James Strecker Reviews the Arts

About two years ago I notified the online All Music Guide that their biography of Hamilton’s Jackie Washington contained a number of errors because its author had mixed biographical information of two Jackie Washingtons. I explained further that I, with Jackie, was the co-author of his two autobiographies, Talks with Jackie Washington and More Than A Blues Singer.

Alas, this mess of an entry remains. It contains, accurately, the dates of Jackie’s birth and death, but one of the albums in the abbreviated list of three is not his. A good place to go, however, to have this mess sorted out is www.wirz.de/music/washing.htm, a “labor-of-love” for the other Jackie Washington, where you’ll find complete discographies and photos of the album covers of both men.

The irony in all this is, of course, that the bio’s author, Bruce Eder, is a respected historian of both music and film. Or maybe that’s another Bruce Eder.

By the way, the offending passages that don’t apply to Hamilton’s Jackie are below. I know he would have been very amused by the confusion….

“Born Jackie Washington Landron to a family of West Indian and Puerto Rican descent ………..he worked at various times under both names, performing music as Jackie Washington, and as Jackie Ladron when he worked as an actor, his second career

He was signed to Vanguard Records in the early ’60s, and began performing extensively in the United States, especially in New York’s Greenwich Village at venues such as Gerdes’ Folk City and other friendly havens for the music. One of the songs in his repertory was a version of “Nottamun Town,” a mountain song recorded and written by Jean Ritchie that he adapted musically to a minor key into his own style, with a droning sound on the guitar. Among the audience members who heard him do this song was Bob Dylan, who asked to hear it several times, according to Washington in the Eric Von Schmidt book Baby Let Me Follow You Down. A while later, Dylan’s “Masters of War,” re-creating Washington’s music from his version of “Nottamun Town,” was released on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the album that established the latter’s primacy in the contemporary folk music landscape. Washington talked of suing but evidently never did. He later took a savage swipe at Dylan’s sound and his opportunistic streak, however, on “Long Black Cadillac” — which sounded like a parody of “Like a Rolling Stone,” in an electric arrangement by Felix Pappalardi, featuring the Youngbloods — which was released in May 1967 on his LP Morning Song, his fourth for Vanguard. In the interim, he’d also released the live album Jackie Washington at Club 47 and the soul-flavored single “Why Don’t They Let Me Be,” all attracting relatively little attention.

The unfortunate part about Washington’s recording career — for Washington — was that Vanguard never really pushed his recordings; the label was evidently content to let the music filter into the folk and blues communities — and in those days, they hardly ever even released singles, and weren’t a very big presence in the radio marketplace. On the other hand, their relative complacency meant that Washington got to record many of the songs that he was doing on-stage at the time, thus leaving behind a fairly substantial percentage of that end of his repertory

Here’s the scene: a dark and shadowy street with strands of London fog drifting in and out, a lamp post, a bobby strolling through, a variety of street-world English accents, and a voice that shouts the news of Sherlock Holmes’ death. Next a few words from Doctor Watson, the play’s narrator, and we flashback with scene change to the study of the famous detective where he listens with ears and heart to an operatic soprano on a cylinder –and I bet you don’t remember those.

Holmes offers a slew of quick observations regarding his associate –that he has gained seven and a half pounds, has moved his shaving table, has a clumsy servant girl – and concludes with, “You see but you do not observe.” We, in our turn, observe that he is smitten with the singer. When he gets to meet her, not long after, he speaks haltingly and awkwardly and with breathy urgency, for hers is “a face a man might die for.”

The ensuing dramatic narrative of the play, we soon discover, is actually a blending of two plots. One involves the King of Bohemia who explains, “The scandal of my life involves that voice.” It turns out that the King was “romantically entangled” with the opera singer Irene Adler and now, on the verge of marriage, must retrieve love letters and a compromising photograph before they fall into hostile hands. The second plot involves the life-threatening presence of Holmes’ eternal rival, Professor Moriarty, and we know there’s a waterfall in their cards.
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Steven Sutcliffe as Holmes has a readily ignited instinct for melodramatic cadences. His insinuating voice is rich with a comic self-indulgence that goes oratorical and judgmental in a snap. His Sherlock is finicky in manner, condescending in tone, and approaches every possibility with a boyish gusto. He enunciates in broad sweeps and speaks in pockets of resonance or with prickish understatement. He is charming.

