can make a Michelangelo possible.

The Peter Principle dictates that most people are vastly unqualified for the jobs they occupy. And it’s a fairly practical rule of thumb that most artistic administrators are vastly, vastly underqualified to fill the positions they have, and some even use the power they amass simply for their own personal gain. Just think of Hollywood. Even in today’s corrupted, hollow American film culture, which has debased the world’s most powerful cultural institution into a morass of computer effects, explosions, and dumb romantic comedies, there are still a few great film producers like Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin and Tim Bevan and Irwin Winkler - moneymen of foresight and vision whose main goal is to provide the public with great art. If these businessmen lose a little bit of money on the bottom line, it doesn’t matter, because they have a faithful, even if relatively small, audience of people who want to see a better product than most of the crap Hollywood churns out. And even if they occasionally make startling errors in judgement, it’s better to have people like them in the positions of ultimate power than it is to have other, more selfish, types of people.

Through the centuries, the world of politics has become more democratic, but the world of business, and especially the world of art, remains a dictatorship. Human expression may be freer in our century than ever before, but the possibilities of human expression is still a slave to whoever controls the profit margins - be it in the world of artistic expression, or be it in the world of living wages.

Without the Medicis or Pope Julius, there’s no Michelangelo, without Razumovsky and Lobkowitz, there’s no Beethoven, without Irwin Winkler and Roger Corman, there’s no Martin Scorsese. And imagine what further glories might have resulted if Mozart, or Van Gogh, or Kafka, or Orson Welles, found a faithful benefactor whose support could have nursed them through the more fallow periods. But nevertheless, are there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of film operatives whose main interest is in exploiting the art of film for their own personal benefit. The evidence that they exist is that there isn’t more great work.

(The Player… the ultimate movie on this phenomenon)

II.

Twice in the last two months, I’ve run into a friend-of-a-friend in my favorite Baltimore bar - an interesting person certainly. She’s an art historian at the Maryland Institute College of Art who grew up in Brussels, her American father being a vocal coach at La Monnaie and then at the Dresden Semperoper when she was older. She literally grew up in Gerard Mortier’s La Monnaie. I kept trying to pry her about the experience of growing up in the opera world, a dream childhood for the kid I was, but it was an experience she was clearly loathe to talk about.

The first time I met her was right as I’d begun to direct Figaro. The second time was the night before the second performance. Certainly, my attitude to the project and the possibilities of doing great things with opera in general had soured enormously in the elapsing time. There were all sorts of things in my staging that weren’t working theatrically in that production, I knew it, the cast knew it, the producer certainly did. But I felt extremely defensive about it - at least I was trying to create something different and new in an artform that has no future and only a past from which it can’t escape and most of whose audiences always yawn with indifference. Just a little more tolerance from a few of them might have made all the difference and let us arrive at something which would have made everybody happy - myself included - because the audience might have sat with something other than respectful silence. The staging certainly felt better on the second night - at least the audience laughed sometimes. But even on the much more successful second night, there were periods when I could feel the audience’s energy draining, its patience wearing thin. Their patience might have worn still thinner had I gotten carte-blanche to retool things in the unorthodox way I saw fit, but then again, it might not have… Opera as it’s generally practiced, at least in America, is just a snobbified version of music theater. In both worlds, too many singers (though hardly all… not even the majority…) are more interested in their own territory than in the combined effect of the production, and intellectual curiosity seems next to nil. It is a playground for narcissism, and its performers are so enamored of their own voices that they don’t notice the audience slipping away. The majority of opera’s audience has long since slipped away, but the audience of music theater (or lack thereof) is beginning to catch up. In the 1950’s, musical theater was the cultural lingua franca of our country. Everybody knew the same songs, the same lyrics, the same tunes. Today, the only thing Broadway is well known for is the technological sophistication of its scenery - and most of its performers are too self-enamored to notice. Good product is still being made, but at an ever-decreasing rate.

