harder days

like so many headscratching things on this big blue spinning marble, these days for me are like Diddy Wah Diddy.

the erudite reader will not need me to recount the importance in my upbringing/downfall/ shattering of all social guidelines that Zap comix and R. Crumb had. they were like the early maps of the new world, showing that land existed far from where I was living, and that different people with different thoughts and speech lived there, people who somehow, miraculously, were not stuck down for the compulsive attraction they had to heresy and a very rich, full style of existentialism.

they made both look like fun, and a million laughs.

no, I won't list my Zap comix memories...forty years later, they would still scorch the pixels of my computer screen.

except I will talk about Mr. Natural.

he was about four foot high, with a three and a half foot beard, and was able to disabuse everyone of their spiritual illusions without really having any insights of value to substitute in their place. he had an answer for every deep question...that left the questioner more lost than ever. he was a curmudgeon, moody, sarcastic, demanding, impatient.

his own pursuits had about the level of spiritual enlightenment of Chico Marx.

Flakey Foont was his natural prey.

Flakey knew enough to seek understanding, but without a clue what it would look like. Mr. Natural could strip his illusions all day, point out his shortcomings and foibles, and Foont never came to realize that his quest for spirituality, unenlightened as it was, was light itself compared to Mr. Natural's cynicism.

perhaps R. Crumb was making a point about a holy man whose gospel is that nothing is holy, that that's the best one can expect. it's great having a partial map of that world...liberating...but I didn't move there.

Flakey Foont asks Mr. Natural, so, after all, what does Diddy Wah Diddy mean?

Mr. Natural says, if you don't know by now, buddy, don't mess with it.

when I move, I cough. when I cough, I get dizzy.

the shoulder tumor had taught me not to stand, not to lift. it still seems to be getting less painful, though I am doing mostly what it wants.

but this new thing is enforcing a quite unwanted sedentaryness.

but it means that most of my day is spent in something not too far from comfort.

except, perhaps, for dose days, like last thursday through monday.

those days, I need to be horizontal, I can't eat, and I feel like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth...the possessor of some unknown extraterrestrial weakness and nausea.

like Diddy Wah Diddy, I don't know what it means.

no one else does, either.

it could be The War Effort.

it could be the drugs seizing 80% of my energy budget for the War On Tumors. it could be that once life-compulsive tumor cells are being sloughed off, liquefied into my lungs like consumption, irritating everyone.

the bump on my shoulder...often called, in an attempt to allay the sense of its strangeness, my "booboo" or "bobo"...isn't twice its former size. it isn't half its former size. there are new, squishy, impeding areas of it. but...is it just new tumor, or old giving up the ghost?

yes, yes, Scott, you are tired, you are nauseous, you cough. take some tessalon perles...but watch, they may make you dizzy. drink more water. your labs look perfect, ekg perfect, you are tolerating the drug amazingly well. let's all hope this is all Nutlin-3 going to cancer cancelling town.

tolerance. tolerating. tolerable. toleration, Mammy Yokum! intolerant. doin' tol'able.

let's not wonder if it is instead the beginning of the end.

the needle biopsy has been circulating nationwide for weeks...someday we will know the results. the C-T scan will happen on the 14th of July, and soon after we will know if we stay the course or try one of what Dr. Gore says are 900 cancer drugs currently in study.

until then, Flakey...don't mess with it.

if the indications are good to miraculous, I won't quibble about wanting to get better in a way that makes me actually feel better. curing, instead of matching, toxicity.

and this is day 7 in the cycle...no more dose for three more weeks...of which each day is supposed to get better and better.

oh, yeah, the blessings column:

my miracle drug is not something I have to live in Bangla Desh to be in a study for.

whatever is being taken away from me...my voice is better than it was last summer. if I sit down for gigs, I can sing a long time and hardly cough at all.

with a boulder on my shoulder, feeling kind of older (Springsteen), I still don't think I suck playing guitar much worse than ever.

and I still get to do sessions at the house...doesn't seem like I'm out of contact with whatever sense of music I've always had. still have easy access to all my ideas, preferences, prejudices.

it's, like, huge.

this was my worst week, and I didn't know what I would be able to do. but I did three gigs and a couple of sessions. and I could be wrong, but I don't think I'm a liability yet.

so often in the last year and a half, I've waited for word. I'm pretty good at it. so often in that time, the second I got word, I longed for the days before I'd had it.

so it's ok that I'm not to mess with it right now. the present scrolls by, and is doable.

we want comfortable, but we'll take doable.