But the casting of this splendid entertainment provides several humorously melodramatic individuals, and each distinct voice gives this production a symphonic variety in sound. Peter Krantz, as the King of Bohemia, for one, speaks with a gruff authority and a blustery roar that punctuates the atmosphere and the play’s headlong pace.

As Moriarty, Thom Marriott is a tall, darkly brooding presence who glides regally in his steps and speaks with solid, commanding and measured delivery. He is elegantly dignified in attire, without a crease. He is a thinking villain, one with a beard he strokes in moments of deep and evil thoughts. His disposal of implicating witnesses keeps him untouchable. Another gem of a performance in the group of conniving criminals in Cliff Saunders as Sid Prince, a cheeky safe cracker with attitude and a nicely shaped Cockney.
accent.

Doctor Watson, on more than one occasion negated as a bumbler elsewhere, is here made a quietly complex creation by Clive Walton. He’s a slightly stooped, linear figure who speaks like a professional and a man of the streets. He is rough-edged and sufficiently slow in keeping pace in detection of details, which allows Holmes, in turn, to dazzle. This Doctor Watson is slightly seedy and rumpled in manner, certainly a compellingly defined character with a real life hidden in his pocket. One keeps wondering about him.

As Irene Adler, Ieva Lucs has a perky, contemporary, and not too worldly quality that plays sunshine to the production’s often brooding setting. She’s a charming creation who speaks her emotions with a pleasant ringing clarity and delivers one of the play’s ace lines: “I have shot tenors, James, and after that a woman can shoot anything!”

This briskly melodramtic production, with its many amusing points concisely made, is directed for sprightly precision by Marcia Kash. She maintains a tone of very refined agitation, something that one may not notice save for one’s constant chuckles in response to it. She ably realizes the comic potential of each scene and delights in lightly maneuvered exaggerations of manner and propriety.

Shawn Kerwin’s involving set, in which the era is here detailed and there simply suggested, provides a physical context for both Edwardian stodginess and crisp narrative momentum. We suffocate in close quarters and then we run frantically along with the story.

The Final Adventure is concisely written, with the text carefully informative as it sends the plot moving ahead in quick leaps. It is an adaptation by Steven Dietz of the once immensely popular play by actor William Gillette and Arthur Conan Doyle. Some scenes certainly take liberties with the canon, even demystify Holmes, but if you suspend your loyalty to the original stories, you’ll thus have much here to enjoy.

Imagine Holmes and Adler youngishly making plans together, although she informs him that “a woman can never be solved.” Imagine the woman-inept Holmes in a lover’s spat where Irene is irritated by his talking about pipes when she wants “evidence of his heart.” And Holmes, though not woman-savvy – he even asks, “What is a man to say?”- does briefly show signs of a heartfelt wooer. Imagine that!

Whether anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Doyle can believe, accept, or even imagine such a Holmes is, of course, the issue temporarily on the shelf. In the meantime, however, this production is pure delight throughout. And it’s on view, appropriately, in London’s Grand Theatre, a “Victorian style theatre, built in the Edwardian era.”

The near-to-first production I saw of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the legendary Peter Brook mounting of forty years ago that placed a smugly grand Alan Howard as Oberon on a trapeze. At the end, the cast burst into the auditorium and startled the audience with personal greetings everywhere and I got to shake hands with Puck. My prof at grad school protested that “this isn’t Shakespeare” but ever since, after many productions, I realize that the play’s potential for theatrical magic allows for a variety of directorial approaches that can, each one, conjure and realize the play’s otherworldly centre. And thus does the current Soulpepper production under Rick Roberts’ freshly imaginative direction that makes us as much participants within a compelling atmosphere, from which characters emerge, as witnesses to a consistently engaging play.

You’ll note that all but two of the speaking parts double as fairies –and sometimes trees- although, because of their hooded attire and Lorenzo Savoini’s seductively dark lighting, we never quite know who or what we are dealing with. Now and then, these large looming figures emerge with concertina, fiddles, bodhrans, and bells in hand and contribute to Mike Ross’s evocative and varying soundscape. The use of flashlights as travelling spots makes for many an eerie moment with misshapen, figures landing upon the lighting’s rich hues. Likewise, the text sometimes doubles as individually delivered phrases of sound within a sonic dream that includes a repeated motif here, an electronic crescendo there, finger tapping to suggest rain, and always a breathy undercurrent that creeps about the stage like a soft wind of undefined intention. As with a McLuhan medium of low definition, we have to fill in the goings on, sometimes with our own fears, and are compelled to be involved.

