<< Music
30 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 18-24, 2015
The golden touch by John F. Karr
H
ere’s a pair of new Broadway cast albums: one classic show is reconstructed, while another is deconstructed. First is a recording I’ve been waiting for all my life, and I’m not kidding. It’s amazing that decades had to pass before a complete recording of The Golden Apple was made (especially when NYC’s Encore series has been so suitably well-equipped for the job). The show was a smash in 1954, and you’d better get its OBC [Original Broadway Cast] if you don’t know it. You’ll find you do know the score’s stand-out ballad, “Lazy Afternoon.” To fit the constricted length of that vinyl LP, only 45 minutes of the show were recorded. Now we have all 135 minutes, on a double-CD set recorded by PS Classics during live performances by the Lyric Theatre of Irving, Texas. A regional theatre, yes, but with an impressive and thoroughly professional talent pool. The performers may lack the unique eccentricities and quirks of the irrepressible performers heard on the 1954 OBC (how can you beat Kaye Ballard, Jack Whiting, Stephen Douglass, Charlotte Rae?), but the Texas talent
are excellent singers who flesh out their characters just fine. The show was composed by Jerome Moross, whose most famous work is the sweeping theme from the movie The Big Country. And here’s the show’s gay connection. The Golden Apple has lyrics by John Latouch (pronounced, Latoush), who also wrote lyrics for Cabin in the Sky, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and for Candide (but not for “Glitter and Be Gay,” as most people think; that’s by Richard Wilbur). Touch, as he was known, has been described as a charmer and a drunk, outrageously out (at least by 1940s standards), and a thorough scamp. I remember reading his scurrilous lyrics for naughty supper-club songs. He was the lover of poet Kenward Elmslie, and died while working on Candide, in 1956, only 42 years old. Officially, from a heart attack, but I suspect that ol’ devil, drink. The Golden Apple tells the story of the Iliad and the Odyssey, reset in a rustic, turn-of-the-19th-century America. For instance, traveling salesman Paris carries off farmer’s daughter Helen in a hot-air balloon. And while the setting is novel, it’s the show’s form that is unique. In the entire history of the musical, there isn’t another show completely
through-composed in a pop vernacular of waltzes, reels, rags, blues, stomps, and vaudeville numbers. Even the recitative can set toes tapping (I wish Andrew Lloyd Weber had paid some attention while writing the intolerable Phantom of the Opera recit). It’s a little overwhelming on first hearing, a tsunami of show tunes. Remember, there is no book, per se; it’s all lyrics, and it’s all music. A popera. The first act’s “Windflowers” is as tender and lyric a ballad as Baby Doe’s “Willow Song.” But I veer toward Act II. It’s such a wonder, in the sweep and surge of its melodic invention, and the sheer toe-tapping joy of its set-pieces. When Ulysses’ men win the fight to get Helen back, defeated local Mayor Hector plots revenge in a splendid soft-shoe. He’ll knock off Ulysses’ men one by one, throwing all the lures of the big city at them in the form of a series of music-hall turns. There’s Circe, the woman
without mercy, and the procuress, Madam Calypso (sung by a performer with the throaty allure of Ann Reinking). There are the con men Scylla and Charybdis (with a Gallagher and Shean routine in which Latouch tickles us with Scylla, villa, chinchilla, gorilla, and sars’parilla), and there are the Sirens, seducing with a Hawaiian spoof (“let’s spoon-a, spoona, spoon-a, in a goona, goona, goona lagoon”). For Ulysses’ ultimate return home, the recording restores the composer’s original bittersweet ending, replacing the 1954 reprise of the show’s main love duet. The producers back then insisted on the show having a happy ending. The actual happy ending is that we can now hear The Golden Apple in its full, adventurous, and rather fantastic form. Now, what about the other album’s deconstruction? I haven’t seen this show An American in Paris, but an uncomfortable lis-
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ten to its OBC suggests it’s a fine souvenir for those who have. As a separate entity, I found its numbers shrill and shredded. Over half the album consists of instrumental Gershwin concert pieces. They’re fine to accompany a ballet one is watching, perhaps, but with abridgments, mash-ups, reduced orchestrations and tinny recorded sound, anybody in their right mind would prefer Lenny B. and the New York Philharmonic. That leaves 11 songs that whisk by in 37 minutes. They’re mostly the same Gershwin standards that have been recycled and recycled again in a couple of recent shows. In an effort to make them seem fresh, they’re subject to convoluted arrangements that switch to another ostensibly novel effect every four or eight bars, with dance arrangements that sound sorely distressed. I doubt I’ll ever listen to this clangorous album again. Unless seeing the show makes me want to hear a souvenir.t