One Last Kiss

the original production of Follies, Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 musical, was opulent and ambitious, and unlike anything that had been seen previous. common to all theatrical works, it is also just as gone forever as the styles of musical it pastiches, whose heyday was the era between the Great Wars.

when the time machine is invented, as full as the Ed Sullivan theatre will be on February 9, 1964, the 1971 shows of Follies could well be just as full. until then, going back will be just as achingly impossible.

the musical takes place in 1971, as well. the theatre where a Ziegfield-like impressario produced lavish musicals for a decade and a half, four decades ago, is being torn down to make room for a parking lot - in New York, a much surer investment. all of the Weissman girls and guys have been invited to a first and last reunion to commemorate and try to let go of a bygone era.

Weissman says, I always know when something’s over.

brave words. tough talk.

but Sondheim does not know when something’s over. he, I will guess, enjoys the musical styles of the Twenties and Thirties more today, if anything, than he did in 1971. and though the theme of Follies is the folly of trying to hold onto beautiful romantic visions whose times have passed - bygone eras of music, lost days of youth, imaginings of love and unexperienced unions - the actual agenda of the play is to present those very styles of music, with Sondheim’s genius-fueled engine under the hood, and see if he can turn back the clock and make jaded modern folk understand the guilty pleasure those songs and performers fill him with.

yes, yes, you hear him apologize. the themes are surfacey and dated. the musical devices have become cliches. the patter lyrics are hardly cutting edge wordplay anymore.

but...with a grand backdrop...with resonances to characters we are made to care about...shining performances, better wordplay, cooler orchestration...can't I show you what it is I love about old school theater, can't I make it do to you what it does to me?

madness. folly. it's over, Steve.

but like I say in The ReJuveniles, a 60's cover band, the 60's aren't over 'til we say they're over.

think of A Mighty Wind. The Folksmen in their striped shirts, desperately clinging to whatever place they may have in PBS reunions, still foolishly believing in their bygone style of music. aren't they saps? these songs are parodies, aren't they? doesn't it all seem stupid forty years later? didn't we love it? wasn't it fun? doesn't a part of us still believe? Mitch and Mickey could be, instead of archetypal folk lovers in a Grecian urn of song, clueless and kind of irritating cloud jockeys...

but don't we ache for them to have One Last Kiss?

I do. I'm a fool. it is my sort that Follies is meant for. just like a hard hitting documentary on prostitution that spends every minute distancing the filmmaker and the audience from its interviewees, yet owes its reason for being to the salacious interest we have in the women,

so we are promised in Follies a modern, hard hitting story about the foolishness of romantic illusion...but it is the romance itself that draws Sondheim, the hundred collaborators in a major stage production, and the audience into the proceedings.

they said it about football, but I say it often about music. you have to be smart enough to do it well, and dumb enough to think it matters.

or a big enough fool.

Sondheim is that Pulitzer prize winning fool.

One Last Kiss, sing the operatically voiced Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald types in some versions of Follies. (here sung by a Present character and her Young self in duet.) our affair is over, and it's bittersweet, so let's have One Last Kiss before we forever part.

Steve wants us to think that Follies is One Last Kiss from an affair that he knows damn well is over, his love affair with a musical style never to be popular again.

the door to the theater that is closed by the Ghost of bygone beauty at the end of the show...that door is closed every night, in every production. it says the end. but it will go on and on.

what made the Kennedy Center production of Follies a lifetime must-see for me was the spectre of bygone beauty that the original production of Follies had become in theater lore.

my first Follies was put on in a small theater in LA, by a pan-asian drama company. now, you might think that it would be hard to see past that aspect (accent? slant?) of the production, but in reality the characters in Follies are so steeped in denial and maintaining appearances that it actually all worked out rather well. "Ben Stone" is not an un-asian character, or character name.

