Month: September 2024

HARMONY AMID HORROR

Harmony, as it happens, is the name of a seriously topical musical of the same name. I wish I’d seen.

It came primarily from a seemingly unlikely source — Barry Minilow, who (though I was not aware of it) is Jewish and in the brilliant twilight of his career, though its most public manifestations were melodic juke box hits like “Copacabana.”

But Harmony is serious business about a seriously discordant period of modern human history.

Why am I writing this?

Because I just happened to stumble on a two-year-old review of the show. (It is my habit never to visit the bathroom, public or private, without something to read. Thus, before heading to the privvy, did I pick up a two-year-old magazine from one of my pack-rat-stacked piles of obscure journals (these admittedly being fire hazards which I insist on keeping around for the fire they ignite in my brain).

On this visit to that periodical, I turned to the “stage” section.

And there it was. Something old but still new on a subject that is, sadly, eternal — the undaunted human spirit amid state tyranny, bigotry and terror. And it was, further, a musically relevant offering from the world of show business that did not have its origin on The Voice or America’s Got Talent –and was not seeking to push some politically correct “message” into my ears and down my throat.

Harmony is about a six-member 1930s comedic German singing group with three Jewish members that gets caught in the raging Nazism of Weimer-era Berlin. It’s based on fact and set in the same milieu that is the setting for Cabaret, among the most celebrated stage and screen hallmarks of Seventies America. The group became so famous that they appeared in more than twenty films and toured internationally with the likes of Marlene Dietrich. Manilow and librettist/lyricist Bruce Sussman, according to the review, “tweaked” the show for a quarter century and “devised a cunning range of songs for both the boys’ cabaret act and to illustrate their off-stage drama.”

If Jersey Boys about the The Four Seasons can offer compelling drama in its contemporanious American context, I can only imagine how much off-stage drama can be drawn from the story of a mixed Jewish/Gentile troupe “stayin’ alive” and hiding in plain sight in the world of the Third Reich.

Again, from the review I learned that the show offers songs ” ranging from “snappy, sometimes slightly naughty comic numbers suitable for debauchery-seeking Weimer nightclub audiences to lush ballads such as the standout duet called Where You Go,’ which is sung by the wives of two of the singers.”

Of course, life on and off stage gets complicated for the group and their families, such as when a fan who also happens to be a Nazi officer informs the singers that they “project the image that Germany is amusing and non-threatening.” (Reminds me of how current Russian, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean shills now and then proffer similar, transparently false assurances that their dreadful societies are fun boxes of freedom and light-hearted amusement.)

Among the group’s edgy efforts while on tour to project the truth about their country’s growing agony — in this case, during a show in Copenhagen — is inclusion in the score of a “witty but chilling song” entitled “Come to the Fatherland” which concludes, Or we’ll come to you.

They survived during Germany’s twelve-year Nazi nightmare. In 1933, they came to Carnegie Hall and the NBC airwaves and were tempted to stay but reluctantly, probably wrongly, feared they would not be welcomed here (this according to this review which, by the way, was written by Kyle Smith for the journal New Criterion in June, 2022.)

The show’s narrator,apparently paralleling Joel Gray’s memorable role as Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, is an amiable group member named Chip Zien. I get the sense that that was the name of one of the actual group members, the last of whom died in 1998. Some of his commentary, according to reviewer Smith, is “tense” and “regretful.” His “younger self” wishes it had made different choices than, perhaps, to have stayed home during such a dangerous, horrific time for all Europe and the world, thereby giving any measure of aid and comfort to Nazi oppressors.

The the show is also obviously a tribute to all long-suffering Jewry, to all who shielded and protected the singers, and to Holocaust victims. In fact, the 2022 performance took place at the National Yiddish Theatre in the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan.

Barry Manilow is on record saying Harmony is the career achievement of which he is proudest.

Rightly so.

But have there been any subsequent performances of Harmony over the last two years?

Manilow, Sussman and coreographer Warren Carlyle apparently staged the 2022 version on a very limited budget with minimal sets and scenery changes, relying heavily, according to Smith, on video and photoraphic images.

