Tag Archives: Connecticut

I Got a Kick . . . At the Opera!

As a rule, I am not a big fan of musical theater. I want my mind engaged when I go to the theater, and the familiar tropes and clichés of most musicals work better than personal ohms to make me drift into mindlessness. There are exceptions to my taste aversion, the stellar standouts, which include anything by Stephen Sondheim, Rent, Roar of the Greasepaint, HAMILTON and a few others. But even as a director of educational theater, who helmed at least two musicals a year, I was hard to please.

Which is why I most often chose very difficult musicals for my students to perform – the very operatic Most Happy Fella and Sondheim’s dark and cynical Sweeney Todd, for example. I am a very tough customer. And I am not likely to trust local regional theater, wherever I might be.

Which is curious, considering that I lived for many years in the New Haven, CT, area, and I had access to some of America’s best regional theaters. I trusted Long Wharf Theatre, Hartford Stage, and Yale Repertory, whose productions I attended religiously. But except for one musical at Long Wharf that I rather liked (about an English teacher), I tended to head to New York when I wanted to check out a play for my kids or to see what was new in the musicals canon.

And that is how I failed to discover the Goodspeed Opera House.

Well, that is not exactly accurate. I knew about the Goodspeed.  I  had even been to the building and had walked the premises. But  I had never gone inside, had never seen a production.

Until last week.

My good friend and colleague Denise Lute was featured as the batty Mrs. Harcourt in Anything Goes, and I decided it was time to take the leap, convincing my best buddy to drive with me from New York to Haddam. Well, blow Gabriel, blow and ain’t it de-lovely! If Anything Goes is an example of what’s been going on out there at the Goodspeed, then I have been a fool. Thank goodness I have lived long enough to get past my prejudices and enjoy this epiphany.

Anything Goes was absolute perfection, from start to finish, a joy to behold and a revelation of phenomenal talent.

Which, as Denise pointed out over dinner, should not be a surprise. After all, everyone in the cast has a host of impressive credits. “My Kingsley (Kingsley Leggs, who plays Eli J. Whitney, Mrs. Harcourt’s boyfriend)”, she averred, “was in Color Purple, Sister Act, etc., David (Harris, who plays the romantic lead) is a hot (and I mean HOT) star in Australia, and Rashidra (Scott), well, she’s here because Beautiful let her take a leave of absence. She’s got a feature role in that one!”  High praise coming from Denise Lute, who works more than most actors I know, a veteran of the Actors’ Studio. Still, I would not have been so easily convinced. Anyone can make a resume sound far more impressive than it is.

Rashidra

Rashidra Scott as Reno Sweeney in Goodspeed Opera’s Anything Goes (photo courtesy of CT Post).

But the cast gels in ensemble synchronicity from the stimulating opener to the rousing finish. Rashidra Scott is in almost every scene and leads the ensemble in dancing that runs the gambit from tap to jazz to ballet to salsa with her fleet feet dancing in perfect alignment with her megavoice. She really stands out.

Because she practically carries the show. But honestly, there’s not a bad apple in this crate. Every single person in the cast sings, dances, acts. Even Trixie, the dog Denise’s character carries compulsively through most of the play, is remarkable, so mellow she could have convincingly played a stuffed animal.

Denise and Trixie

Cheeky (Trixie the Pomeranian) in the arms of Mrs. Harcourt (Denise Lute). Photo by Tim Cook/The Day

I would have preferred less mugging and ad-libbing by Stephen DeRosa, who plays Moonface Martin, Public Enemy #2, but that’s because I’m a writer (script sacrosanctity!) and a former acting teacher (be generous, babies; don’t steal the light); the crowd there loved him, and so he mugged harder and ad-libbed all the more vigorously.

To tell the truth, if I were to say to one person in the show “You’re the top,” it would be to choreographer Kelli Barclay. I haven’t seen dancing like this anywhere. The dance in this show was more than just a fun interlude. In many cases, the dance captured pieces of story that were not clearly elucidated or they underscored a subtext the audience could easily have missed. The book is simplicity itself, with no intricate story lines, no metaphorical messages to darken or clutter the story, but the characters might come off as stick figures or cartoons were it not for the choreography. Barclay’s choreography endows Reno Sweeny and Billy Crocker, and even Moonface Martin with a humanity that is not in the script, is not clear in the music.