I saw the 2001 revival on Broadway, where instead of taking an empty theater and elaborately dressing it up to resemble an empty theater, you were shown as you sat down the untreated back wall of that very theater.

it sure emphasized the story.

but I left feeling kind of a little gypped, or hoodwinked.

but, here, this year, the Kennedy Center which had presented six Sondheim musicals for his 70th birthday (I saw Merrily We Roll Along), announces a 28 piece orchestra Bernadette Peters- starring new production of Follies. big budget. big deal.

as close to a time machine as I imagine I will ever see, despite the best efforts of Apple and Antares.

start saving now. I have to be there. maybe...maybe...maybe...

maybe I'll get to see what Steve really had had in mind, what veteran theatregoers throughout the blogosphere often refer to as the best theater experience of their lives.

Follies plays out to the beholder on three visual levels.

one level is the well lit, Present 1971 characters...the main four are the two couples Ben and Phyllis, Buddy and Sally.

the second is the pallid appearances of the Young versions of each of the characters, from when the shows were being put on. a great deal of the fun comes from seeing the Present couples interact while their Young versions show the flashback of what is being referred to.

sometimes the interactions are identical; sometimes the Young couples put the lie to what the Present ones are saying.

the third level is that of the silent, posing, Erte-like showgirl-costume clad Ghosts of bygone beauty, the very illusion itself it would be "Folly" to pursue or cling to. always dimly lit, out of reach, tantalizing but just a mute greek chorus, reinforcing the unapproachable.

I go into this in detail because, ironically, the beautiful shining unapproachable Ghost that mutely distances this production of Follies from its potential does not come from 1928 but 1971.

I think the director of this show was seeking to build a time machine, to be in the theatre for Follies-Done-Right, The Way It Was.

not that he reproduced all of the choreography, imitated the sets, stuck to the original book (which has been changed many times).

he didn't.

but I felt that again and again, his choices reflected The Play...the 1971 Icon...and not the play...the story between the characters, the present, living, soon to be just as gone forever experience of this cast, these people, this place, this time.

Regine, an 80 year old French cabaret chanteuse, played Solange, the thickly accented elderly cabaret chanteuse in the play. yes...she actually is that person, I'm sure of it. did it make her performance great?

non.

her solo number, an amazingly witty, fast paced Sondheim travelogue, was unintelligibly garbled. not fatal, but far from bringing the noise.

Linda Lavin's "Broadway Baby"...lisa loved it, and it's constructed to be an unavoidable show stopper. I felt like the Icon was served...if this person does this number, won't that be great?

but again and again throughout the evening, I felt that emotionality and continuity...presentness... was lost to homage. that knowing the reason for the casting took precedence over how well the actor cast would perform his or her part.

I thought Phyllis, for a woman referred to as icy and jaded a dozen times in the script, was screechy and rushed. I thought Ben's number where he breaks down trying to deliver a jaunty tribute to himself was emotionally way mishandled...I kept seeing the point in Episode III where Anakin becomes Darth Vader, arguably the nexus of all six Star Wars movies, which largely due to the acting came across to me like, "yeah. ok. whatever."

I though Ben's physical appearance was uncannily like the Ben in the few snippets of the '71 production that exist on YouTube...showing more of a "big fat phony" than the steel and stone, say, Tom Wopat showed in the 2001 Broadway version.

maybe it's those asians, but that's more where the interest is for me...when stone starts to crack.

Buddy was everything you could want Buddy to be. you read about Ben in the magazines...you meet Buddy in the bar. the common man's strengths, and his weaknesses as well. I though the portrayal was spot on.

