THEATRE-GOING WHEN YOUNG - PART 7 of 8

 

Continuing an occasional series about the theatrical events I was fortunate to experience when in my late teens.  The first Blog in this series was posted in August 2015, the most recent in August 2021, so it’s been rather a long-running saga!  I explained the background to the series in my 23 August 2015 Blog.

 

36. Bells are Ringing

 

By Broadway standards Bells are Ringing has a provenance without equal.  And it is a truly charming musical – of the frothy rather than the profound school; entertaining, not challenging.

 

The story, and the lyrics that brought that story to the stage, were written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, a writing partnership of more than 60 years.  The Comden and Green team collaborated on plays On the Town and Wonderful Town, and on movies Singing in the Rain, The Band Wagon and Aunty Mame….and numerous others.  And by way of significantly more than an afterthought, I recall Green’s memorable performance as Dr. Pangloss in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, both the video and the CD.  As well as a practised lyricist, Green was a robust baritone,

 

Accompanying the Comden-Green lyrics for Bells are Ringing was the music of Jule Styne, another prolific star in the firmament of musicals.  Think Gypsy and Funny Girl, and keep going.

 

The Broadway opening was on 29 November, 1956, and starred Judy Holliday as the answering-service telephonist who lives vicariously through the phone messages of her customers, until imagined life becomes real for her.  Her co-star was Sydney Chaplin, in the later (1960) movie replaced by Dean Martin.  Between times (in 1958) the play came to the Princess’s Theatre, where the lead was Shani Wallis, a British actress whose CV has scores of credits in film, television, and theatre.

 

Bells are Ringing has three memorable numbers, songs which entitle it to be counted among the finest of musicals:  Long Before I Knew You, The Party’s Over, and Just in Time.

 

37. The Fabulous Ray Charles

 

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet I have been able to ascertain that the Ray Charles concert I saw was at Festival Hall on 1 September, 1964.  

 

The Ray Charles life story poses some fundamental questions.  What is a "good" person; what is a "bad" person?  Can one become good having previously been bad?  Should the fact that one has been bad, or remains bad, affect society's judgement of that person's professional worth?  Should society accept redemption, and forgive; or should past behaviour forever remain on the scales?  

 

Giving these thoughts some non-theatrical relevance: is it appropriate for Confederate General Robert E. Lee's statue to be toppled from its stand 150 years after his death because he was part of a scenario that some latter-day observers find unacceptable?  Or why should we care whether Joseph Stalin's statue has likewise been removed from public prominence?  And, closer to home: because Tom Wills is now believed to have been a murderer of Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century, should we now destroy the statue erected to mark his role in the development of Australian football?  Is it not both futile and self-defeating to attempt to expunge the writing on the page of history?  Probably.  Yet, should the response be different if the purpose of the statue were specifically to commemorate the role of Wills in the suppression of the native peoples?

 

Enough to say, perhaps, that the past informs our view of the present (and the future), and that to obliterate uncomfortable aspects of the past surely does us little service.  Which thought brings us to aberrant behaviour of a much less extreme nature, and to shine the light on Ray Charles.  Despite Charles’s long and successful performing career, we cannot avoid seeing that he was a lifelong drug addict, and that he fathered twelve children from ten women, only two of whom were his wives at the time.  Do these colourful aspects of Ray Charles’s life entitle us to impugn Ray Charles the musician, and his achievements?  I say certainly not…………although his life experience clearly elevates him into the "interesting" category.

 

Mind you, the Ray Charles image was not exactly burnished by the programme note: "The sensitivity of Ray Charles will not allow the selection of music in advance of the actual concert performance.  Programming of music for the concert is selected by Mr. Charles from the mood and response of the audience while the concert is in progress.  It is likely, however, that many of the following selections will be heard."  And there follows a list of some 47 numbers.  What a jerk!  What a wanker!  One would have thought that a great artist, as doubtless Mr. Charles considered himself to be, would have been able to take any audience and mould it to his whim - and meanwhile stick to his preferred playlist.  And what of the accompanying Ray Charles Orchestra who, presumably, had to flick with ease between at least 47 scores without pause to think "now that's a great idea, but when did we last rehearse it?"

 

 [Incidentally, Charles was back at Festival Hall three years later, and on 17 August 1967 he performed fourteen songs - eight of which were not in the list of 47 from three years earlier.]  

 

Having trashed the man and his memory I confess that I’m unable to offer starry-eyed admiration by way of counterpoint.  I remember nothing of the concert.  Undoubtedly, Ray Charles was a pretty big cheese in the entertainment world, but “fabulous” is a bit of a stretch.

 

38. Sam Snyder’s Fabulous American Water Follies

 

In the days before Flinders Park and the Melbourne Tennis Centre, the “home” of tennis in Melbourne was Kooyong, that is the stadium of the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Association.  Kooyong, in addition to being both the club and the championship tennis venue, was also a general entertainment centre for mega open-air events, whereas Festival Hall – formerly the West Melbourne (boxing) Stadium - was the preferred indoor venue, and with considerably greater seating capacity.