One of the difficulties of a show like Anything Goes is that the vacuity of story and absence of characterization can leave the audience a bit numb. Even while they are having fun, they might be inclined to turn off a bit, to withhold investment in the people the actors are playing. Barclay’s dances ensure that the audience cares about all of them, even about the ensemble characters we hardly know at all.

Director Daniel Goldstein can take credit for opening a world and for making sure that all the elements of the production are of that world. The design of the set by Wilson Chin is simple but elegant, very old-school theatrical, with small revolves, wagons and flies providing a variety of sub-sets. The costumes by Ilona Somogyi are adorable, respectful of the bodies they adorn and time-period-appropriate, in colors that enhance the set design. Lights, by Brian Tovar are unnoticeable and flawless, but sound was slightly lacking, as there were whole chunks of dialogue that were inaudible or indiscernible where I was sitting in the front left orchestra.

Best of all, what Goldstein has achieved, what directors hope for and too often miss, is a cast and crew that loves being together, loves making this show, loves Cole Porter, loves everything about being in Haddam on the stage of the Goodspeed Opera House. That’s remarkable. It’s hard to pull off a show that’s based on the music of a beloved song writer and refrain from making it more than it is or less than it can be. An American in Paris on Broadway very graphically proved that to me. No one had any fun in that show, at least on the day I saw it. And the writers and director, in adding tried dark drama to the simple storyline, muddied the waters and detracted from the beauty of the music. The actors were great ballet dancers but could not act, and the dancing told no story. The play was merely an exhibition, a total disappointment. And the antithesis of Anything Goes.

Which taught me a valuable lesson. I must lose all NYC snobbery. Theater in the boondocks –like it or not, folks, the Goodspeed Opera House is in the idyllic boondocks, on the banks of the CT River – can be well worth the requisite battle to reach it through horrific Connecticut (worst in summertime) traffic.

goodspeed

It’s too late to see this production of Anything Goes, which closed  June 16. But there will be other productions – check them out here. And be sure to watch for work by people like Rashidra Scott, Denise Lute, Daniel Goldstein, and Kelli Barclay.

Himself and Nora, an off-Broadway show about James and Nora Joyce, about which I was skeptical about until I realized it features Barclay’s choreography, sounds like a great prospect. There’s lots of subtext in that marriage to elucidate through dance. My guess is that it can’t miss.

 

 

We Might all be forced to wear May’s Shoes

NB: I wrote this right after Sandy Hook and have updated it, though the only thing that has changed is that there are many more Mays, more people left in the wake of senseless slaughter. . . .                                                                                                       ——————————————————

I’ve been thinking a lot about my friend May these days. May’s not her name, but everything else I write about her will be faithful to the person I knew.

May and I taught together in a fairly small English department in a mid-sized town in Connecticut. She was a veteran by the time I began teaching, though we were nearly the same age. She is one of those exceptional people called to teaching, and while I did not agree with her approaches, she was undeniably driven to spend her life in a classroom. She loved her work, loved her school, loved her students.

More than that she loved her family. Her husband was a semi-retired business owner, and together they trained show dogs and horses. Their daughter, whose disabilities made her dependent on them for life, was sheltered in unfettered warmth. But the light of May’s life was her talented, intelligent son.

May never tired of sharing photos and mementos from her son’s glory days in high school, then college; her only complaint was that he remained single, and she longed for him to bring her grandchildren. Then,  just before I left my position as a teacher in the room down the hall from May’s, her son did marry, and he married a girl May easily adored. Beside herself with joy, May was confident that grandchildren were finally on her horizon, and she could not wait.

I didn’t see May for a lot of years. I had moved to another school and then left teaching altogether; I hardly thought about her. But when Newtown happened, I saw in a news story that one of the children murdered there had her last name. Unwilling to imagine the bottomless pain of being a parent of a Newtown parent, I dismissed the name as a coincidence until a week later, when someone I knew from that town wrote me to tell me that the child whose name I had noticed was indeed May’s grandson.

Connecticut is a small town, and May’s was not the only family I knew whose hearts were buried in that awful rubble. But having reached grand-motherhood myself, having spent so many hours hearing the golden son stories, the news of May’s loss struck me like a serrated knife slicing away the edges of my heart. I couldn’t even write to her. I hadn’t been in touch with her for over twenty years; it felt disingenuous to write of sympathy, of love.  I was dumbstruck.

