I was struck by a delightful little coincidence this
morning. In my last blog entry I started off with the memory of having gone to
see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
at Radio City Music Hall in New York at the age of fourteen. And ended after a
string of youthful memories with the fact that I shared a birthplace with the
radical abolitionist, John Brown, who raided Harper’s Ferry in Virginia in
1859, for which act he was soon captured and hanged. The coincidence is the
fact that in 1929 the Pulitzer Prize went to the writer Stephen Vincent Benét
for his poem John Brown’s Body, the
very same writer whose story, “The Sobbin’ Women” about the myth of the Roman
rape of the Sabine women, became the basis for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
I dug up this bit of trivia because I was struck with the
charge by at least one modern-day feminist (supported by many of her commenters) to the fact that this Broadway musical
purports to be about song and dance and love and marriage but is in fact about rape and
the Stockholm syndrome. One of the commenters even writes: "I’ve never seen “Seven Brides…” and don’t plan to!"
The six younger brothers, if you remember the plot, go
into town, grab up the single girls, and steal off back to their mountain cabin with prospective
brides. A politically correct
sensibility comes into play here. Millie, the wife of the oldest brother Adam,
had been duped into marrying her backwoodsman husband before learning he was
looking for someone to cook and clean for him and his six brothers. She comes around to accepting her lot for herself, but when the boys follow their brother's example and show up with six “brides,” Millie insists the girls be well
cared for until they can be returned to their families in the springtime, when
the road, which has been cut off by an avalanche, can be cleared. Stockholm
syndrome – because the girls have time over the isolation in the winter months
to fall in love with their captors.
The past, they say, is a distant land, with different
values, attitudes and belief systems, and nothing illustrates this better than
the contrast between the view in 1954 of a “jolly good romp” and the view in
2018 of a “crime scene” to describe the very same phenomenon.
Everybody familiar with theater is familiar with the need
for a “willing suspension of disbelief.” Plays, even the good ones, are easily subjected
to exaggeration, to coincidence, to unlikely plot twists and too readily resolved
dilemmas. Corners have to be cut to accommodate the need to squeeze what
would take months or years in real time into a two or three hour period to be
represented on stage. In opera, characters fall in love instantly, love turns
to hatred and back in seconds, and people are suddenly willing to die for somebody they only met
fifteen minutes ago. Emotions are not so much real as expressed by proxy. They become
real when sung about, rather than experienced through interaction.
I have mentioned many times before what I call the moment my
life went from black-and-white into technicolor, when I was twenty and for the
first time I got to experience on a daily basis what life can be in a world-class city. I saw
my first opera in Munich, Prokofiev’s The
Love for Three Oranges. A perfect
combination of the sublime and the ridiculous. Sublime because there was
something magical about sitting in a theatre with a whole bunch of strangers and
being transported by an orchestra of talented people playing for singers and
dancers, also capable of lifting you out of your ordinary circumstances to a
place where imagination runs free. Once you get used to the idea of princesses
coming out of oranges and dying of thirst, the rest is a piece of cake. [Here,
by the way, is a video of San Francisco’s Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the
march from The Love for Three Oranges.]
I love all kinds of musical performance, piano, violin, cello concerts, chamber music,
symphony orchestra performances, operettas and operas. And the American answer
to the operetta, the Broadway musical. I remember my reaction the first time I
heard somebody tell me he hated opera. “The voices sound too unnatural, too
strained,” he told me. “Not strained,” I answered back. “Trained!” Cultivated.
Disciplined. How could he possibly not see the work that goes into training an
operatic voice? OK, so I'm not so crazy about hard rock and I find a lot of rap too aggressive.
Every musical genre has its followers as well as those who remain unmoved. Some people
don’t like jazz, others turn their noses up at baroque. Even more do so at countertenor voices. And many people find
the American musical too hokey for words. I love blue grass, country,
gospel, blues. Love Dolly Parton and honky tonk. Love Japanese enka. Love folk guitar. The Mighty Wurlitzer. And the music of the oud and the zither and the sitar. Hell, I even love bagpipes. So I really have trouble understanding how it is that people take exception to American musicals. But obviously, the thought of people suddenly bursting into
song when you least expect it is too big a stretch for some people.
OK, so it's absurd for Freddy Eynsford-Hill to ring Liza Doolittle's doorbell in My Fair Lady and then launch into a first tenor paean to the street on which she lives. For me that absurdity is just part of the nature of theater.
If you want real life, you can wash, dry and fold your laundry, follow the
latest shenanigans of a crooked politician, watch cars go by on a freeway. Me,
I’ll take every moment I can snatch away from real life to watch people do
things that I myself can’t do, particularly things that require talent way
beyond the ordinary. Dmitri Hvorostovsky when he sings, Gene Kelly when he dances. Yo Yo Ma and his cello. Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers dancing cheek-to-cheek. The way over-the-top choreography of the finale of Chorus Line, and the many hyper-athletic performances like the barn-raising dance in Seven Brides for
Seven Brothers.
Seven Brides is
not usually listed among the top musicals. It doesn’t pop into your head as
readily as Oklahoma, or South
Pacific, or The King and I. West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar. There’s
a long long list. Cabaret. Rent. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Guys and Dolls. Showboat. Man of La Mancha. Camelot. And they extend right up to today with such winners as Les Miz or Phantom of the Opera. And most recently The Book of Mormon and Hamilton.
But it still
holds its own for a musical from sixty-four years back in time. It was the
highpoint in the careers of several of the principals, but others had talent
that obviously couldn’t be contained. Marc Platt, who played Brother Daniel,
went on to dance for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and to become director of
the ballet company at Radio City Music Hall, among his many other
accomplishments. Jacques d’Amboise, who
played Brother Ephraim, was principal dancer for the New York City Ballet with
dances created for him by George Balanchine and is the winner of several
prestigious awards, the Kennedy Center Honors Award, a MacArthur Fellowship,
National Medal of the Arts, among them. Russ Tamblyn went on to an unforgettable performance as gang
leader of the Jets in West Side Story. And Howard Keel and Jane Powell are in their own way legendary.
The musical
nearly died out in the late fifties, and Seven
Brides is associated in many people’s minds with its decline. I’ve been
trying to figure out why and am not completely satisfied with the standard
explanations, the rise of television, the vertical nature of the
film industry, etc. But I don’t really
care. I loved The Book of Mormon and
will get to Hamilton one day when I
win the lottery. And their success suggests the day of the musical is not done.
And thanks to all
those people out there transferring film to digital and getting things out on
YouTube, and others fixing up old stuff, as well as the staying power of
theater, including movie theaters showing classics, the rumors of the death of the
musical are clearly premature. As for that other issue, the problem of reading
and watching material from that foreign land that is the past, with its racism,
sexism, homophobia and hokey humor, I think we should recognize that one can
still appreciate a beautiful rendition of Amazing Grace without worrying about the medieval religious self-loathing behind
such expressions as “a wretch like me.”
And just as we
shouldn’t cry “Nazi” every time a right winger calls for something that
exposes a fascist mentality, and trivialize the horror of Auschwitz by
overusing the word holocaust, we shouldn’t trivialize
the real victims of Stockholm Syndrome by self-righteously dismissing a tale of the Old
West in which some backwoods yokel talks about “goin’ into town an’ gettin’ me a good woman!”
You can hate Japan for their defense of hunting whales, hate the U.S. for their support of Donald Trump. And you can hate the past for their misogyny and racism. And still marvel at Japan’s exquisite knowledge of beauty, the U.S.’s capacity for embracing diversity, and the past’s rich storehouse of people who could sing and dance.
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