I never liked Bernadette Peters. til I saw her in Into The Woods, the Sondheim musical about fairy tales, as the Witch.

she was not the Mel Brooks movie vamp for 95% of the first act...agreeing to the ugly witch costume was only part of that decision...but I had to admit, even her BP moments throughout the play were effective and essential; in the end, cool.

she is not a typecast Sally. Sally has let herself go some...Bernadette, I hypothesize, hugs herself constantly and never lets herself go.

she had moments in Follies that nailed me to the wall. twice she hit the gentlest note in the most powerful way, and held it dangerously, unerringly, until she had won the war and could do anything she wanted with her spoils, the audience. high kilowatt star power.

another untouted moment that put me right back in the story was when she was listening to Ben sing his song "The Road Not Taken", in which he unconvincingly makes his case that the choices he did not make throughout his life (including choosing Sally) really had little importance and wouldn't have changed him much.

Sally just listens. but the way Bernadette Peters listened showed the whole point of the song, louder than Ben's singing.

that felt like a Present moment to me.

I don't think the play of Follies wants a star as Sally. I think the Icon "Follies" demands it.

the smartest thing Bernadette Peters could have done was to not overact or overplay at any point. and she did that. in fact, I've never seen a less signature performance from her...it's as if she realized that the role is not so much a Star turn, though there is real drama there to be conveyed.

"Losing My Mind" is Sally's big second act number...whoever I've seen sing it, I've seen the devil sit on her one shoulder, saying, sell it, baby! the second you sell it, though, you come off like Napoleon the XVI singing, "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Haaa!"

I didn't even see the devil on Bernadette's shoulder. she just sang it. her voice sounded a little rough for the only time in the show...an affect? at the end she took a precipitous octave plunge which I thought was pure Icon...but it was followed by one of those light pure notes that blew me back like a Maxell hi-fi ad. guess there's no argument here...

there was pretty much one set change in the night. and it was a stunner.

after an hour and a half of looking at (thoughtfully constructed) black theatre walls, a curtain covered the proscenium arch. the four principals are arguing full steam. after I'll guess no more than 25 seconds, the curtain drops to the stage and all you can see is concentric half circles of large pink flowers, filling every inch of space.

wow.

it is, of course, the beginning of the Loveland sequence, which starts with an impossibly cliched 20's style song about love and lovers and Loveland...and during which sequence each of the characters in solo numbers breaks down and has to relinquish their illusions for the necessity of their real lives.

it turns out the pink of the flowers was due to stage lighting, which changes again and again impressively redecorating the set.

the audience applauded thunderously.

but the audience seemed a little like a Spamalot audience to me.

Spamalot was the bringing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to the Broadway stage. and why not, say I.

but it makes for a Rocky Horror midnight show kind of affair, where the audience knows what's about to happen throughout, and laughs before the joke.

still good fun.

it didn't happen in 1971, though. no Follies audience then had any idea what to expect.

this time, it felt like...

ok...here's Sally's big number. can she pull it off? will Carlotta top Polly Bergen in the 2001 version? here's Linda Lavin...

I felt like we got disconnected star moments, in full glory, while the emotional material (which I find devastating) was truncated and/ or mishandled.

if the audience thunderously applauds a set change...are we really putting enough focus on the material?

yeah, it's hard when every great Broadway singer...and every lesser...has offered their versions of the show's songs. where do you go? what do you do?

what you don't do, though, is fill out a form. even in Follies, which will always have a certain amount of "Revolver" to it...pull the trigger, and here's another song more related to the genre than to the plot...especially in Follies, when it's time for the soap opera, it's time.

and it's a good one. and I missed it, staring into the dazzle of the Ghost of bygone beauty, the director's muse to which he was true, the creation of the Big "Follies".

at the end of Follies, the four principals, each having considered taking the road not taken, through a night of revelations of infidelity and resulting recriminations, leave the theater as they came in, the two couples intact, to resume their lives, sadder, arguably wiser, but definitely more resigned and more disillusioned, stripped of their follies.

I felt a little like that when I left at the end of the night. back to waiting for the time machine. 1971 more unattainable than ever.

but...Follies at the Kennedy Center...wasn't that the room to be in at the time? didn't I just have to be there? the flawless orchestra, those two or three notes, Sondheim's words and music, the set change, the spark in the dark...it wasn't 1971, but this time, this time I was there, and I imagine somewhere in the future I will encounter the Ghost of bygone beauty of this play staring at me from the internet, from another Follies production.

only this time I will have seen her fully lit, beauty marks, warts, and all.