There is no bottom to the kind of despair I envision in the wake of such a loss. And today, for the 294th time this year, another group of grandmothers’ lives have been strangled by an angry man carrying a gun, and by the deranged, terroristic forces in our society, who claim it is his inalienable right to carry that weapon with which he has slaughtered her child’s child.

It is time to stand up as a nation and say ENOUGH. We will take no more. We will make it stop. And we must do it now. We have no time to lose. We are all being watched through the sights of those guns, and it is up to us to hobble them for once and for all.

Now.

What’s a (Grand)Mother to do?

Variations on a Surreal Scene of Violence

Show me the country, where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings, once so tall
And I’ll show you a young land
With so many reasons why
And there but for fortune go you and I, you and I.
Phil Ochs
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1. This is personal

I am a first generation American Jew. I am here by a fluke, by the accident of my mother’s survival, the miracle that she was not exterminated by the complacency, conciliation and paralysis that killed 6 million of her co-religionists and at least 5 million of her co-Europeans over a period of less than six years.

As the child of that happenstance, I owe a huge debt to my grandchildren. It is absolutely necessary that I not keep my mouth shut, that I not stand by and watch as Rome burns, that I not look the other way when society and government conspire to allow rampant murder to take over the country. It is time I look you in the eye and say aloud that if we do not find a way to stop mass murderers from infiltrating our schools and theaters and shopping centers and lives, each of us is complicit in the deaths and/or maiming of every victim.
All right. I’ve spoken. I’m probably preaching to the choir. Our voices join in outrage.

Now what?

Trouble is – and I’ll bet this is what happened to a lot of folks who might have wanted to change things in the 1920’s, 30’s and ‘40’s – I don’t know what we should DO. I have a perseverant Facebook friend who posts every few days that she may be only one voice, but she will keep saying how terrible it is that kids die in places like Newtown. But a voice, a post on FB, is not enough. What action can we take?

Well, to begin with, we might attempt to take down the gun lobby, get them to back off their insane stance that assault weaponry belongs in American homes, that armaments equal liberty. There is no question that the idiocy that prevails over our legislative bodies needs to be tempered with something like intelligence. It would be a good place to start, but we all know that even controlled guns, like controlled substances, can be lethal. The weaponry used in the Newtown slaughter was duly registered to the mother of the assassin. Further, in Canada where guns stand at the ready in every corner, there are no mass murders akin to ours.

Clearly, gun laws are not The Cure. Yes, we need stronger enforcement of more stringent laws, but the American black market is a cornucopia of easily obtained ill-gotten gains; gun laws won’t stop the killings. What else?

We need better health insurance and a medical community equipped to fully treat mental illness rather than stuffing sufferers with pills and telling them to call in the morning once every six months. We require a national societal outlook that accepts that mental disorders are as honorable as any other; no one hides diabetes in the family closet, but few are willing to talk openly about the schizophrenic who lives upstairs. That has to change.

We need more empowered and more effective training for law enforcers. When the Isla Vista murderer was reported to local police for his stash of weaponry and his menacing, disturbing videos, the police found him “polite” and “well-mannered” so they left him to his diabolical planning. That boy’s red flags were waving all over the Internet, all over his lifestyle, all over his face, and no one took him seriously because he was polite and well mannered? Who trained those investigators?

We need sensitivity to the vagaries of iconoclasm. Perhaps rather than labeling some of the perpetrators, if their communities had found a way to embrace them, they might have facitated ways to work out anxieties and anger. As a drama teacher, I often saw misfits find satisfying niches that turned their outsider statuses to a special kind of belonging, and I know that drama’s sister arts – music, individual sports, crafts, visual arts, etc. – are equally adept at “normalizing” weirdness.

We need mitigation of the violence we call entertainment and/or to understand why mad violence is so compelling to us all. A favorite character on the unremittingly brutal Game of Thrones is stabbed in the eyes, and everyone shudders but no one fails to tune in next time to see who’ll be the next prolific spewer of blood. Life on television and in video games is a bowl of splayed intestines, relentlessly devoid of sanctity. But while video games, television drama and even the news might inure our youngsters to the savagery around them, it is not the reason some carry AKAs into elementary schools and shoot five- and six-year-olds.

I could go on, but the point is clear: there is no one way to stem the tide. And even if every item on the list suddenly appeared in our communal midst, the ill might not be cured.

Because the one thing we need absolutely is a way for all of us who decry the violence to work together. We need organizations that send us out into the communities to preach and teach and listen and learn. We need to host meetings where kids and their parents and the disgruntled and the disenfranchised might come together for group support. We need to create a movement through which we are empowered to act.