 

On this occasion, in 1956, Kooyong was the venue, and entrepreneur Kenn Brodziac of Aztec Services brought to Australia the paraphernalia to equip Kooyong for an aquatic extravaganza.  This was big time:  an exhibition pool for water ballet 75 by 35 feet, and 5 feet deep; a diving pool 50 by 35 feet, and 8 feet deep - all up 60000 gallons of water.  And all “able to be dismantled within 6 hours” [as if that was going to happen more than once!].

 

And, to add a touch of non-aquatic class, the show included Chet Clark, harmonica virtuoso…….and all of this accompanied by an orchestra led by prominent local bandleader, Tom Davidson.  In essence, the show was a series of acts, linked to the water rather than to the stage. 

 

I’m short of further detail because I’m short of recollection, but I see that a copy of the Australian tour programme – the very programme that I gave to the State Library some years ago – has an Internet asking price of $30 plus postage from Queensland, or $43 including postage if you choose to buy from an American source. 

 

39. Anniversary Waltz

 

Hollywood actor, Richard Arlen (1899 to 1976), came to Melbourne to star in Anniversary Waltz – at the Princess’s Theatre, in a season commencing 15 August 1958.   The play, by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields, had opened on Broadway on 7 April 1954, and ran for 611 performances. 

 

Richard Arlen was still a headline actor at age 59, having acted in a prodigious number of feature films…..my count of his Wikipedia  lifetime listing got to 148, but the program note tops that at “more than 250“ – and by 1958, indeed!  Being able to count is not a pre-requisite for compilers of bio notes or of theatre programmes.  Whatever the true number, Arlen in 1958 was clearly (already) a veteran of the silver screen.  

 

The following note is from a Player & Sons, Film Stars series cigarette card (circa 1934, fourteen years earlier), by which time Arlen had acted in 26 silent films and about 30 talkies:

 

“Richard Arlen, christened Sylvanus van Mattimore, was born on September 1^st, 1899, in Charlottesville, Virginia.  During the Great War he enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps at the age of 16, training in Canada.  Upon demobilisation he became a sports writer, was attracted to the Texas oil-fields, and eventually arrived in Los Angeles.  After working as a motor-cycle messenger, he became a film extra.  Wings gave him his first real chance, and won him his wife, Jobyna Ralston.  They have one son, Richard, born in 1933.  Richard Arlen is 5 feet 11 inches in height.”  [There were a couple of subsequent wives.]

 

The programme notes for Anniversary Waltz (some 24 years after the cigarette card bio) tell much the same story, adding the anecdote that Arlen may be the only actor personally affected by the old theatrical greeting “break a leg”:  while he was a messenger for a film laboratory, and delivering a can of film, he was struck by a car - owned by Paramount Studios - and had his leg broken.  “Studio executives interested themselves in the boy with the engaging smile and gave him a chance to act.”  Ah, the stuff of legend!  

 

 I have no recollection of Arlen’s performance or, indeed, of the play itself.  I presume it was a pleasant enough affair within the light entertainment genre circa 1950s.  But I’ve located a review of the 1954 premiere Broadway production, featuring Macdonald Carey in the lead role.  The review is from TIME magazine, and the criticism is trenchant [I have made substantial cuts]: 

 

“Anniversary Waltz tells of a couple who are celebrating their 15^th wedding anniversary.  The husband gets high enough to inform his in-laws that it is really a 16^th anniversary – there was a year of unholy wedlock at the outset.  No sooner are the wife’s parents quieted down than the daughter tells all on a TV show.

 

There is something so authentically unpleasant about the characters that the play might have some value if it aimed at realism.  Aiming as it does for entertainment, it merely proves the shoddy road that can be travelled in the quest for laughs.

 

Anniversary Waltz fetches a laugh, now and then, but mostly it is crude, unavailing hackwork.”  Gulp!

 

40. Abe Saperstein’s Harlem Globetrotters

 

It would be futile to trigger a discussion about whether there is a difference between sport and entertainment.  Certainly, sport can /should/must be entertaining, but is it an “entertainment”?  The discussion is likely rendered otiose [thank you Justin Dabner - I heard you use that word 30 years ago, and have waited these many years for an opportunity to use it myself!], rendered otiose by the cross-overs that occur in the real world.  Think of ancient chariot races; think of gladiatorial contests.  And think of the Harlem Globetrotters – basketballers playing their sport as entertainers.

 

Described as an American “exhibition basketball team” the Globetrotters were “created” in Chicago in 1926.  They play exhibition games, and tour the world.  They survive to this day.  Their shtick is to “combine athleticism, theatre, and comedy in their style of play”.  

 

Until the American National Basketball Association began to admit black players in the early 1950s the Globetrotters were exclusively black; and are largely so today.  Sure, what the Globetrotters provided was not mainstream basketball competition, but many regarded it as of equal entertainment value and, in many respects, demonstrating greater skills.  With such longevity, the Globetrotters have clearly dominated the market they created for themselves.