And perhaps my frustration had opened her up a bit. Though I’ve never met her father, I don’t doubt that he had many experiences like mine, though on a much larger scale.  As our mutual friend - another MICA professor - sat with us, we had to explain to him the realities of opera in Europe, a world he could barely believe exists. There is absolutely the same hidebound opera traditionalism in Europe that there is in America. But among European audiences, there is an extreme bifurcation.  She explained to him the ‘cocaine and sodomy’ rule of European opera. It often seems an unwritten rule that every European production contains them both - as though the presence of either can shock a 21st century audience.

There is a surprisingly large contingent of European opera lovers who believe in opera as a revived contemporary artform. They flock to every production with a new conception, and every directorial divergence is celebrated as a milestone in the development of a new conception of opera. They honor every composer who composes within the framework of their particular dogma - no matter the quality of how well they compose within that framework, and they treat those performers who play outside the framework of which they approve with truly vicious contempt.

It’s all rather amusing, but they inspire no fear or dislike in me in the way more traditional opera crowds do.  At least they still have intellectual curiosity, misguided as they’ve pointed it, and at least they clearly love the artform enough to care about its future. They live in a dream world, but at least it’s a dream world of today, and not the dreamworld of a bygone era.  

I’m more than aware of the weird contortions of my opinions on opera. Here I was, an avowed opera traditionalist who once wrote a long post on this blog called “Keep Opera Dumb!”, who decamped to the extremes of ‘regietheater’ the moment I got my hands on an opera stage. I understand why these extremists feel the way they do - it’s the desperate move which anyone of an intellectual bent would feel the urge to make in a field such as this one, starved of attention and affection.  Today’s public has no organic connection to this music, so in lieu of that, we have to make artificial connections. Operatic ‘regietheater’ is already a compromise - combining the music of yesterday with the theatrical techniques of today - but I did my best to create a compromise within that compromise. A thoroughly untraditional traditional staging of the type that can now be seen regularly at the  Metropolitan Opera during the Peter Gelb era (albeit millions of dollars less expensive). No matter how reformed the staging seems, it’s still always thoroughly grounded in tradition, and as a result, you can now see even the kind of nudity and graphic sex at the Met that scandalizes my grandmother’s generation. But even so, the updates always seem to make sense, and the failures are still failures because they hew too close to the tradition, not because they divorce themselves from it. I doubt these developments will do anything more than give opera a short-term bump in interest - but at least the European fanatics have the courage of their convictions, and it will keep their vision of the artform alive a little longer than we will ours.

We never hear about the banal exploiters who keep the arts mediocre because they thrive in a world in which the destruction of their activities attract no publicity. But we always hear, very loudly, about the reforming demagogues who promise us a glorious new world, because their very advancement depends on publicity. Inevitably, these supposed revolutionaries are just reactionaries in red clothing. It’s a refreshing change, but the world they promise never sounds that exciting, and the world they provide is only slightly preferable to a world in which people strive for nothing more than mediocrity.

Classical music has long had Pierre Boulez to fill this role, though who knows for how much longer, but opera had Gerard Mortier, who died two days ago. He was the self-proclaimed prophetic impresario of opera’s new dawn, and spent truly breathtaking amounts of public funding in order to achieve his vision of what opera should be. But where was his Beethoven? Where was his Michelangelo?

He was a controversial figure, and not without his merits - would that so many artistic administrators insisted on intellectual competence from their forces. He was, without a doubt, the most influential operatic producer of the age. Thanks to him, so many voices of the ‘modernist’ school - composers, directors, conductors, even singers… - have their place in the opera world. But he was also a fanatic and a shyster whose methods brought down one of American culture’s greatest institutions. What Mortier never understood was that his great new operatic world looks a lot more like the old one than any of his most fervent admirers were willing to admit. The fare he provided was fundamentally the same operas, with the same types of voices, and the same instrumentation. When he brought his ersatz revolution to the harsh realities of New York, the only place he ever operated without Europe’s unsustainable social safety net, the harsh realities crashed in on him. He promised a new golden age at the New York City Opera, and young idiots like me thought about to moving to New York just so we could be around it. The end result was that by trying to bring a new world into action, he absolutely destroyed the old one (and make no mistake, Gerard Mortier destroyed the City Opera) without putting a single thing in its place.

