Brigadoon: Love and Loss

Robert Fairchild in Brigadoon at New York's City Center. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The 1947 musical fantasy Brigadoon was the fourth collaboration between Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe (music), but it was the one that put them on the musical-theatre map. It ran for nearly two years and became a staple of regional and community theatres; there were three revivals on Broadway within a decade and a half of the end of its original run. Now it’s revived only rarely, having somehow acquired the reputation of being syrupy and old-fashioned, like a Rudolf Friml or Sigmund Romberg operetta from the twenties. That’s inaccurate. I think it’s a beauty, and that the score is one of the glories of the golden age of Broadway musicals. The 1954 movie adaptation – directed, with a surprising lack of conviction, by Vincente Minnelli, and starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse – didn’t get at the show’s charm; nor did a 1966 TV version with Robert Goulet and Sally Ann Howes, though it did have the great dancer Edward Villella repeating his performance from the 1963 New York City Center production in the principal dance role, Harry Beaton. But anyone lucky enough to catch one of the performances of the staged concert of Brigadoon, once again at City Center, between November 15 and 19 got a taste of what made – and makes – the musical so special. Christopher Wheeldon, the deservedly lauded director-choreographer of the 2015 An American in Paris, staged the show exquisitely with no set except for a bridge, some simple projections, and a motif of hickory branches that he used in the choreography and, in one dialogue scene, to stand in for the arms of chairs. Though obviously a far more modest presentation than his work for An American in Paris, this Brigadoon was so evocative and imaginative that I’m tempted to say that it was just about as good. The music director was Rob Berman, conducting the Encores! orchestra. Visually, musically and emotionally it was a thrilling evening of musical theatre.

To Own Your Creation: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Children

Krysty Swann and Robert Fairchild in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Photo: Shirin Tinati)

Robert Fairchild gives a supremely touching performance as The Monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which just ended a brief run at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York City. His role in Eve Wolf’s adaptation is a hybrid of dance (which he choreographed) and acting, and Fairchild, the New York City Ballet alum who spent most of the last couple of years playing Jerry Mulligan in the stage adaptation of An American in Paris, is a great dancer who also happens to be a fine actor. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was produced by a company that calls itself Ensemble for the Romantic Century, and Fairchild’s Monster, childlike and exuberant, fragile and openhearted, gets at the Romantic (capital “R”) core of Shelley’s novel, in which a man-made creation struggles to understand his place in the universe and rebels against his creator.

An American in Paris, Sans Alan Jay Lerner

Robert Fairchild, Brandon Uranowitz and Max Von Essen in An American in Paris (All photos by Angela Sterling)

Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 movie musical An American in Paris is simultaneously breezy and lush. With its smart, sometimes cheeky Alan Jay Lerner script, its Gershwin score and the ebullient choreography by its star, Gene Kelly, it’s one of the highlights of the golden age of M-G-M musicals. Kelly plays Jerry Mulligan, an American G.I. who sticks around Paris after the war to paint. He finds a patron, a wealthy émigré American socialite, Milo (Nina Foch), who wants to add him to her roster of bohemian lovers, but he falls in love with a shopgirl named Lise (Leslie Caron) whom he spots at a café. He courts her and wins her love, but just as he’s hampered by his attachment to Milo (he doesn’t reciprocate her sexual interest in him: these are still the days of the Hays Code), Lise also has other claims. She’s engaged to the affable music hall performer Henri Baurel (Georges Guétary), whom she doesn’t love but to whom she feels beholden, since he took care of her during the war when her parents, Resistance fighters, were captured by the Nazis. (Here Lerner reworks a plot strand from Casablanca.) To complicate matters further, Henri and Jerry have just become friends, through their mutual pal Adam (Oscar Levant), a struggling composer.

Seven Doors on One Side, Seven on the Other: The Revolver Box

The Beatles in Abbey Road Studios during filming of the "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" promo films. (Photo: Apple Corps)

A pitfall of trying to understand history is the narrative fallacy. It means deciding, often on scanty evidence and against opposite indications, that things happened a certain way for certain reasons, and then revising every conclusion to fit that faulty or incomplete picture. An example is the still-common characterization of The Beatles’ 1968 White Album as a study in dissolution because a) we know the group were having difficulties at the time, and b) John Lennon decided to describe it that way: “It’s like if you took each track off it and made it all mine and all George’s . . . It was just me and a backing group, Paul and a backing group.” There’s no reason not to hear the 1966 Revolver likewise, as a collection of solipsistic fragments. But we never have, because the dissolution narrative doesn’t commence until later—after Brian Epstein dies, Magical Mystery Tour bombs, and Yoko arrives. In fact, Revolver has long been held up as the summa of the group’s creative unity, despite being as diverse and divergent as the White Album.