 

The Globetrotters appeared at Kooyong, at what would otherwise have been Centre Court.  They comprised a squad of nine African Americans, and they played a second – all white -squad described as the New York National Basketball Team.  It was Globetrotter custom to pit themselves against another (inferior) team brought along for the occasion……..and the programme note immodestly points out that in the 36 seasons (up to 1963) the Globetrotters’ record over the years had been 7677 wins to 310.  One wonders whether there was some difficulty in lining up opponents.

 

In addition to the serious/comic exhibition match between the Globetrotters and the NYNB side the evening’s entertainment included six variety acts.

 

41. Danny Kaye….and his all-star international show

 

In more than one of his movies Danny Kaye played dual roles or multiple parts, and duality exists in his real life.  There was the period of his successful film career as a comic actor, and there was the period of his championship of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) – dare I say Danny Kaye the humourist and Danny Kaye the humanist.  These periods overlapped. And there was plenty more in a life of 76 years (1911 to 1987) and, taken all together, Kaye is entitled to be remembered as one of the great and the good.

 

David Daniel Kaminsky, native of Brooklyn, of Ukrainian stock, is said to have begun his career entertaining his schoolmates with jokes and songs.  Abandoning high school he ventured to Florida with a mate, the pair surviving for a while as a vocal/guitar duo.  Later he polished his craft as a tummler at upstate New York resorts - a tummler‘s function being to encourage an audience or guests to participate in the entertainment.  He met his wife-to-be, Sylvia Fine, at an audition in 1939, and they married in 1940.  Kaye was 29, and had already been working as a professional entertainer for seven years.  He was part of a vaudeville dance troupe, The Three Terpsichoreans, that toured the United States in 1933, followed by a six months tour of Asia in 1934.  It is said that the effort to communicate with non-English-speaking audiences led to the employment of facial expressions and gestures – hallmarks of Kaye’s subsequent film career.

 

Kaye was in a number of Broadway shows in the early 1940s, and The Danny Kaye Show was a successful CBS radio programme in 1945/1946.  His first feature film was Up in Arms, in 1944.  Among his most successful films were Wonder Man (1945), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), The Inspector General (1949), On the Riviera (1951), Hans Christian Andersen (1952), Knock on Wood (1954), and The Court Jester (1956).   His television credits are extensive.

 

Kaye and Sylvia Fine were married for 47 years, and Fine occupies a significant place in Kaye’s professional life.  She managed his career, and a number of Kaye’s films contain songs that are examples of Fine the lyricist and composer.  

 

I have referred to Danny Kaye the humanist.  This aspect of Kaye’s life stemmed from a trans-Atlantic flight in 1949.  Kaye was seated next to the head of UNICEF.  Kaye’s subsequent involvement with UNICEF was deep and lifelong.  His biographer writes: “For all his successes as a performer his greatest legacy remains his tireless humanitarian work – so close were his ties to UNICEF that when the organization received the Nobel Prize, Kaye was tapped to accept it.”  

 

Kaye’s involvement with UNICEF dates from 1949, about half-way through his feature-film career.  By the time he appeared on the stage of the Princess’s Theatre in July 1959, fourteen of his seventeen feature films were behind him.  His stage show is described in the programme notes: “Danny works with the band on the stage behind him because he must have uninterrupted contact with his audience – so that he can sit in the footlights, dangle his legs in the empty orchestra pit, smoke a cigarette (which he will probably borrow from somebody in the first row) while discussing current topics with anyone who wants to talk.  And even though he’s really taking a breather in his strenuous routine, these intimate interludes provide some of the best-liked moments in his performance”

 

The next instalment of Theatre-Going When Young will be the final in the series.  It will culminate with the 46^th report of a performance or event I attended more than 60 years ago.  Among those 46 there were a number of big names, world leaders in entertainment (including a couple of doozies in the final instalment), but none is more impressive than Danny Kaye……not just because he was at the top of his chosen professional field as a comedian, but because he was a man who had a very special interface with humankind.

 

Gary Andrews

FUNERAL MUSIC

My uncle Bill was so loved and revered that when he died, back in 2004, there was an all-out family effort to produce a tribute worth remembering.  The funeral gathering was treated to a slide show, and because Bill lived to 91 and was never camera shy, that show was extensive.  I delivered the keynote address, with interspersed contributions from half-a-dozen others.  [The folk from the funeral directors were so impressed with the proceedings that I was offered a job arranging other peoples' farewells!  I declined.]  After the cremation [“you’re not going to bury me – so unsanitary!”] there followed a more than ample repast lubricated with Bill's favourite sparkling burgundy. 

 

A significant component of Bill's funeral was the accompanying music, through which we tried to recall his favourite tunes and performers - somewhat of a task, you can imagine, having to be done in haste and without the benefit of Bill’s own recollections.

 

A little while later my wife, Annie, suggested - in order to avoid a similar last-minute rush in the future - that I should make a list of music to accompany my own funeral.  Who better than me to choose that music?   Annie was being practical, not maudlin.  So, I happily did as she suggested, and after a lot of contemplation I listed half-a-dozen candidates for my "funeral music"……… with the expectation that somebody else would one day make the final cut.  