The New York City Opera was ‘The People’s Opera.’ Charging far less for nights at the opera, taking risks on young singers, more innovative productions, and new composers which the Metropolitan Opera wouldn’t dare in the heydays of Edward Johnson and Rudolf Bing. But like so many once-great American institutions, it had become mediocre for at least twenty years when Mortier took it over. But like all those once great American institutions, there was no reason why it couldn’t stay mediocre for another twenty years until a more practical manager came along to provide a greater result. Like so much of America, its temporary decline was inevitable, but it was expedited by bad, perhaps even corrupt management - which allowed one of the Koch Brothers to donate a all the money it took to rennovate its building and slap his name on it, but seemed unable to make the Koches cough up a cent to help with artistic management.

But the City Opera didn’t need to die. Only Mortier's kind of fanatical mindset could have killed it. He cancelled a year of production so that more money could be raised for ‘next year’s productions’ which were far grander in scale and had appeal to only 'special interest' people like me could. His plan meant paying the orchestra, paying the stagehands, paying for the maintenance, with absolutely no money coming in that was not from solicited contributions. It was, for all intents and purposes, a hostage crisis in which an extremist starves his prisoner to death unless his demands are met. And when it became clear that his demands wouldn't be met, Mortier absconded to the Teatro Real in Madrid rather than help the City Opera get out of the mess he created himself. It demonstrated, conclusively, that Mortier’s methods were tantamount to cultural extortion. It was all the problems of the European social system writ small and brought to America. It makes one almost starry-eyed for the good old days when mediocrity and corruption ruled this country.

Mortier and his ilk stake their claim of reform on two different planks, both of which can be refuted in a matter of seconds. One is the de facto ban on populist opera composers like Verdi and his Italian predecessors in the Bel Canto tradition, and most of his successors in the Verismo movement - as though the nostalgic pleasures of Italian opera are any more un-progressive to the vast majority of the Modern Era’s ears than operas from the rest of Opera History. The only other difference on which they can stake their ‘revolutionary’ claims is in the theatrical settings - fundamentally using minimally bare and functional stages as though that’s been shocking at any point since the 50’s, onstage sex as though it’s been shocking at any point since the 60’s, and high-tech stage violence as though that’s shocking at any point since the 70’s. Like Boulez, Mortier proclaimed yesterday’s revolution for tomorrow. The museum is showing the same exhibits, they’ve just repainted the walls.

There is an absolutely huge disconnect in today’s ‘director-driven’ opera between the modernity of the staging and the ever-increasing intensity of the search for ‘authenticity’ and the ‘composer’s intention’ which happens in the pit. No matter how supposedly ‘weird’ the staging, the music is the same from performance to performance, while the theatrical setting is always changing. The result is that the musical performances will win no converts - it will tell people everything about what you already know. If people were not well-disposed to opera previously, they will be disposed no better after it’s completion. And while these new theatrical concepts will prove revelatory to some and make a few converts (with all a ‘convert’s fanaticism), it will strike most people at best as a lot of effort exerted for too little good result. No matter how hard the attempts of all those who wish to see opera thrive, it is  at best a secondary artform in our time, and is likely to be a secondary artform of many times to come.

I am all for the re-imagining of texts to fit a different context.  But if so many directors insist upon re-imagining stage action, why shouldn't more conductors insist on re-imagining scores?  Mahler and Stokowski would re-orchestrate and change tempo/dynamic markings to fit the parameters of their times with extreme liberality, so why don't conductors re-arrange scores for our own time? Why shouldn’t we hear Handel done by rock bands or Strauss refitted by DJ’s for turntables. If that idea reads like a lame or pathetic stab at contemporariness, then let me ask, is it any lamer or more pathetic than most of the ‘modernist’ stagings we see in opera? If it fits the production and the conception is sound, why shouldn't we reimagine Figaro with electronic instruments or Tristan with pre-recorded over-dubs?  Many performers always maintain that each performance demands its own rules which can only be determined at the moment of performance, but what a performer decides that the rules of this particular performance contradict the score in more fundamental ways than one's choice of tempo or dynamics or the historical period of the instruments’ make?  Should we condemn the performer for tampering so blatantly with the composer’s conception, or should we praise him or her for shedding such new light?

