THE SOUND OF MUSIC: Embracing the “Sugarcoated Lie”

Posted on May 6, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

Die_Trapp_Familie_PosterEd and I were in Berlin* a couple years ago visiting my folks when we stumbled upon a German movie from the 1950s being shown on TV.   We missed the first seconds of the credit sequence and so didn’t catch the title, but something about the opening shots of Austrian mountains and buildings felt familiar.  Then the story introduced us to a novice named Maria.  She doesn’t fit in well in the convent with the other nuns, and so the Mother Superior forces her to take a position as a governess to the seven children of a retired Austrian naval officer.

Ed and I started thinking, my does this look familiar, could it be…?  Maria gets on well with the kids and teaches them to sing Austrian folk songs, but she clashes with their father who eventually sends her back to the convent. Then he realizes he’s in love with Maria and they marry.  But then the Nazis take over Austria… By now it was undeniable, this is The Sound of Music, except of course it wasn’t.   After the movie ended Ed and I looked up the German TV guide: turns out this film is Die Trapp-Familie, the first film to be made about the famous van Trapp family, and a big success in German cinemas in 1956, so big in fact they filmed a sequel: Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika.

And without Die Trapp-Familie there would be no The Sound of Music.   It was the German movie that attracted the attention of the original producers of the musical who brought the project to Rodgers and Hammerstein.   It was astounding to Ed and me to see how much the plot of The Sound of Music resembles Die Trapp-Familie.  Except in the German original the van Trapp house is a fine mansion but not the palatial estate of the musical, and the van Trapp children’s names and ages are truer to history.  Both movies end with the van Trapp family fleeing Nazi occupied Austria after the Germans try to force van Trapp (Baron van Trapp in the original, Captain van Trapp in the musical) to join the German military, but in Die Trapp-Familie we see the family get stranded on Ellis Island in danger of being deported.  They are only allowed to enter the United States after they sing for a New York talent agent who puts them under contract.

When The Sound of Music was released it broke the all time box office record Gone with the Wind had held onto for 25 years.  Critics were mixed on the movie – Pauline Kael famously branded it a “sugarcoated lie” – but audiences all over the world embraced it.  Well, almost all over the world.  Germany and Austria never much cared for The Sound of Music, preferring the original Die Trapp-Familie.

Which explains why I, growing up in Germany in the 1970s, was a stranger to The Sound of Music.   I avidly watched every musical German TV aired, but The Sound of Music wasn’t one of them.  (I also have no memory of Die Trapp-Famile airing on TV, but I was less likely to watch a German “Heimat-Film” from the 1950s than I was to turn on the TV for a Hollywood product.)

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More fun with FIRST GRADE OPERAS: the King, the Queen and the Wacky Witch

Posted on May 3, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

KING COFFERN (looking through his special magnifying glass):

“I want to find a queen who is beautiful and kind.  Let’s see what Queens I can find with my magnifying glass.  All right let’s see … here’s a Queen … hmmm, knows too much … how about this Queen? She cheats in cards – no thanks! Let’s try this Queen … looks like she never showers!  Pee-ew!  I’ll try again.  At last! There she is! That Queen is perfect!”

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And so begins the second First Grade Opera performed this year (read more about how the first graders create their operas here), with King Coffern finding Queen Rose with his special magnifying glass and then singing “Love is Magical”, an unusually romantic tune for First Grade Operas.  Before I continue with the story, I should explain that when the child acting the King sings his song the whole class sings along with him.  When we perform First Grade Operas every song is sung collectively, with the “soloists” acting out the song.  The roles are also shared, with several children tag team performing each character during the course of the show.  This way every child in the class gets a solo moment even though there are on average only 4 – 6 different characters in any First Grade Opera.

But back to this opera: before King Coffern can present himself to Queen Rose, her land is rattled by a massive earthquake:

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After this disaster Queen Rose can’t find her parents.  King Coffern uses his magnifying glass to locate Queen Rose’s parents:

QUEEN ROSE: There’s a worm wearing a cardboard box!  But where are my parents?

