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| Hershey Felder in Maestro, The Art of Leonard Bernstein. |
By Ed Rampell
In Maestro, The Art of Leonard Bernstein actor-playwright-musician Hershey Felder is a one-man band in his fourth one-man show about a renowned composer that has played at the Geffen Playhouse. The other unusual suspects of Felder’s magnificent musical obsession have been George Gershwin, Frederic Chopin and Ludwig von Beethoven. Bernstein, who composed the music for West Side Story, Candide, Trouble in Tahiti, the Marlon Brando movie, On the Waterfront, etc., struggles to live up to his father’s demands proved to be a rhapsody that made Lenny blue (in more ways than one), as we’ll see.
Like Ed Asner’s FDR, recently produced at the Pasadena Playhouse, this 90-minute or so one-man show has no intermission. But unlike Asner’s New Dealer, Felder’s musician must tickle the ivories on a Steinway while he also acts and relates the life story of one of the 20th century’s most renowned conductors, composers, musical mentors and proselytizers. Hershey skillfully pulls off this delicate balancing act with aplomb, bringing Bernstein and his music back to vivid life. We follow Lenny from his troubled childhood to his schooling at Boston Latin and Harvard, his apprenticeships with several conductors, the accidental thrusting of young Bernstein into the limelight at Carnegie Hall, his TV appearances as a sort of musical dramaturge on the Omnibus and other programs, his forays at the Great White Way, Bernstein’s conducting of major orchestras and his angst-ridden journey to become a great American composer.
We also get glimpses into Bernstein’s tumultuous private life: Early intimations of homoeroticism, marriage, fatherhood, his coming out of the closet and abandoning of his beloved wife, Felicia, and the repercussions of his actions.
Bernstein lived to regret his betrayal, if you can call it that, of Felicia. But what haunts the conductor most is his self-perceived failure to live up to the expectations of himself and others that he would compose an immortal classical masterpiece. The tortured maestro flagellates himself over the gap he believes exists in his otherwise admirable, transcendent oeuvre.
To what should we ascribe this creative “omission”? Perhaps, like his literary contemporary, Truman Capote, Bernstein’s celebrity overshadowed his artistry. Why tackle the clacking keys of that typewriter or piano, grapple with your muse as you strive to create -- often a painful, nervewracking experience requiring the utmost concentration, shutting all else out -- when one is invited to hobnob with Jackie O. and exchange bons mots with the beautiful people at Elaine’s instead? Especially when one’s celebrity status also pays the rent, and there’s no pressing economic impetus to create.
I don’t know to what extent the Manhattan glitterati, Broadway success, Hollywood excess, and so on enticed and distracted Bernstein, as it did Capote (his childhood friend Harper Lee apparently learned this lesson well, and after To Kill a Mockingbird’s wild success, she shunned the limelight that consumed Truman). But I have a different interpretation as to why the composer of the play that revolutionized Broadway felt like an aesthetic flop. It really doesn’t matter if one co-creates (with choreographer Jerome Robbins and lyricist Stephen Sondheim) a West Side Story, or Candide, with its mellifluous music enlivening Voltaire’s enlightening tale or the sonorous score for On the Waterfront, and so on, and bring so much joy to millions of children (I still remember Lenny’s wonderful explication of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf) and adults. What matters is that if you have a parent who belittles you and tells you that you’ll never amount to anything, even if you illuminate the lights of the Great White Way, Tinseltown and the world with your artistry, you and your work will never be good enough, and never will be, you bad boy. There was a lot of trouble in Bernstein’s Tahiti. (I’m no Sigmund Freud, but perhaps this may also help to explain the apparently bi-sexual Bernstein’s psychosexual tension?)
These are insights I took away from Felder’s drama, along with what a huge role Judaism -- in particular that religion’s mystical side -- played in Bernstein’s life and on his music. This was quite a revelation. What’s missing in this bio-play is the rather well-known fundraiser Bernstein threw for the Black Panther Party at his posh Park Avenue penthouse pad, and which Tom Wolfe ridiculed in his 1970 book Radical Chic &a Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. For the Virginia born and raised Wolfe, whose father edited The Southern Planter journal, white guilt was the rationale for Bernstein’s Panther bash. But even if the soiree took place in a duplex I prefer to believe that the son of a Russian Jewish émigré might have had compassion for and solidarity with members of another oppressed minority. Who’da thunk it?
But you can’t include everything in a bio-play, even one as ably directed by Joel Zwick, who also helmed Felder’s preceding dramatic triptych of composers. Maestro does have great acting and stellar music, as well as imaginative projection design rendered by Andrew Wilder, as the play does include some archival footage of the conductor, plus other striking images. Randall Arney is Maestro, The Art of Leonard Bernstein's artistic director, while the estimable film/TV helmer Gilbert Cates, who has produced 14 Academy Awards ceremonies, is the Geffen’s producing director. For those interested in music, theatre, gay subjects, Judaism, obviously Bernstein himself, and virtuoso acting, don’t miss the latest installment of Hershey’s philharmonic factory. Bravissimo!
Maestro, The Art of Leonard Bernstein runs through Dec. 12, at 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood Village, CA 90024. For more information: 310/208-5454; for more info: www.GeffenPlayhouse.com