Opera, as it’s currently taught in schools and publicized to theatergoers, is as close to dead as an artform can possibly be. The great theater of the twentieth century which combines music with theater is musical theater, in which lyrics finally take their place on the grand stage as equally important, perhaps moreso, than the music itself. The grand tradition of opera as a dominant artform basically died in the 1920’s with Strauss, Puccini, Berg, and (retrospectively) Janacek. Britten and Adams have given us noble efforts to revive a moribund tradition, and Shostakovich would have too had Lady Macb-th of Mtsensk not been censored by Stalin. Many would say that Prokofiev and Hans Werner Henze have as well, or Philip Glass and Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Michael Tippett and Bohuslav Martinu. But theirs are operas fundamentally made with the ideas of former times, with the instruments of former times, and the vocal techniques of former times.The operas of all of these composers, even Britten sadly, seem commentaries on what has already taken place. To justify the massive funding which grand opera requires, these are operas which would need the same massive popular appeal of Mozart and Verdi if they want to have lives of their own, and the fact that they have no demonstrable popular appeal without the propagation of state funding, or as a token modern production to set against the steady diet of Aida, La Boheme, and Carmen, demonstrates their ineffability. Were any of these composers, even Britten, played as often as Rossini or Puccini, they would never sell more than a hundred tickets in a single performance. One day, the performance venues which cater to their tastes will be shut down, and the audiences which like such minority fare will shout bloody murder. Perhaps murder it is, but it will not prevent their doom.

Perhaps a future era will come when such ‘minority tastes’, uncorrupted by popular voices, will become what is popular and healthy. And just as Mahler has attained a posthumous, thriving life in the concert hall, and Janacek seems now to be attaining in the opera house, perhaps so too will their successors - who await a generation that understands them in a manner that people like me clearly don’t. But such an era, which has rid itself of the producer’s autocracy, will probably have too many of its own concerns and expressions of to take anything more than a cursory interest in the minority tastes of an era long gone. With a few exceptions, like Britten and Adams, I highly doubt that these opera composers have not already seen the height of their popularity. The traditional environs of classical music still have a little life left in them, even as their audiences grow ever older. No one could have predicted Mahler’s resurgence in the mid-20th century, nobody could have predicted that the early music movement would have revived interest in Handel’s operas so greatly. Perhaps the winds of change will bring a newer opera composer of eminence to heights of popularity of which he could only dream as he was writing and premiering his work. If it’s going to be anyone, it will probably be Britten or Adams, but no one can say for sure who it might be, or whether there will be any composer at all who will ever be so revived again.

And that’s sad, because a lot of good opera was written in the three later quarters of the 20th century, even if there wasn’t enough… I even believe that a few of them may have a future if opera itself has a future - Peter Grimes of course and The Turn of the Screw, perhaps Billy Budd and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Doctor Atomic and Nixon in China, Lady Macb-th of Mtsensk, maybe a number of Prokofiev or Philip Glass operas might survive if most people’s aesthetic priorities are different from mine (and they generally are). But no one can deny, this is hardly a golden period to set against the 19th century’s remarkable flowering. Once the Great Depression hit the world, it wasn’t just the money which dried up, it was the gilded commercial class which sponsored opera as we know it - and which gave the more populist, working classes some joy to add to the squalor with which their masters kept them.

(Was a greater song written in the 20th century?)