 

Not only did I choose the pieces but I sourced the actual tracks from my own LPs and CDs, and listed full particulars - thus to make the task easier for my grieving family and friends!  And I gave the list to Annie, and forgot about it; and the electronic file was lost some time ago between computers, and that was that......until, that is, a paper copy surfaced recently - and prompted this blog.  

 

My selections had been chosen as pieces for a specific occasion, possibly with a touch of sentimentality, and certainly mindful of their beauty (with one possible exception - you figure).  I have carefully reviewed my selections of seventeen years ago, and I'm sticking with the pieces I picked then.  In the process I have sampled numerous alternative versions but, again, am sticking with the versions I originally chose.   All six are featured in this blog, together with my present-day comments on why I chose them………thus giving my future mourners some insight they would not otherwise have enjoyed. 

 

Ingemisco

 

[from the Dies Irae section of Verdi's Requiem]

 

expresses powerful sentiments, although sentiments somewhat ironic for a non-believer

 

Giuseppe Verdi was the great Italian composer of opera, or should that be the great composer of Italian opera?  Either way, in his long life of 87 years Verdi composed 28 operas, many of them still today regarded among the greatest, and front and centre in the performing repertoire of the world's opera houses.

 

By comparison, Verdi's output of music in other genres was small - but he did write one requiem; and the Ingemisco is a tenor solo from it.  This is the only one of my six funeral selections that is seriously sacred.  

 

A requiem is a mass for the repose of the soul of the dead, largely peculiar to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.   Requiem masses have a long history within church liturgy and it is not surprising that so many serious composers have included requiem masses on their CVs.  What is surprising, though, is Verdi's dramatic departure from the usual requiem format - not a departure from the formal structure of the mass, but a departure from the typical sombre tone.  Verdi's Requiem has an unaccustomed dramatic force, an operatic flavour that separates it from all others.  And in the midst of that drama Verdi includes the sweet supplication of the Ingemisco.  What follows is one of numerous translations from the Italian:

 

       "I groan as one guilty, and my face blushed with guilt.

     

Thou who didst absolve Mary [Magdalen] and hear the prayer of the thief, hast given me hope too.  

 

My prayers are not worthy, but Thou, oh good one, show mercy, lest I burn in everlasting fire.  

 

Give me a place among the sheep, and separate me from the goats, placing me on Thy right hand."

 

Not in the words of today, clearly, but you get the point.  Despite the contrition and the pleading tone however, some interpreters have delivered the words with a surge of insistence and vigour, as though they have a god-given right to demand a favour from god.  I don't think that works. The characteristics of operatic tenor voices range from huge to modest, and while there are so-called heldentenors - tenors necessarily with voices to blast Wagner to the upper galleries – such voices are wrong for the Ingemisco.  Certainly, there is an overriding requirement for projection - even the smallest voice must be able to be heard at the rear of the upper circle – but the great failing of the powerful voice is loss of sound quality.  I once compiled, for comparison, a tape of 20 versions of La Donna e Mobile, from Verdi's Rigoletto.  There was an astonishing range of interpretations.  And what was clear was that while the smaller voices usually have little difficulty in beefing up when it suits them to be forceful, the big voices are often unable to tone it down, and can't desist from braying unmusically.  The Ingemisco doesn’t need to be belted.

 

I have seen a listing of 85 recordings of the complete Requiem, and who knows how many interpretations exist of the Ingemicso alone.  I may be a completist, but I'm not crazy enough to go seek all those versions.  Of the tenors I have reviewed my favourites are the ones who hold back a little, the ones who adopt the tone of a supplicant - true when I first made my selection, and true still.  And the most sweetly ardent is Luciano Pavarotti, and specifically his Ingemisco recording with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor George Solti, recorded in October 1967. Listen and weep:

 

 Send in the Clowns, Reprise, and Night Waltz

 

[from A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim]

 

a song of loss, reprised at the close of the play; and the most haunting waltz melody

 

Stephen Sondheim, who died at age 91 in November 2021, was an ornament to the American musical theatre.  His Wikipedia entry extends to 43 pages, including 242 footnotes!  The simple fact is that he was the greatest contributor of his time to musical theatre.  He wrote some 20 musicals, both the lyrics (from other people's books) and the music - with the exception that on three occasions he wrote the lyrics but had some journeyman tunesmith write the music, those nobodies being Jule Styne (Gypsy), Richard Rogers (Do I Hear a Waltz?), and Leonard Bernstein (West Side Story). 

 

A Little Night Music dates from 1973, but its origins were the 1955 Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night.

 

The story of the play (and the film) is simple enough, but the relationships are complicated.  Send in the Clowns is sung by Desiree, a woman of middle age, reflecting on the romance she once had with Fredrik, and her loss when they drifted apart.  And here, a generation later, they are re-united after Fredrik’s son elopes with Fredrik’s young (second) wife-to-be; then Desiree and Fredrik sing the reprise together.  Has fate, through bitterness, at last brought them together?

 

I had always thought that Sondheim’s message of “send in the clowns” was a reference to circus life where, after some catastrophe in the ring, they send in the clowns to distract the audience.  But, when queried in 1990, Sondheim confessed to no such imagery.  Not far from it, though.   He wasn’t thinking specifically of circuses, merely that “if the show isn’t going well…..let’s do the jokes”.  Anyway, listen to the music.  It is exquisite.