Among the actors, there are several who please a great deal. Mike Ross –yep, the sound designer- as Lysander and Brendan Wall as Demetrius are young men not quite out of boyhood who react to situations from an emotionally driven core, as much physically as in words, always with an inherent playfulness. They are dopey just enough to make them lovable. In comparison, Alena Malika and Karen Rae, as Hermia and Helena respectively, offer detailed and carefully shaped readings of the text, sometimes edged with emotional shadings that suggest individual personality, yet sometimes one senses a conceptual approach in which rhyme and form safely rule too much. But note Tatjana’s First Fairy who, with soft lilt in her voice, musically blends both earth and air in a brief, but enchanting, brew.

As Theseus and Hippolyta, Ins Choi and Trish Lindstrom concisely suggest presences of quiet unforced authority in both public places and in the bedroom. As a physically agile Oberon, Choi is not so much kingly as a short-fused and seething inner intensity awaiting a reason to burst, and sometimes the outbursts seem arbitrary. But just as Oberon easily gives in to rage, Lindstrom’s Titania very readily awakens to what seems an unrealized sexual freedom and we can tell, via her fawning and probing caresses of Bottom’s body, that this is one ass who turns her on. This Titania, who earlier fell asleep as if suspended in air, exudes an insistent sensuality. Both pairings of Choi and Lindstrom offer revelations, as does Gregory Prest’s Puck, a menacing realization of theatre’s favourite gofer who, here, implies a secret life and a not-too-concealed mean streak. And his last words are very threatening indeed.

As one would hope, the tradesmen-players round off the disconcerting elements in both play and production with a guileless, clueless innocence that allays the worldly and metaphysical sharp edges that one can easily find herein. In something contrary to expectation, Oliver Dennis is a more inward Bottom whose socially rough edges show some grace, while Michael Hanrahan’s Quince is less bookish than I have seen, pragmatic and gruff and slightly prissy. Their play is indeed the thing, genuinely hilarious with a prancing, breast-baring Thisbe of Michael Simpson, who gets off on feeling up Wall and the crotch underneath, and a self-indulgently oratorical Pyramus who bellows, wails and sobs way over the top. His suicide with not less than five knives and a well-positioned phallic sword is eye-watering funny. Go see, go enjoy, for there is magic in this Soulpepper production.

South Pacific’s lead characters, ensign Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque, originate conspicuously from two distinct worlds. She is from Little Rock and exudes an aura of everyday small town folk. She is twangy, good-willed, innocent in the ways of worldly culture, and yet she is solidly herself, secure in her life even when an inner insecurity about love nags her toward doubt. Emile, on the other hand, has the quality of a quietly heroic sophisticate. He is tall, deep-voiced, and polished with an appealing continental savoir faire. He has poise and dignity. He reads Proust and Gide; she doesn’t.

These two characters, each one realized with sensitive theatrical smarts by Carmen Cusack and David Pittsinger respectively, don’t ask for our affection but they certainly win it in minutes. They are appealing, via the two leads, because they speak openly through emotional bruises and make us care along with them about their difficult love affair. Each one implies an inner turmoil, yet a gradually deepening connection with the other, and they tell us who they are by suggestion as much as overtly. They are likeable by seeming natural and not broadcasting likability.

This wonderful production of South Pacific begins magically and so it ends. There is no guile in the air, no mean-spiritedness, but a lightness of being that is unselfconscious about romance while acutely aware of how war touches and deeply changes lives. To open, the two charming kids sing Dites-moi, the servant supervises them in French in an atmosphere of implied sophistication, and through the large window the sea is made of soft blue enchantment. The world is good. Next comes a flawless transition from home to beach where a chorus of sailors celebrates the entrepreneurial Bloody Mary. Already, this production brilliantly combines stylized fantasy and the gritty realities of war, for these sailors seem sweaty and worked over by the hot climate.