Of course, there were other operas from the period immediately after Strauss, Berg, Janacek, and Puccini, which you could measure against them to show that opera emphatically had not died - The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny, The Eternal Rode, Street Scene, Porgy and Bess, Strike Up The Band, Funny Face, Show Girl, Girl Crazy, Of Thee I Sing. Because after the age of Strauss, Berg, Janacek, and Puccini came the age of Gershwin and Weill. It was a new kind of opera - lighter, more portable, less expensive. The instrumentation was far less sophisticated, the singers’ voices could be much lighter, and the stage could be miked electronically. And because singers could project so easily, singers of untraditional voice-types could be used, and the lyrics which were sung could be projected far more easily - and therefore could be written with far greater complexity. With Gershwin and Weill, opera ceased to be opera as it was ever before understood. The Age of Opera was dead, and a new tradition and era, the ‘Age of the Musical’ was born - Show Boat, Cradle Will Rock, Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse, Pal Joey, On Your Toes, Paris, Fifty Million Frenchmen, Gay Divorce, Kiss Me Kate, Panama Hattie, Let’s Face It, Something for the Boys, Mexican Hayride,  Anything Goes, Can-Can, Silk Stockings, Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun, Kismet, My Fair Lady, The Music Man, No Strings, Hello Dolly, Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, The King and I, Cabaret, Chicago, Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella, The Man of La Mancha, Camelot, Once Upon a Mattress, She Loves Me, The Wiz, Hair, Damn Yankees, Peter Pan, The Sound of Music, Milk and Honey, Oliver!, Funny Girl, Sweet Charity, Mame, 1776, Godspell, Grease, Pippin, Annie, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Evita, 42nd Street, Nine, Dreamgirls, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, La Cage aux Folles, Little Shop of Horrors, Chess, Cats, Les Miserables, Starlight Express, The Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Once On This Island, Tommy, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Ragtime, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Randy Newman’s Faust, Rent, Urinetown, Hairspray, Avenue Q, Wicked, Spamelot, The Light on the Piazza, Elton John's Aida, Jersey Boys, In the Heights, Billy Eliot, The Book of Mormon, Once, On the Town, Wonderful Town, Candide,  West Side Story, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, Passion - none of these including strictly movie musicals of both Disney animation or the great live action movie musicals of the Golden Age of the Hollywood Studios, and all of these leading up to and drawing down from the work of Stephen Sondheim, a theatrical creator of a power unseen since Mozart and Shakespeare, whose work is so cosmically imaginative in that not a single creator of any type of theater in our time has come even close to his achievement.

You don’t have to like all of these shows (god knows I don’t…) or even most of them. And furthermore, as Broadway musicals have grown more successful, they’ve grown as expensive and decadent as grand opera at its most Turandot-like, money-strewn musical theater for a second Gilded Age. Like the operas of Donizetti and Bellini, the early musicals were written with practical questions of economy in mind. In a sense, perhaps their quality suffered as a result, but because of those early efforts, they made later, greater, efforts possible, when more money was available to stage something more risky.

Unlike opera, this is clearly a living tradition in which people never have to worry about its long term survival. It is a ‘majority taste.’ And even if not a single great musical is ever written again, it can survive on its reviving its current repertoire for at least the 90 years which opera has thus far survived as a’ minority taste.’ In the world of music theater, people worry about the dumbing down of the artform, in the world of opera, people worry about its very existence. Unlike every opera composer since Puccini, there is no way you can get through life in the Western World completely untouched by musical theater, even if you hate it.

There is no denying it, this is a musical and theatrical tradition to set alongside opera - the opera of our time, a record of our age, and the fact that ‘opera’ is no longer the term used for music theater simply shows how apart the world has grown from the necessity of opera as we’ve ever understood it. However debased music theater seems in comparison to a generation or two ago, it still shows that it’s a living artform, more affected by contemporary concerns than with the baggage of history. History is still being made in music theater, and that is why it is the opera of our time.  

800 Words: Reuniting with West Side Story

I have just seen West Side Story twice this weekend at the Baltimore Symphony. As James Earl Jones would say, the memories were so thick I had to brush them away from my face. During 'America' I was five years old, watching Buddy Rich on PBS with John Williams and the Boston Pops, playing Buddy’s jazz version of the piece, the first I’d ever heard. During 'Maria' I was eight years old, watching the Three Tenors with my parents and Bubbie. During the 'Mambo' I was twelve at music camp, away from home for the first time and watching the New England Music Camp Symphonic Band play the Symphonic Dances of West Side Story. During the 'Dance at the Gym', I was fourteen years old, playing Doc and Glad Hand in a production of West Side Story in which the director instructed me to create a dance during it in a manner so uninhibited and crazy that it would cover up the fact that nobody on stage could dance any better than me. (It still makes me laugh to think about it. The experience of being in West Side Story is no doubt a post in itself... but that's a post to be written on another day/year/decade)