KING COFFERN: There’s an elephant with a tutu!  But where are your parents?

QUEEN COFFERN: There they are! My father is stuck in an earthquake crack and my mother is trying to pull him out!

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SPEAKEASY and the “breaking into song with music out of nowhere” musical trope

Posted on April 30, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

Alice goes through... Alice goes through the looking glass                            Alice goes through the Looking Glass

JANE (puts the Drink Me bottle back onto the little table):

How much hooch will I have to down before I get to the Wonderland?

(singing) WHAT ARE THESE DRINKS THAT I’M DRINKING

THESE THOUGHTS I AM THINKING

WHAT WHERE AM I NOW?

Oh. I’m singing! Fun!

 

Elsewhere John is wandering alone in the maze.

 

JOHN:

I wonder if I’ve changed somehow?

(singing) WAS I THE SAME WHEN I GOT UP THIS MORNING

BUT IF I’M NOT WHO AM I NOW?

I can’t be the same.  I’m actually singing.  I don’t do that, do I?

The above is an excerpt from the musical Speakeasy – the Adventures of John and Jane Allison in the Wonderland, a Roaring Twenties adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books featuring two Alices, the newlyweds John and Jane Allison.  Jane has just “gone through the rabbit hole” at the same time John has slipped “through the looking glass”, and they find themselves in a magical dream world where time and space and identity don’t follow regular rules (to read more about Speakeasy, you can access additional posts about the musical by selecting “the Speakeasy Chronicles” in the category sidebar).

In addition to the mind bending shifts of time and space as well as the shifting understanding of who they are that John and Jane experience while in the Wonderland dream, they also experience the actuality of music accompanying their activities and the seeming normalness of they themselves and the people they meet easily breaking into accompanied song.  Which of course is rather convenient for the drama, as Speakeasy is a musical.

During the excerpt above, John and Jane, in separate areas of the magical world they slipped into, for the first time experience themselves unexpectedly warbling snatches of song, and remark upon it.  Jane finds this amusing, but John is a little more alarmed.

Eventually Jane will meet up with Roberta White (Speakeasy’s version of Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit), who will consciously start up a jazzy song by snapping her fingers and calling out “Hit it!” to an invisible but responsive orchestra. John will meet Julian Carnation and three gay florists (Speakeasy’s version of Through the Looking Glass’ Red Queen and Flowers).  Before they regale John with a song of their own, Julian will remark upon the orchestra playing the introductory measures: “And there’s the cue.  We’ll make our point musically.”

After that John and Jane will be deeply enough immersed in the strange rules of time, space, and music of this world to turn their initial snatches of melody into a questing song of their own, Curious Colorful Night:

 

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How Cabaret circumvented the “characters breaking into song” musical trope

Posted on April 27, 2015 by dannyashkenasi
Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles in Cabaret

Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles in Cabaret

When people who say they hate musicals explain why they hate musicals they usually fall back on this well-worn reason: it is unrealistic that characters just break into song and dance; this doesn’t happen in “real life”.  I find this a rather eye-rollingly lazy reason to reject musicals as an art form.  Do we reject comedies because in real life people generally don’t engage in hilarious dialog and pratfalls?  Do we reject action films because in real life all those extreme stunts just don’t keep occurring like that?  Do we reject horror films because there is just no such thing as zombies and mummies and vampires (never mind that they are a reflection of our subconscious desires just as much as a song is in a musical).  If you hate jokes, fine, reject comedies.  If you don’t want to watch violence, fine, reject action films (like my mother-in-law does).  If you hate being scared, for heaven’s sake, avoid horror movies.  And if you don’t like music, avoid musicals.  But if you do like music (and really, most everybody does), it doesn’t make sense to reject all musicals just because people sing in them.  People breaking into song in musicals is as much a suspend-your-disbelief integral element as all the other suspend-your-disbelief elements we accept to enjoy genres of art, or even the basic tools of the language of cinema, like editing, lighting or musical scoring.  Or as one blog post I found that goes into great detail defining various musical tropes puts it: “Musicals have songs in them – just go with it.”