A few groups do exist that claim to be fighting the madness, but when I try to get involved, they offer me no action; they simply ask for money. I have none. I can write, and I can speak, and I’m experienced in working with people; I want to put my skills to work making a difference. It should not matter that I am not solvent enough to contribute financially.

I am as baffled by it all as the next one. But other countries with problems far worse than ours, with cultures that have far less aversion to violence than ours, do not suborn the kind of terror we seem to be witnessing with increasing frequency here all over the country. I do not want my legacy to be my silence. I do not want my descendants to judge me complacent.

There must be something we can DO. Now.

What about we start with a mass protest meeting? We all join on Skype or Google or some common space online, and we have a huge symposium to brainstorm solutions. We sign a promise to sling no blame. We vow to listen to all suggestions, make no judgments, and we select volunteers to compile our ideas and to schedule follow-ups until we have plans of action, at which point we set about implementing them.

Anyone have another suggestion? It’s time. While we still have some.
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2. Nobody is Safe

I’ve been thinking a lot about my friend May these days. May’s not her name, but everything else I write about her will be faithful to the person I knew.

May and I taught together in a fairly small English department in a mid-sized town in Connecticut. She was a veteran by the time I began teaching, though we were nearly the same age. She is one of those exceptional people called to teaching, and while I did not agree with her approaches, she was undeniably driven to spend her life in a classroom. She loved her work, loved her school, loved her students.

But more than that she loved her family. Her husband was a semi-retired business owner, and together they kept horses, which both enjoyed riding. They had a daughter whose disabilities made her dependent on them for life, but whom May adored with unfettered warmth. But the light of May’s life was her talented, intelligent son.

Because I had a son a few years younger than hers, and because my son was a very accomplished young man who attended our school, May never tired of sharing photos and mementos from her son’s glory days in high school, then college; and when I left my position as a teacher in the room down the hall from May’s, that son was about to be married to a girl May adored. May was beside herself with joy. Grandchildren were on her horizon, and she was thrilled.

I didn’t see May for a lot of years. I left that school, moved to another one and then left teaching altogether; I hardly thought about her. But when Newtown happened, I saw that one of the children murdered there had her last name. Unwilling to imagine the bottomless pain of being a parent of a Newtown parent, I dismissed the name as a coincidence until a week after, when someone I knew from that town wrote me to tell me that the child whose name I had noticed was indeed May’s grandson.

Connecticut is a small town, and May’s was not the only family I knew pummeled by the awful rubble. But having reached grand-motherhood myself, having spent so many hours hearing the golden son stories, the news of May’s loss struck me like a serrated knife slicing away the edges of my heart. I couldn’t even write to her. I hadn’t been in touch with her for over twenty years; it would have seemed to her disingenuous to write of sympathy, of love.  I was dumbstruck.

There is no bottom to the kind of despair I envision in the wake of such a loss. And today, for the 75th time since that horrific day in Connecticut, another grandmother’s life has been strangled by a duly registered semiautomatic pistol aimed pointlessly at her child’s child.

It is time to stand up as a nation and say ENOUGH. We will take no more. We will make it stop. And we must do it now. We have no time to lose. We are all being watched through the sights of those guns aimed at our loved ones. Those guns must be hobbled.

Now.

Skeptical Idealism

I once was a union maid. Singing along with my soul father Pete Seeger, I turned 13 in a world where the unions, which had little to do with my life, existed to make workers feel appreciated, keep their bellies full and protect their rights. I would have followed “Dad”  and Uncle Woody to the ends of the earth carrying placards, recruiting for the unions.

Practical experience, however, has taught me skepticism.

In 1988, I went to work as a teacher in the state of CT, rejoicing that unlike AZ, where I had earned my certification and where no unions represented teachers, CT offered membership in a local chapter of the National Education Association.  I served on the bargaining committee and was part of a team that won my district some important concessions.  Then, after twelve years of fighting the politics of bureaucracy vs the arts, after feeling castigated for my perceived iconoclasm, I decided it was time to leave the profession.

Had I been a true devotee of my union, I would have stayed on indefinitely.  I had tenure.  I didn’t have to fight, didn’t even have to work very hard anymore.  My contract, buoyed by my Union membership, would have allowed me to get away with almost anything short of criminal behavior without being fired.  I could have followed in the footsteps of so many teachers who had gone before me, sleeping through classes, disengaging further and further from education, sitting for hours in the teachers’ lounge complaining about my lot but doing nothing to change things,  safely and securely ensconced in my job.