I'm sure I was far from the only person in the audience who feels that way. West Side Story is so much a part of the American DNA that it's impossible to go through life in America without encountering it at all sorts of felicitous moments. If you've never heard a song from it, you might as well have never heard Bob Dylan or James Brown. And yet, since my childhood, West Side Story had very little to do with my life, yet it was such a prominent part of my life's fabric until I was 14 that it never felt as though it left me. All through the time I familiarized myself with Company and Sunday in the Park with George, with Candide and the Jeremiah Symphony, playing in the pit for Wonderful Town and screwing up the violin solo in the Chichester Psalms, watching Bernstein's Mass in Baltimore with stinking revulsion and Sweeney Todd in London with unalloyed joy, the score of West Side Story which I could practically sing and orchestrate from memory was there. Yet this weekend was the first truly sustained acquaintance I've had with the show in nearly twenty years, and what a weekend it was...

Many people have gone to many more concerts than I, but I’ve been to so many memorable ones. I’ve wiped away tears as I watched Charles Mackerras lead the Philharmonia in Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass, and I’ve watched dozens of people wipe away tears as Leon Fleischer played Brahms’s arrangement of Bach’s Chaccone for left-hand piano, I watched Mavis Staples give a Golden Age Soul performance in 2011 and I’ve watched Bob Dylan fall to his knees, I’ve heard the Vienna Philharmonic play the Schubert and Dvorak of a lifetime and the Boston Symphony play Ives and Gershwin better than I’ll ever hear it again, I’ve watched Ozzy Osbourne sing a beat-and-a-half behind his band and I’ve watched Earl Scruggs play banjo at top speed when he was three limbs in the grave, I was there for the New York premiere of Le Grand Macabre and the Met premiere of Nixon in China, I’ve seen Aretha Franklin’s hat from across the National Mall and I’ve watched James Brown try to seem contemporary by leading a 2004 audience in a chant of ‘Whoop! Der’t Is!’. I’ve watched Daniel Barenboim conduct Beethoven in honor of the Olympics and James Levine conduct Verdi’s Requiem in honor of Pavarotti’s passing, I’ve been to Alfred Brendel’s last concert in America and Carlo Bergonzi’s last staged opera performance, I've watched Ravi Coltrane play jazz in Grant Park to an audience of 50,000 and Mark O'Connor play fiddle tunes in a black box theater to an audience of twenty, I’ve seen Don Giovanni and Peter Grimes in the theaters where they were premiered, I watched Yuri Temirkanov conduct Shostakovich’s Babi Yar Symphony in the presence of the poet whose music Shostakovich set and I watched Music for 18 Musicians two seats away from Steve Reich, I watched Gustavo Dudamel perform The Rite of Spring to an audience of students and I watched David Zinman lay the groundwork for what a modern American conductor was supposed to do in Baltimore when nearly every other orchestra in America was stuck in the 1800’s. But in all these years, I’ve never been so sure that I was watching something resembling a cosmic event, a performance so powerful, so revelatory, that in some miniscule way it altered the curve of history, and the world, in its small way, was a different place than it was before we heard this concert.

Now, to be sure, I've been to better performances than this (not much), and I've certainly been to better performances of better music than this. But for the first time, I felt like I was part of a unique experience of a that nobody ever experienced before those of us fortunate enough to be in the hall. The premise was simple - a live orchestra to accompany the movie version of West Side Story. The technology to create a concert like this was simply absent until the last few years, and the result was that we could experience West Side Story in real time with a full 110-piece orchestra playing every note of the score... and then some. Passages that sound tinny when played by a dozen musicians come through with an apocalyptic, Wagnerian, power and passion. I don't know if West Side Story will ever be understood, but we came a little closer to understanding it this weekend.