Family affairs by Jim Piechota
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson; Graywolf Press, $23 n her last literary foray The Art of Cruelty, LA-based poet, author, and critic Maggie Nelson creatively examined the conundrum of whether exposure to acts of cruelty desensitizes us and exacerbates our capacity for barbarity. Her new book The Argonauts delves into Nelson’s struggles with becoming sober, finding love, and creating a family, all while pondering art and sharing a few introspective thoughts on the notion of nor10:17 AM malcy. The book veers in and out of Nelson’s private life with her love interest, the nomadic transgendered artist Harry Dodge, going into their efforts at babymaking and familycentric happiness, then shifting to social ruminations and thoughtprovoking, digressive critical theory. From the beginning, it’s clear she has a lot on her mind. When she declares her love for Dodge, it is done while engaging in some rather rough anal sexplay with “my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad.” A few steamy afternoons are spent together on Christmas vacation in San Francisco, “smack in the middle of the cracked-out Tenderloin.” Nelson compares her “I love you” to Dodge with “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” An intensely private person, Dodge, upon reading the first draft of the book, feels as if her representation of him throughout the text is tarnished somehow. He “has told me more than once that being with me is like an epileptic with a pacemaker being married to a strobe
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light artist,” Nelson writes. She ponders gender fluidity. Dodge, who identifies as male, was born female and began testosterone hormone therapy during Nelson’s pregnancy, both of them emerging with new bodies and changing purposes. “Our bodies grew stranger, to ourselves, to each other.” That doesn’t mean that the journey was an effortless one, especially for Dodge, whose identification still lists him as female. “When a guy has cause to stare at Harry’s driver’s license or credit card, there comes an odd moment during which their camaraderie as two dudes screeches to a halt.” Nelson dismisses her own pregnant physical shape as “obscene,” radiating “a kind of smug autoeroticism: an intimate relation is going on – one that is visible to others, but that decisively excludes them.” Careening from one subject to another, Nelson addresses the “sharply private activity” of breastfeeding, and comments on life from a renter’s perspective, “which in-
volved never lifting a finger to better my surroundings. When it gets to be too much, you just move on.” Nelson’s discussion on heteronormativity and the “decriminalization of homosexuality” is sparked by a Snapfish photograph of her, seven months pregnant with Iggy, posing with Dodge and his son, at Christmastime. A friend comments that the picture is so traditional that it doesn’t seem like a queer family at all. There follow pages of lucid thought on family, gender, perception, and the valiant LGBTQ movement for radical equality. “If we want to do more than claw our way into repressive structures, we have our work cut out for us.” Nelson writes best about her own family. A night’s outing to a trapeze-burlesque show with a fivemonth-old strapped to her chest is met with rejection by the “jovial Australian bouncer,” who contends that the show is 18+ and her child in a sling would nix other patrons’ “adult night out,” with its cultivated “cabaret atmosphere.” Nelson also processes themes of pregnancy, childbirth, and feminism by referencing German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s epic disquisition Bubbles, and poet-activist Mary Oppen’s autobiography Meaning a Life. Other references pluck novelist Jonathan Franzen out of the mix for his depiction of women and a reference to “aging-female insecurity” in his novel Freedom. For such a slender volume, the book contains a lot of heady subject matter on the nature of sexuality, the elements that comprise a contemporary family unit, assimilation vs. revolution, and how the exploration of one’s personal identity can become both an inward process and an outward declaration.t