Some college, or even high school drama department or community theater somewhere should take note. A musical that finds a way to seriously yet entertainingly illuminate the problem of anti-semitism would be very timely indeed.

HURRICANE HELENE

It will be just a storm here. But as of 2:57 p.m., September 25, 2024, there is an ominous gray, a buiding steady ominous breeze, a silence, a realization that some neighbors have fled. Anxiety. The old Florida thing.

It is out there in the Gulf, freshly emerged from Cancun. It will get stronger over warmer waters. Stronger and stronger.

A widening, multi-colored, swirling electronic blob on the TV radar, embracing, it seems, everything and threatening everything and everybody with wind and water. A monster.

I pray. And I think of those quiet Gulf-front villages and roads of the Panhandle, constantly being reconfigured by these ancient, prowling, giant, all-devouring meteorological beasts. In some cases, nearly wiped off the map. Mexico City, for instance. Wiped out.

And they give these creatures names so that they almost have faces, arms, legs, lips. Female or male, they are androgenous bodies destined to dissolve into rain, fluttering and stirring branches on some northern sidestreets until the sun shines again, and all is still and all is memories and so much is broken in its wake.

I must leave my tin and vynl domicile for somewhat safer ground.

AMERICA’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, CIRCA 1975

It’s fun to look at the last chapter of old history text books to see how the authors chose to frame the long past “present moment” for the high school or college student of that hour.

Long ago, at a Tampa, Florida yard sale, I bought a thick (over 800 pages), impressively illustrated American history text book called, The American Nation by Columbia professor John A. Garrity. ( I recall how the working class, thirty-something guy selling it on his front lawn lamented his own failure as a student to value it more –at the very moment he was letting it go for a few dollars.)

The big old tome is notable, at least to me, for how heavily and not inappropriately it vividly emphasizes –right from the first chapter– the often previously neglected or underplayed history of America’s tragic interaction with the slave trade.

The American Nation was first published in 1966; my edition is from 1975. Hence, it ends speaking of Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon. And, in between, of course, the troubled history of the Vietnam War gets extensive treatment.

But back to that last chapter.

It is portentiously titled, “A Search for Meaning.” Garrity evokes and somewhat demolishes what he calls nineteenth century American historian George Bancroft’s “naive assumption” that he was telling the story of God’s American Israel. Adding…

(F)or Americans had always assumed, and not entirely without reason, that their society represented man’s best hope, if not necessarily the Creator’s. The pride of the Puritans in their wilderness Zion, the Jeffersonians’ fondness for contrasting American democracy with European tyranny, what Tocqueville called the “garrulous patriotism” of the Jacksonians, even the paranoid rantings of the latter-day isolationists all reflected this underlying faith. Historians, immersed in the records of this belief, have inevitably been affected by it. Their doubts have risen from what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “the irony of American history”: the people of the United States have been beguiled by their real achievements and the relative superiority of their institutions into assuming that they are better than they are.

(I detect here early signs of the pendulous Obama-era liberal political and academic emphasis on America’s sins and resulting assaults on American confidence that has led to the equal and opposite cry to “make American great again.” But, whatever….)

Among other things, Garrity goes on to asks:

Has modern technology (and this is 1975) outstripped human intelligence?

Has our social development outstriped our emotional development?

Garrity concludes: No one one can currently answer these questions. Nevertheless, we may surely hope that with their growing maturity, their awareness of their own limitations as a political entity, the American people will grapple with them realistically yet with all their customary imagination and energy.

In othe words, he drew up short of any predictions, but gave a nice pat on the shoulder to 1975 Americans before we ran back into the game.

How have we done in fifty years — with our “customary imagination and energy”?

Historian Garrity died on December 19, 2007 at the age of 87. I wonder how he thinks we did on the path to national maturity and emotional development –and did he perceive, in his final years, the unexampled threat Artificial Intelligence added to fears human intelligence might be on the brink of being “outstripped”?

It’s interesting that Garrity invokes the evaluation of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who is also credited with that prayerful evocation of divine trust and human limitations that has, in this increasingly and aggressively secular age, become a staple introductory prayer at meetings of many addiction recovery groups:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Let me hear a big American –Amen!