 

Glynnis Johns [still with us at age 98] was chosen by Sondheim to open the show on Broadway, and this is her premiere interpretation.  Johns is well known as a British screen actress of the post-WW2 era, and not well remembered as a singer, but the catch in her unique throaty voice captures the regret of a lifetime lost.   

 

“Isn't it rich?

         Are we a pair?

         Me here at last on the ground,

         You in mid-air.

         Send in the clowns.

 

         Isn't it bliss?

         Don't you approve?

         One who keeps tearing around,

         One who can't move.

         Where are the clowns?

         Send in the clowns.

 

         Just when I stopped opening doors,

         Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,

         Making my entrance again with my usual flair,

         Sure of my lines,

         No-one is there.

 

         Don't you love a farce?

         My fault, I fear.

         I thought that you'd want what I want -

         Sorry my dear.

         But where are the clowns?

         Quick send in the clowns.

         Don't bother,

         They're here.

 

         Isn't it rich?

         Isn't it queer?

         Losing my timing this late in my career.

         And where are the clowns?

         There ought to be clowns.

         Well, maybe next year.”

 

Reprise [duet] and Night Waltz (finale) -

 

         “Isn't it rich?

         Are we a pair?

         You here at last on the ground.

         You in mid-air.

 

         Was that a farce?

         My fault I fear.

         Me as a merry go-round.

         Me as King Lear.

 

         Make way for the clowns,

         Applause for the clowns,

         They're finally here.”

       

 

The Impossible Dream

 

[from Man of La Mancha by Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion]

 

not a bad message, although a little late for me

 

Never known to be self-effacing, the writer, Somerset Maugham, when asked about his place in literature, described himself as being in the front rank of the second rank.  Somewhat consistent with Maugham’s feigned modesty he published, in Redbook magazine, a series of essays on the great novels - and included nothing written by himself!  The Redbook articles were later (in 1954) re-published by Maugham as 10 Novels and Their Authors.  Maugham had dared to select the best books ever written, to read and to study them – and, for purposes of elimination, to read who knows how many of the next nearest best - and then to stick out his neck with a ten best list.

 

And, guess what?  Don Quixote was not on Maugham's list.  But Maugham, in the preface to his book, does discuss Don Quixote extensively, the inference being that it was a close contender for a top ten position.  "It is a great and important book, and a professed student of literature should certainly read it once through (I have myself read it from cover to cover twice in English and three times in Spanish).”  [Maugham that is, not Andrews.]  Maugham concedes that Don Quixote has some tedious parts, yet “I cannot but think that the ordinary reader, the reader who reads for delight, would lose nothing if he did not read the dull parts at all.  He would surely enjoy all the more the passages in which the narrative is directly concerned with the adventures and conversations, so amusing and touching, of the gentle knight and his earthy squire”.  We have, by the way, no means of identifying and skipping the dull parts!

 

Fifty or so years on from Maugham Don Quixote's odds had shortened.  A Washington Post review of a book about “The Power of the Printed Word” informs us that in 2002 "one hundred major writers from fifty-four countries voted Don Quixote the best work of fiction in the world".

 

Don Quixote - or, to give the book its full title (in English), The Ingenious Gentleman Sir Quixote of La Mancha - was the masterwork of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes lived from 1547 to 1616.  Through Cervantes’ fictional character we now have the word quixotic, meaning unrealistic, impractical, idealistic.

 

The book was the basis of the musical play, Man of La Mancha; and the challenge for creators of the adaptation was to turn the greatest book ever into a great theatrical experience.  They succeeded; and Man of La Mancha ran for 2328 performances on Broadway from November 1965. The device of melding the character of Don Quixote with that of the author, Cervantes, was a masterstroke.  The opening scene - with Cervantes being thrown into a dungeon prior to interrogation by the Inquisition and, before a kangaroo court of fellow prisoners, transforming himself from Cervantes into Don Quixote - was breathtaking theatre.   

 

Man of La Mancha was a smash hit; and the smash song from the musical was The Impossible Dream, subtitled The Quest.  It comes at a turning point in the narrative, where the audience at last realises that Quixote is not a buffoon.  Confused and deluded perhaps, but a man genuinely on a mission to right the wrongs of the world.  Alas! a man with an impossible dream.  Here are the words: 

 

         "To dream...the impossible dream...

To fight...the unbeatable foe...

To bear...with unbearable sorrow...

To run...where the brave dare not go..

To right...the unrighteable wrong...

To love...pure and chaste from afar...

To try...when your arms are too weary...

To reach...the unreachable star.

 

This is my quest, to follow that star

No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.

To fight for the right without question or pause,

To be willing to march into Hell for a Heavenly cause.

 

And I know if I'll only be true to this glorious quest

That my heart will lie peaceful and calm

When I'm laid to my rest.

 

And the world will be better for this:

That one man, scorned and covered with scars,

Still strove with his last ounce of courage

To reach the unreachable star."

