Boston Arts Diary

Play with Music

With Hershey Felder as Leonard Bernstein

Hershey Felder as Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein (1918 – 1990) led a charmed and a complex life.

After training as a pianist, composer and conductor, in 1943, at the age of 25, he stunned the world, when, as Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he filled in for conductor Bruno Walter and exhibited such talent and gusto that he became a star overnight.

But composition was his first love.

He had early success as a composer of a Broadway musical, On the Town (1944), and then, somewhat later, of the musicals Candide (1956) and, then, West Side Story (1957), from which he became wildly famous.

He also composed less well-known, serious works, including three symphonies, Jeremiah (1942), The Age of Anxiety (1949) and Kaddish (1963).

In the late 1950s, in his late 30s, he became the director of the New York Philharmonic and established his reputation as one of the world’s leading conductors. He held that position until the late 1960s.

But serious composition was Bernstein’s first love and he was never really able to bring to fruition the sort of accomplishment in that arena to which he aspired. In addition to his symphonies, he did compose song cycles, a mass and miscellaneous other shows and pieces, but it appears he felt that his classical compositions never really hit home.

In the end, Bernstein found himself being remembered mainly as the composer of famous songs from West Side Story and saw, as a result, his attempt to make his mark as a serious composer had been a failure.

Hershey Felder as Leonard Bernstein

Bernstein’s love life was also complicated.

Married for many years to Felicia Cohn Montealegre, and the father of three children with her, he took up, in his middle years, with a series of male lovers and ultimately left Felicia to live with one of them. Though that relationship did not endure, and Bernstein returned to his wife, she was not to live for long afterwards. In this regard, Bernstein witnessed the painful implications of his behavior for her and their children.

Leonard Bernstein

I saw Hershey Felder do his George Gershwin show at the American Repertory Theatre some years back (Felder announced it was about eleven years ago) and remembered it very fondly.

There is no disappointment in his reappearance here as Leonard Bernstein.

Adorned with a grey hairpiece (it is so intentionally obvious, but not unappealingly so, it almost seems like a skullcap), he takes the audience, autobiographically, through a tour of Bernstein’s life and works, replete with anecdotes and reflections along the way.

Felder is not only a talented actor, but an excellent pianist, and plays, expertly, renditions of many of Bernstein’s compositions, and those of others, so one gets, truly, a very well executed, dramatized concert.

And he is funny – very funny – doing imitations of Bernstein’s Yiddische father, complete with a totally authentic accent and a symphony of gestures and grimaces.

Felder gives a thorough, but not at all ponderous, depiction of Bernstein’s youthful determination – despite his father’s opposition – to play piano, his initial aspirations as composer, his early training as a conductor, and the following sequence of his remarkable successes.

Felder not only plays the piano, but he sings as well. Much of the time his singing is nuanced and beautiful.

My only serious complaint about this otherwise superb production is that when Felder sings out loudly and attempts to project, it seems – either because of his failure to modulate his voice well enough or because of the failings of the amplified sound system design – as though he were screaming. It is an unfortunate element of a production which is singularly wonderful in so many regards; hopefully, Felder and his staff could address this in some way.

And, though beautifully played, the segment devoted to the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde goes on too long. I did get the importance of the reference to tragic and intense love, but a few bars less would have made the same point more effectively.

Leonard Bernstein
Photo by Jack Mitchell

I felt I came out of the performance with a real and vivid sense of who Bernstein was, and a deep appreciation for Felder’s capacities as a biographer-dramatist-musician.

The performance not only gave a wonderful account of Bernstein’s life and career, but, in a vivid and focal way drove home the poignant dramas. Even blessed with such obvious talent, charisma and success, how could a sense of failure predominate? Felder’s inimitable capacity to convey the grandeur and the disappointment with warmth and humor made this a rich and wonderful evening.