SAD AND HAPPY FIGURES RECEDING IN THE REAL AND CINEMATIC DISTANCE IN ART AND LIFE

Feel like I’ve indulged in this meditation, or something nearly like it, before.

It has to do with figures, mostly meaning people, viewed as they recede in the distance. It is a familiar trope of Hollywood movies, sometimes sad, sometimes happy at the end of a drama — the hero or the lovers together or a disappointed lover alone walking off down a beach or John Wayne, at the end of The Searchers, walking off alone as the door to the house closes and THE END appears. In a John Steinbeck story called “The Mountains” in his book, The Red Pony, a child has a distant view of a man who’d been a visitor riding off into the mountains.

Edward Arlington Robinson captured such a moment and such thoughts, meditated on them over and over during the long poem, “Man Against the Sky” that begins:

Between me and the sunset, like a dome  
Against the glory of a world on fire,  
Now burned a sudden hill,  
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,  
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
Save one who moved and was alone up there  
To loom before the chaos and the glare  
As if he were the last god going home  
Unto his last desire.  

Well, I’m traveling and constantly saying hello and goodbye to people along the way. But in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, my companion Diane and I checked into a motel and then went looking for a place to have dinner. We pulled into a rather plain and ugly parking lot in front of what looked like a restaurant, but it turned out to be an ice cream place. That wouldn’t do. So we sat checking the internet on our phones in search of another address of another possible eatery. It was dinner time, or just after it in some households.

Now, I’ve been living in Florida, a very flat state with few exceptions, those being up in the panhandle. There are no mountains or notable hills — true hills. This section of Pennsylvania, by contrast, had mountains — be they the Poconos or some stretch of the Appalacian range. The motel looked off toward mountains.

The parking lot where we’d paused was ugly, as noted, and had a strange dip in a break between strip centers where one could drive or walk to a lower parking beyond which there was a steep hill topped by a neighborhood of houses.

As we sat idling in the car, a young boy of about twelve emerged from the ice cream shop with what was certainly his little sister. They commenced to walk toward that macadam dip, probably bound for those house. The boy had a bundle, probably ice cream, destined for the dessert table of one of th ose houses where parents and maybe other siblings happily awaited this post-dinner ice cream feast, or so I imagined.

The little girl — the little sister — appeared to be about six or seven. She was pretty, wore a dress, had long hair and she was…marching! Yes, her happy stride, holding her brother’s hand suggested delighted expectations – for ice cream and for all of her still innocent life. She was marching along with big brother who was just walking, probably kind of used to the way little sister liked to happily muse and march along in life. I watched them, yes, recede from view as they headed down that black tar gully and out of sight. And I said…I’ll remember that picture.

But, as we went to drive away from that parking lot, there suddenly appeared, unexpectedly to one who for five y ears now has dwelt where the last view of anyone or anything is on a flat plane — a fond, heartening, distant vision:

The young boy and his high-stepping, pretty little sister appeared again, side-by-side with their ice cream bundle, rising distantly up that hill toward those houses, small figures now, destined to vanish from my view. But there they were, a distant, receding vision, destined to vanish from my happy view of them and from that moment — forever. I wished I could have followed them, seen the rest of their life’s drama — how life would treat both of them, praying for the very best for them as they climbed that hill, getting smaller and smaller.

They will always be walking — her happily marching, him with his bundle — and that glimpse of them will always linger in my memory. Yes that movies will always be running in my mind..

without my ever seeing on the screen of my memory the words…

THE END

A TOWN WITHOUT SAUCE

Returned to the old town, mill town, never ultimately “home” but home for a long while, but seeming less like home for this moment in time for reasons unclear to me.

Got a steak sub at the local sandwich shop. Had been there a fair number of times before. Didn’t recognize anyone.

Got the sub back to the old neighbor’s house where I was staying and found that it had no sauce on it. None. Just a scumble of beef nestled in plain white bread.

No sauce. No taste. That’s what’s missing in this old town. Maybe it never had any real sauce or taste.

I was sad, trying to remember what the town had tasted like when I was in it. I ate what I could and threw the rest away.