         

In the world of musical theatre The Impossible Dream is performed as a bravura baritone piece, but in the outside world of popular song it has encountered numerous interpretations.  I have checked out a few.  Elvis Presley's version is passably good, Kelsey Grammar (of Cheers fame) can't hold the line and is awful.  Jim Nabors is absolutely spot on with the notes but has some unique and unsettling diction.  Among opera performers, Samuel Ramey is simply too operatic; and Placido Domingo - I can't believe I'm saying this - sounds too Spanish!  Keith Michel brought the role to the West End, and his performance is fine.  Very secure, although a bit sing-song for mine - it could have been rather more metronomic.  But, at the end of this latter-day survey I have returned to my original choice, the inaugural Broadway performance of Richard Kiley.  [Incidentally, Wikipedia has a listing of "notable renditions" of The Impossible Dream.  Sixty-eight versions are listed, not including three of those mentioned by me.]

 

Richard Kiley (1922 - 1999) was the consummate all-round performer - film, television, stage.  And could he sing!?  Yes, he could sing!  He won numerous awards in his career of 50-plus years. Kiley's rendition of The Impossible Dream is superior in every way - a perfectly executed crescendo.  Recorded in 1965, here is his original Broadway cast recording:

 

Guess Who I Saw Today?

 

[from Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1952]

 

the most bitter sweet bittersweet song I know

 

In making this selection I take a significant step back into my "listening" history - to 1952, some years before television was transmitted in Australia, when as a teenager I was developing an interest in serious music while at the same time remaining immersed in the popular music of the day.  That music, before rock and roll hit the airwaves in the mid-1950s, was largely regulated by the weekly half-hour hit parade of the top eight tunes as determined by record shop sales of 78 rpm discs.  To its credit the radio (then still widely referred to as the wireless) served up plenty of music that was neither classical nor pop; and this tune, Guess Who I Saw Today?, remains clearly in my listening memory from sources other than hit parades.

 

Guess Who I Saw Today? is one of the tracks on the LP Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1952.  The sleeve notes tell the story:  "Just as the theatre critics and Broadway wiseacres were deciding that the 1951-52 theatrical season was the dullest in years, Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1952 bounded into town and proved that 'good revues are about as delightful as anything the stage has to offer'"......the show was "a good looking, fast moving, intimate revue with a tremendous polish on it".

 

Sillman had been presenting "New Faces" revues since 1934 and, over the years his revues had debuted faces that were to go on to theatrical and cinema fame:  Imogene Coca, John Lund, Eve Arden, Richard Carlson, Gypsy Rose Lee, Van Johnson, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power.  So, no pressure to emulate in 1952!  As it happens, a number of the 1952 cast achieved minor fame; but the most famous "discovery" of the year was Eartha Kitt, who Sillman made famous after she'd (already!) "played the best spots in Istanbul, Greece, Egypt and Paris".  New Faces of 1952 was not your school production playing for two consecutive weekends, or your amateur theatrical stretching for a full fortnight.   It ran for 365 performances on Broadway.

 

The show premiered in May 1952, and the LP appeared a mere two months later, followed by inevitable airing on Australian radio.  There was a 20th Century Fox film in 1954 that largely replicated the revue, with numbers strung together by a thin story line.

 

Guess Who I Saw Today? is performed by June Carroll.  Carroll appeared in several of the ensemble pieces in New Faces, but this was her feature solo.  No way could she be said to have a memorable voice, but in Guess Who I Saw Today? she hit the right note of pathos, she nailed it.  There are versions by other latter-day “name” performers.  They are universally lifeless.  Nancy Wilson, Eartha Kitt, Carmen McCrae: these singers treat it as a song for a smoke-filled room.  It is not.  The source of the tears in our eyes lies elsewhere.

 

A bit of trivia:  June Carroll was the sister of producer, Leonard Sillman.  A second bit:  June Carroll was the mother of American composer Steve Reich.  

 

And here are those bittersweet words:

 

         “You're so late getting home from the office.  

         Did you miss your train?

         Were you caught in the rain?

         No, don't bother to explain.

         Can I fix you a quick martini?

         As a matter of fact I'll have one with you.

         For to tell you the truth I've had quite a day too!

 

         Guess who I saw today, my dear!

         I went in town to buy the kids a thing or two,

         And thought I'd stop to have a bite 

         When I was through.

 

         I looked around for some place near,

         And it occurred to me where I had parked the car

         I'd seen a most attractive French cafe and bar.

         It really wasn't very far.

         

         The waiter showed me to a dark secluded corner,

         And when my eyes became accustomed 

         To the gloom,

         I saw two people at the bar

         Who were so much in love,

         That even I could spot it

         Clear across the room.

 

         Guess who I saw today, my dear!

         I've never been so shocked before.

         I headed blindly for the door.

         They didn't see me passing through.

         Guess who I saw today?

         I saw you!”

 

 

Sheep May Safely Graze

 

[from The Wise Virgins Ballet by William Walton (from J.S. Bach)]

 

they don't come any more beautiful than this..........