The problem is, Leonard Bernstein hated the movie music, and accused the orchestrator of destroying his score. It's not a completely unfair accusation. The movie 'overture' completely destroys the shock of a Broadway Musical beginning with a ballet of gang warfare. The 'Somewhere' ballet sequence is completely cut out, and songs as wonderful as 'One Hand, One Heart' and 'A Boy Like That' are hacked to pieces. Every potentially controversial line which Sondheim wrote is replaced by something thoroughly bland so that it doesn't offend the delicate sensibilities of Middle America. But it's also true that some scenes are better than in the original score - America is better when sung and danced by the entirety of the Sharks and not just their women, Officer Krupke and Cool switch places for the movie, and the switch makes far more sense than the original order. 

But there are other problems - most importantly, the movie itself isn't that great. As the central pairing, Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood kind of stink. They suck out all the energy of their scenes together. Marlon Brando was eager to play Tony, and even if he was nearly 40, he'd have been a much better choice to play a street tough gone soft than this no-name would be matinee idol who resembles no one so much as Zeppo Marx. But at least Beymer had an adequate voice. Natalie Wood couldn't even sing her part and Marni Nixon had to be brought in every day to anonymously cover for her bad singing. As for her acting, she's at least better than Beymer. Though if she were acting next to Brando, god knows if she could have kept up. Perhaps the pair that was meant to be was Wood and James Dean reuniting for the first time since Rebel Without A Cause (a movie whose influence on the musical cannot be overestimated), but by the time this movie was made, Dean had been dead for almost six years. If the movie has a great performance, it's George Chakiris as Bernardo, and the movie never recovers after he dies. Rita Moreno is good as Anita, but not as great as people say - using her energetic body language to convey a "stock Latina" rather than a fully individual character.

But some of the problems can't even be blamed on the movie. The score is amazing, but it's schizophrenic - two musicals in one. Leonard Bernstein was fully able to create the jazzy Gershwin-like atmosphere of the streets, and when the play demanded Verdi-like operatic love, Bernstein provided the required over-the-top passion in spades. The problem is that this over-the-top passion has no place in a show like West Side Story. It is a pre-modern sentiment within an entirely modern story. In an era of arranged and shotgun marriages, when marriages of convenience were the norm, love as it’s experienced on the pre-20th century stage was the norm. Most people experienced (or expected to experience) a few days of true love in their lifetimes. So the immediate declarations and the extravagant sentiments of those scenes were probably much truer to their experience than it is to ours. But West Side Story demanded something much less mawkish than it was provided.

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

The truth is that the great glory of West Side Story was always the dancing. The whole show was Jerome Robbins's idea, and there had never been a 'serious' musical in which dancing was so crucial to a show's success. Robbins's choreography was always like an encyclopedia of dance styles - the Dance at the Gym has the rival gangs trying to control the whole stage with the Sharks rhumba-ing while the Jets do the Chicken, or think of Fiddler on the Roof when the Russian peasants weave a Kazatzky through the raised arms of Hassidic Jews dancing the Hora..Jerome Robbins, like Leonard Bernstein, was a genius who killed his own talent. Both of them thought that Broadway was beneath them, and strove mightily to create masterpieces in their respective classical corpuses which eluded them for the entirety of their careers. They never understood that rhe classical worlds of music and ballet as they envisioned them never existed, nor would it ever. Broadway was, in fact, the American classical world. Because regardless of genre, greatest masterpieces are as populist in nature as they are elite, representing the perfect fusion of intellect and emotion. The 20th century classical world was simply to stuffy to accommodate anything which smacked of emotion, just as many more popular groups are too stupid to accommodate anything which smacks of intellect. It is generally agreed that Bernstein or Robbins never created anything so memorable for the concert hall and ballet stage as they did on Broadway, and when they left Broadway, Broadway never had a chance for a plethora of achievements to equal the best in film and popular music. But their absence did pave the way for one towering figure to accomplish alone what no creative team ever did.