Instead, I saw that I was becoming ineffective.  I was distracted by personal traumas and exhausted from the constant round of fundraising and fighting for auditorium time that constituted much of my life.  I couldn’t focus on the student writing I was supposed to be coaching, and I feared allowing my negativity to rub off on the kids.  Nothing is worse for education that an ineffectual teacher, so I left.

And that’s when I found out just what the union had really done for me.

Long before my time, in the 1950’s, the Connecticut Teachers Retirement System voted to opt out of Social Security, and in 1959, at the request of the Connecticut Education Association, the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut prohibited members of the Retirement System from holding any further referenda on the matter.  To this day, the ban on Social Security for teachers in the state of Connecticut remains in place.

Which works out great for those teachers who stay  – even those who stay too long — from youth to age.  Had I been able to max out with 37 years in the system, I could have had a pension that exceeded my working income, and I would have had lifelong healthcare benefits.  But I began teaching at 50; I was hardly going to make it to the end any way I sliced it.  Today, at 65, my social security looks like I didn’t work for twelve years, and I have no pension.  The union did a great job for the one group and totally screwed the others.

Basically, the union made it possible for me to keep my job forever.  But it failed to protect any alternatives to the ties that bound me to the system, as it failed to allow the system to realistically assess my worth.

No union can make a perfect system.  None should promise to do so.  The union I am affiliated with now made promises, got commitments from management but the enforcement of all the concessions is a huge task, and in our case, implementation forced whole segments of the work force to compromise their well-being and/or to sacrifice their jobs altogether.  For the most part, the union shakes a hefty stick and makes noise but falls short real advocacy.  Yesterday the union actually gave credence to a management censure of a colleague who is dressed too well.  He breaks no rules, he comports himself professionally, and he even wears the required uniform.  Yet the union allowed his time and theirs to be wasted over nonsense.

There is no panacea.  No union can promise universal satisfaction any more than any politician can.  I don’t blame the unions.  I blame myself.  I expect too much.  Employers will exploit workers every chance they get, and workers will take advantage of any opportunity to bilk the employer.  It’s the way of the world.  Why do I keep hoping there is any protection from it?

Oh well.  It don’t scare me.  I’m sticking to the union . . . but I’m also lookin’ out for numbah one.  Know w’ad I mean?

A Mother’s Day Gift to My Children – Part IX

In 1970, another tragedy fueled another uprooting.

Only four years after relocating to Scottsdale, AZ, and finding a sudden surge of interest in his art, Herma’s husband died suddenly the day after Thanksgiving.  “It’s time,” Mama declared, “for a rapprochement! ”  She bullied Alfred into moving them across the country, to a house less than a five-minute walk from Herma’s.  Four of the kids were still in school — the youngest, in fact –was still in middle school, but she was undeterred.  Once she had moved, her mother and father followed, and soon thereafter her younger sister Ruth with husband Fred as well.  The family reunited and began life anew.  Yet again.

If Charlotte and her sisters had been paid by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, they could not have been more effervescent spokeswomen for the state. None of them had any desire ever to return to the gentle greenness of the east coast; they were delighted with the dry warm winters, the fragrant springs, even the blistering summers.  Visiting Connecticut in the ’90’s, Mom declared, “I feel so closed in.  I can’t see the sky.  Too many trees!”  Arizona suited her. “When Hitler threatened us, I begged my father to let me go to Israel with B’Nai B’rith, but he insisted I come to America with the rest of them.  This is my consolation prize,” she would exclaim, reveling in an Arizona sunset.  “This is Heaven!”

Herma, right, and Charlotte in 1975 with my firstborn – Both adored their grandchildren.

Then, in 1974, her world threatened to unravel once more.  Both Ruth and Herma were diagnosed with cancer, and Herma died in 1979.  This time Charlotte had polished her armor.  After her beloved Herma left her, she very quickly absorbed the loss and buried herself in her professional development.

After a rough start — in a middle school where the principal was put off by her accent — Charlotte found work in Scottsdale and taught not only Biology but Special Education as well, for the next 25 years; after she died in 1999, the school auditorium was full to bursting with students, teachers, alums, who came to say farewell to a most beloved, greatly revered teacher and friend.