 

I have mixed feelings about English composer, William Walton (1902 to 1983).  And in reading biographical notes I sense that he may have had mixed feelings about himself.  His compositional career was long, but he was not prolific.  He had extended unproductive stretches.  His parents had been strong musical influences, and his years as a chorister and student at Christ Church, Oxford, provided him with an impeccable pedigree in serious music.  Then, his years of association with the Sitwell family (living in an attic in their home for 14 years!), and his collaboration with Edith Sitwell in the production of Façade in 1923 – her words, his music – welcomed him to the avant-garde.  Yet within the decade he was writing an epic cantata, Belshazzar’s Feast (1931), not the least bit avant-garde; and twenty or so years after Facade he was writing conventional film scores.

 

Withal, he was knighted, given the Order of Merit, and has a memorial in Westminster Abbey alongside Elgar, Vaughan-Williams and Britten.  Add to this his commissions to write anthems for the coronations of George VI and Elizabeth II and it’s clear he was firmly accepted by the establishment, his early modernist transgressions long forgotten.

 

From the mid-1950s Walton and his wife lived on the Greek Island, Ischia; and one wonders whether this isolated him from current trends and estranged him from the cutting edge of modern composing.  And did it really matter?

 

The Walton piece I have chosen, Sheep May Safely Graze, is firmly traditional.  It originated in 1713 as the ninth movement of Bach’s secular cantata BWV208, being an aria for soprano, two recorders and continuo.  Walton arranged and orchestrated it in 1940 for Frederick Ashton’s ballet The Wise Virgins.  It is drop-dead gorgeous music.  This performance is by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Bryden Thomson, recorded in 1990.

 

 

Morgen! (Tomorrow!)

 

[from Four Songs, Opus 27 by Richard Strauss]

 

..........yes they do!

 

The composer, Richard Strauss, is not to be confused with Johann Strauss (the "waltz king") and all his family.  And not to be confused with Oscar Straus, composer of operettas.  But their lives were contemporaneous to some degree:  Johann (1825 to 1890 and Oscar (1870 to 1954) were Austrian, and Richard (1864 to 1949) was German.  [Oscar was born Strauss but dropped the second "s" for professional purposes.]  Richard's music was a world apart from that of his namesakes, and there are many who would rank him as the greatest "classical" composer of the 20th Century, certainly the first half; or at least rank him with Mahler, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky, all of whose lives also overlapped that of Strauss – each for more than 40 years.

 

Strauss spent a lifetime as an orchestral conductor, what might be considered his day job; and in 1920 he was a co-founder of the Salzburg Festival.  But his enduring fame is as composer.  He wrote a number of operas, including Der Rosenkavalier and Salome, and several tone poems.  Franz Liszt is given principal credit for the development of the tone poem (an orchestral work in one movement), and some say Richard Strauss took the form to its peak. 

 

Of equal eminence are Strauss's songs, memorably his Four Last Songs, written when he was 84.  Earlier, when he had been thirty, Strauss published another set of four songs, as his Opus 27.  The fourth of these songs, Morgen!, he dedicated to his (then) wife, Pauline.  Morgen means tomorrow.  The piece was set with piano accompaniment, but three years later Strauss arranged it for orchestra with violin solo.  This is the version we hear.  Be aware that there are several translations of the words from the German, and I have chosen one of the more poetic ones.  It matters little, because you will hear it sung in German.  It is a love song, and a song of longing.

 

         “Tomorrow again will shine the sun

         And on my sunlit path of earth

         Unite us again, as it has done,

         And give our bliss another birth.

 

         The spacious beach under wave-blue skies

         We'll reach by descending soft and slow

         And mutely gaze in each other's eyes,

         As over us rapture's great hush will flow.”

 

The singer is Felicity Lott, supported by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conductor Neeme Jarvi, recorded in 1986.  I could find no more beautiful version.

 

 

Well, there you have it.  Selections that, although not funereal, seem quite appropriate for a funeral, I think.  Not chosen because they are my all-time favourite pieces, but pieces to accompany reflection. 

 

Gary Andrews

 

         

 

 

SAM - THE SHEPPARTON ART MUSEUM

 

Australian regional and rural population centres invariably enjoy lavish sporting facilities, and it's a bit of a conundrum that so many of them also have public art galleries.  I speak specifically of my home State, Victoria, where a dozen or more centres of as little as 10000 citizens have a public gallery, and the art collection that adorns it.  Perhaps the public appreciation of art stems from the nineteenth century worker education movements of the Mechanics Institutes and the Workers’ Educational Associations; or perhaps from the prominence and deserved fame of the early landscape painters.  Perversely, it might derive from some sort of push-back against the ubiquitous sporting culture (oxymoron intended) – an attempt, subconscious perhaps, to demonstrate that Australia is not all about cricket, football and beer.

 

Regardless, it is undeniable that Victoria’s regional art galleries are significant cultural institutions, each important in its own right and important for the town or city where located.  It seems that the establishment of an art gallery was part of the foundational mindset of early white settlers, not at the pioneer stage perhaps, but soon thereafter to become one of the hallmarks of permanence, and of “civilization” being imposed over the bush.