Stephen Sondheim is the closest thing we've had in nearly half-a-millenium to a theatrical figure whose achievement equals Shakespeare - and the fact that he did it at a moment when the appeal of live theater seems on the wane makes his achievement that much more miraculous. Unlikely as it currently seems, it may transpire that live theater could soon be obliterated completely by movies, television, the internet, and virtual reality. And if that (admittedly) unlikely historical event happens, Sondheim will be remembered as the last true theatrical genius. But in West Side Story, we barely have any idea of what his talent has in store for us. His hands were completely tied in this work. There were so many 'wrong' moments in West Side Story that his genius could barely show through. How could he possibly turn songs like 'Maria' and 'I Feel Pretty' into something cosmic when the sentiment was completely wrong for the show's plot? When the show gets modern in moments like 'America' and 'Officer Krupke', we see him reaching out to his full powers, but when the show turns pre-modern, all he could do is write lyrics which sound as dumb as in any 19th century opera. For years, people wondered why Robbins, Sondheim, and Bernstein didn't team up again. When they began a failed attempt in the late 60's to adapt a Brecht play into a musical, Sondheim was immediately asked why they hadn't tried to collaborate since West Side Story. His answer was one word: "Wait..."

The fact remains, West Side Story is the Great American Show. The Citizen Kane of American theater – the summit to which every piece of theater before was leading, and every piece since was a reaction. The one-off moment when America’s three greatest young theatrical talents put their titanic egos aside to make a musical together. The result was a sublime achievement on a level that in so many ways has never been equaled in the history of America – a seemless fusion of dance and song, a perfect melding of grand opera with popular idiom, and most importantly, a piece that speaks to the entirety of the American experience; both native and immigrant, on a level that no other piece of theater ever equaled, and perhaps never could. It gives the poorest and crassest of America’s residents a high dignity that humanizes them to people who’d cross the street to avoid these characters. And yet, it’s also totally ridiculous… with gang members speaking in a mixture of slang that probably dated already in 1957 and bad love poetry.


(Bernstein revisits West Side Story, an invaluable document of a recording disaster. Also worthwhile because you get to hear Lenny swear!!!)

If West Side Story has coherence, we haven't found it yet. And like most great works, every performance has been stunningly inadequate to the task of capturing its full power. The original cast album is still the best, but it feels like a rough draft. The performers are probably better than any since have been, but the details of Bernstein's writing are completely glossed over with bad cuts, shoddy playing from a too small orchestra, and tempos that are clearly faster than Bernstein and Sondheim intended. The movie version gets lots of things more right than the original, with dancing that's even more involved than the original choreography, and but where it goes wrong it's a travesty. Bernstein's own recording of the complete score is both a miracle and a grotesque disaster. The sheer detail of the orchestral parts come through as never before, and the love music is so utterly beautiful that it's difficult not to be moved to tears by it. But Bernstein made a fatal decision - it would be sung by opera singers. Tony was sung by Jose Carerras with a thick-as-oil Spanish accent (!), and Tatiana Troyanos sang Anita with all the sexiness of a troll. Bernstein made two recordings of the Symphonic Dances - a suite of orchestral music from the score - the first was incredibly sloppy, the second was drained of vitality. Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Symphonic Dances much better than Lenny ever did. The 2009 revival at least doesn't rush the tempos ahd contains great dancing, but the orchestra's smaller than ever, and the singing is as bad as on Bernstein's recording. Rather than too operatic, the revival version sounds as though sung by the cast of Glee or Rent - with vibrato-less belting and sliding into notes galore. I have yet to hear much of the 1980 revival, but what I've heard has some enormous strengths. Maybe it succeeded where the others failed, but I doubt it. 

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


(Finally, WSS from the point of view of the Sharks. Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Symphony of Venezuela.)

There is, unfortunately, something about West Side Story's importance which makes performers either too timid or too ego-driven to do justice to the piece. West Side Story was considered a classic from the moment that unfortunate movie was released. West Side Story has become the first and probably the most important of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of the American Lyric Theater along with Gypsy and A Funny Thing Happend on the Way to the Forum (no doubt a disputable claim) - as important to the American musical theater as The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte are to the European (but with Anyone Can Whistle and Candide being potential additions to the center if anybody can ever find convincing ways to stage them). What those three musicals achieved was something that was more than just the achievement of a great individual. It was a triumph, a short-lived triumph, of collaboration.

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

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