- BADMan

Musical Play (2008)

With Kerry A. Dowling (Diana), Michael Tacconi (Gabe), Christopher Chew (Dan), Sarah Drake (Natalie), Michael Levesque (Henry), Chris Caron (Dr. Fine/Dr. Madden)

Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893)

Diana (Kerry A. Dowling) is a middle-aged housewife with a mental condition. It seems that she is bipolar, but she also has delusions, which suggests something more. Her husband, Dan (Christopher Chew), is energetic about her finding psychiatric help, and her daughter, Natalie (Sarah Drake), a teenager, suffers the rebound effects of this situation. How does delusion manifest itself, and how best can it be managed? How can she and Dan wrestle with the issues that surround their son, Gabe (Michael Tacconi)? Can psychiatry answer the problem? How will the family fare?

Chris Caron as Dr. Madden and
Kerry A. Dowling as Diana
Photo:Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo

First off, let me say that this production is very tight and well done. The singing and the music are excellently performed. There are some considerable subtleties of tonality and harmony in the music and the performers live up to the expectations beautifully. As well, the scenic design is simple, but very intelligently conceived. A series of projections on the paneled background provide the necessary changes of setting and mood very effectively.

Secondly, let me say that I fully support the attempt of theatre, even musical theatre, to address difficult issues like mental illness. Obviously, finding artistic outlets for dealing with the complexities of depression, bipolarity and schizophrenia and their manifold impacts on family relations, is an important and noble effort.

As well, let me underline that all of the actors did a very commendable job. I was most taken with Sarah Drake in the role of the daughter, Natalie, and with Michael Levesque who plays her boyfriend, Henry. They conveyed their roles particularly affectingly and straightforwardly.

Foreground: Chris Caron and Kerry A. Dowling
Rear from Left: Michael Tacconi, Christopher Chew,
Sarah Drake, and Michael Levesque
Photo: Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo

But, that said, frankly, I had a good deal of trouble with the writing and the music.

The book and the lyrics were, for me, fundamentally off key. A note in the program indicating the genesis of the project reinforced the general sense I had about it.

Apparently the project got started in 1998 when the author, Brian Yorkey, several years out of college, saw a piece on Dateline NBC about a woman with bipolar disorder undergoing electroconvulsive therapy. He and Tom Kitt, a college friend, who did the music, created a ten minute piece about it entitled Feeling Electric, which over the course of the next ten or eleven years they expanded into the current show.

Sarah Drake, Christopher Chew and
Kerry A. Dowling
Photo: Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo

And this is how it felt to me: that this was written by two young guys who had encountered a journalistic piece about mental illness and wanted to write a musical. They obviously, over time, took pains to create a narrative and a full array of songs, but the feeling of the entire piece, to me, was of something manufactured from a news article, not something that probed the depths of the issue at hand.

Having known people who have wrestled with severe bipolarity and clinical depression, I felt sensitive about what seemed, for the bulk of the show, to be a kind of facile, showbizzy approach to the issue.

There was something offhandedly satirical about the writing that bothered me. I think it was supposed to feel acute, wry and poignantly funny, but to me it seemed bizarrely jazzy and tonally off the mark.

Nonetheless, the narrative turns near the very end of the show felt somewhat more authentic than anything that preceded it and rescued me somewhat from the sense of alienation I had from most of the writing beforehand.

Michael Tacconi, Kerry A. Dowling,
and Christopher Chew
Photo: Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo

The music also seemed like an indelicate combination of raucous and mawkish. Occasionally, it evoked in me a feeling of authenticity; but more often than not it felt alternately too jumpily agitated, then too sentimental. Where it might have conveyed complexity of feeling, it opted for cleverness and rowdiness mixed with emotional gooeyness in a way that, to my ears, fell flat.

Mental conditions have, in recent years, become a very hip thing to write about. There have been on the market multiple published memoirs about mental illness and its effects on families. And at least one major television series features a main character who has a mental condition.

If those narratives are well-executed, that is all to the good. But, if the subject gets capitalized on in a way that feels less than sensitive and insightful, the effect is not rewarding.

Though this production was musically and technically well executed, it was difficult to understand how this show received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010 and the Tony Award for Best Score of a Musical in 2009. Obviously, others felt it was a major accomplishment of authorship and music.

- BADMan