 

These institutions exist today with varying degrees of [choose your word] modernity, popular appeal, curatorial skill, funding; and with collections of varying standards; and with varying degrees of local support.  And with the needs must consequences of the tastes of generations of benefactors.   But despite their variability each has some treasures, some comment on the national story, some feature to make a visit worthwhile.  I make this final remark in anticipation of proving it to be true……..because Annie, my wife, and I have resolved that in the ensuing months we shall progressively visit Victoria’s regional art galleries - not adhering to a regular timetable, simply occasional visits.  We have previously visited a number of these galleries, but this is a new project, and any re-encounters will be a pleasure.

 

First up:  Shepparton Art Museum [SAM]………for two specific reasons: to see the “first significant showing of works by acclaimed Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus, on Country”; and to see the gallery itself.

 

SAM is squeaky-clean new, and unapologetically in your face.  The Shepparton collection dates from 1936, but is now housed in its brilliant five storey centre, surrounded by parkland, overlooking Victoria Lake and the Goulburn River beyond.

The re-location occurred late in 2021, and the SAM happily welcomed the Shepparton tourist information bureau to occupy a piece of its ground floor, and thus enjoy the benefits of some captured tourists.

 

The building was designed by Denton Corker Marshall, Melbourne and International architects of enduring fame – architects of The Melbourne Exhibition Centre, of the Bolte Bridge and Gateway, of the Melbourne Museum, and so on.  With SAM they have “done it again”!  I cannot express too strongly my view that this is an overwhelmingly fine building. 

 While a great metal box might sound ponderous, the diversity of planes and surface textures makes for an exciting exterior. The central open area occupies the whole five floors, with display galleries and other functional spaces to either side.  (Even) the cafeteria is an artwork of design, such design extending to the servery fittings and to the dining furniture.  

 

Built into the wall between the cafeteria and the adjacent open space are several display cases (glassed both sides), currently featuring the lifetime collection of Shepparton local, Ian Wong – an assemblage of domestic and household items, predominantly plastic, that would be nothing but kitsch if they hadn’t been gathered into a collection.  Each display has a colour theme, so there are 50 or so black items in one showcase, similar orange items in another, and red, and blue, and so on.  And these items?  Car fridges, toys, all manner of utensils and gadgets, characterised as Everyday Australian Design.  Stuff known to and remembered by us all.  Ian Wong’s collecting mania has been turned into a powerful insight into the domesticity of Australia in the 1980s.

The Wong collection is on display until early in May.  It would be a great loss if the collection did not become part of SAM’s permanent museum collection.

 

In the Level 1 gallery space (until September 2022) is the exhibition Flow: Stories of River, Earth and Sky.  As the name tells us, this exhibition is about landscape.  The program notes elaborate:  it “explores the narratives we weave through the places we inhabit, and the myriad ways in which nature shapes our lives and culture”.  It is significant that the exhibition is all drawn from the SAM permanent collection of some 4000 works.  It features more than 60 artists.  The ubiquity of landscape as a theme has enabled the curators to feature some of SAM’s major possessions, paintings by

 Grace Cossington Smith 

Albert Namatjira 

 Sydney Long

 John Longstaff

 Margaret Preston

 Arthur Streeton

Clarice Beckett

Eugene von Guerard.  

The huge medallion-shaped display of tiny ceramic buttons, titled Under the Dump Garden, was of particular interest not only for its intrinsic charm (and the prodigious amount of effort that it must have taken) but for triggering a cheeky thought that we could try to make something similar.

And then the Level 2 People’s Gallery exhibition of works by Lin Onus.  Onus is the son of Bill Onus, famous in my youth as an aboriginal activist and showman (boomerang throwing demonstrations at public events), and founder of the Aboriginal Advancement League.  The younger Onus grew up in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, and first worked as a mechanic and spray painter; later making a career as a sculptor, printmaker and painter.  He died in 1996, at age 47. 

 

The SAM exhibition is a comprehensive retrospective, described in the program as “the first significant showing of works by acclaimed Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus”.  The paintings are both representational and symbolic and likely not to everybody’s taste, but there is much to admire in the undoubted skill of Onus in applying paint to canvas.  The “exhibition weaves together a story of Onus’ experiences and relationships to place, people, and the politics of his time”.  I was particularly taken with the series of large canvases titled Dreams in the Garden of Allegation, otherwise known as the Musquito Series.  Musquito was an aboriginal bushranger in New South Wales, later in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).  His story verges on the unbelievable and, while the man may be notorious in the southern State, his story is little known north of Bass Strait.  It ended, in 1825, at the end of a rope.  Each of the Onus paintings depicts an incident in Musquito’s colourful career, with the protagonist facing the viewer with a look, alternatively, of bewilderment, anger, resignation, frustration……….

 

By the time you read this the Lin Onus exhibition will have terminated – it ran from 20 November 2021 to 13 March 2022.  A considerable number of the exhibits are the property of the Onus family and, as with the works owned by galleries and others, they will be returned whence they came.  There is no plan for the collection to travel, or ever to be re-assembled.  This is a great shame.

 

Gary Andrews