The story concerns interracial relationships and ultimately the southerner Nellie must acknowledge, of the seeds of racism in her, that “I can’t help it…. This is something that was born into me.” Lieutenant Cable, whose love for Polynesian Liat makes him face his own submission to racist barriers, sings, “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.” The fact that the tall and meaty Cable on his knees is as tall as the ultra petite Liat also provides a blunt metaphor for superpower USA’s dominance over helpless colonials. But Cable comes to realize, albeit too late, that he must forsake his racist homeland in his love for Liat, just as Nellie must change her inner self to love Emile. Thus, one of the great scores in musicals doesn’t shirk reality.

There is so much to cheer in this thoroughly conceived and imaginatively directed, by Barlett Sher, production. The stage feels full and vibrant with only one character or with twenty on it. Transitions from scene to scene overlap like filmic dissolves and, if you want seamless, look here. The realities of war are conveyed here in a small gesture, there in a vocal cadence, there in a nuance that speaks loud and clear. The singing at any volume, sotto solo or robustly choral or in between, is grand yet rooted in human complexity where feelings are ambiguous, unspoken, and uneasy in the world. The clever choreography bursts with dynamic human ingredients and individual energies and always accentuates character.

The magically subtle sets by Michael Yeargan prove gradually hypnotic and, without fail, seduce one’s imagination. Flexible stage size screens provide several vertical layers of depth and the physical blending of scenes, from one enchanting hue to the next, creates a subtly magical continuum. The sets are fresh with stylization, be they the commander’s office with a wall-size map of the east pacific islands or a subtly tranquil beach that suggests sand vibrating with both heat and mystery. Donald Holder’s equally subtle lighting is carefully attuned to the dramatic potential that these visual patterns provide and his combinations of colours shift with the narrative moods. The lighting not only sculpts the settings and characters into theatrical definition, but gives them a blend of psychological and magical resonance.

Carmen Cusack’s Nellie is, of course, the production’s heart, an almost permanent presence on the stage for the show’s running time of almost three hours. She is believably small town, feisty yet vulnerable, dynamically girl next door, and a character of slowly revealed unknowns. Cusack’s voice is startling with versatility, ranging from comic twang to resonant poignancy, often in one breath. She is conversational yet operatically- tinged, undeniably enthusiastic, able to do a Diana Shore clone and move on before the dust has settled. Especially beguiling are her slow drawls that ease her into new realizations, and especially in “A Wonderful Guy,” with its tiptoe choreography, she embodies comic lightness which she tosses off with ease.

In “This Nearly Was Mine” David Pittsinger sings with a deep ocean of a voice
that here and throughout the show reveals inherent nobility and sounds majestic even in everyday feelings. “Some Enchanted Evening” is delivered in a voice that is solidly operatic yet accessible, rich in resonance with, no doubt, much in reserve. Pittsinger warms the heart with his manner, thrills with his ringing tones, and in presence and voice remains something of a mystery, like a volcano that asserts itself by doing only what it needs to. Jodi Kimura’s sharply played Bloody Mary, on the other hand, is very much a person of the streets. physically hefty, savvy in dealing her wares, like a boars tooth bracelet, and a slightly menacing blend of street smarts and exotic other worldliness. She is likeable, if mostly on her own terms, and, with the slightly lunky, boyishly sincere, jock-leaning Lieutenant Cable of Aaron Ramey, rounds out this world onto itself that is South Pacific.

Add to this theatrical abundance the unforgettable male and female choruses, both sexually vibrant, both sexually friendly and inviting, both suggesting a kind of sexual fun that isn’t desperate to take itself seriously. The male voices are firmly masculine and their physicality bursts in mass energy. These men are implicitly rowdy, especially in “There is Nothing Like a Dame,” which here becomes an anthem of collective horniness as they stock around like caged animals. One pelvis thrusts, one hand fondles a breast; these guys need women fast. The delightfully chirping female chorus, meanwhile, displays, like their sailor friends, a variety of timbres in strongly individual voices that in turn makes for detailed harmonies and full-bodied groupings of sound. Moreover, their leggy look and pleasantly substantial derrieres are far from anorexic, packaged in coyly modest bathing suits like almost risqué forties pin ups.

This award-winning South Pacific is memorable and a must see. It offers thoroughly entertaining and moving theatre and is a splendid mounting of a classic that you’ll want to see again before the run ends on April 10.