That said (or vented), there is at least one musical that most stringently circumvents the “characters breaking into song” trope.  Cabaret is chock-full of brilliantly realized musical numbers, but all of them are performed “realistically” within the context of a performance actually happening as naturally as any other interaction between characters in the real world.  If you absolutely must avoid suspending your disbelief at seeing “characters break into song” when “in real life” they wouldn’t, couldn’t ever do that, then I invite you to watch the movie adaptation of Cabaret.  It also just happens to be one of the greatest musicals (or movies) ever made.

Joel Grey as the M.C. with the Kit Kat Girls

Joel Grey as the M.C. with the Kit Kat Girls

The stage version of Cabaret, a big hit on Broadway in 1966, was a traditional musical where characters would burst into song.  It also included scenes in the Kit Kat Club, a seedy Weimar Berlin cabaret, where the creepy Master of Ceremonies (played by Joel Grey on stage as well as on screen), the Kit Kat Girls and Sally Bowles (played by Liza Minnelli in the movie) would perform numbers that would comment on the musical’s narrative.  These numbers were therefore not suspend-your-disbelief moments of characters breaking into song unrealistically, but real life performances at the Kit Kat Club, which was as much a real setting of the musical as the boarding house where Sally resided.

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FIRST GRADE OPERA #1: Astronaut Alice and the Moon Aliens

Posted on April 25, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

ALICE: I told Lollipop I would never ever forget him or leave him and now he is gone.  I  can’t find him.

DIGGER: Alice, we will find him together, just like we found the moon rocks. Don’t give up, we can do this!

I get first graders at the Brooklyn Children’s School to create their own original music theater pieces. We call them First Grade Operas.  The teachers and para-professionals in the classroom are closely involved in all stages of the process.  Each first grade class creates their own opera.  I usually start my visits in October when the children choose a theme for their story (this year the themes were Space, Underwater and Knights).  Over time the children will create characters, a story outline, song ideas, lyrics, melodies and dialog.  By late March or April a scenery back drop that covers a wall in the classroom will have been painted, set pieces and costumes will have been designed and built, all with the children’s help.  Each classroom will have been turned into a theater space, and each class will perform a dress rehearsal for the other classes, and an official performance for invited family. It’s a pretty big deal for the kids and their folks.

I have helped create about 50 first grade operas over the years (that’s just first grade at the Children’s School; if you add all the other schools and grade levels where I have mentored original opera projects, the number would be…. um, easily in the hundreds, but my grasp of accounting and statistics is exceeded by that question).  I have learned when the operas are performed for the parents that the one thing that often needs to be restated is that the children really did compose the melodies of their songs.  Adults don’t question that 6 year olds can create stories and dialog and paint scenery, but they assume that I must have written the music.  Of all the arts, composing seems to be the most mysterious to grown-ups, they generally can’t imagine themselves doing it so they don’t see how the kids could do it.  So I often find myself confirming that yes, the children came up not only with the lyrics, they also made up the melodies.  Usually this process involves me sitting at a table with a group of children, reading out a previously written lyric to a song, and asking one of the children to try to sing it back to me.  The first graders don’t need to know how to write down notes, they just need to be willing to sing and make up melodies or melodic phrases.  I will be their scribe and their music editor.

OK, enough explaining, let’s get to the fun, the first retelling of a First Grade Opera!

This one from this year’s space opera by class 1-1, with excerpts from the score:

1-1-15 song 1

Astronaut Alice and her dog Lollilop run out of fuel and crash land on an alien moon. While they leave the rocket ship to look for fuel, the alien Digger enters the rocket and excitedly plays the video games he finds inside.

1-1-15 song 2 Continue reading →

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Des Broadways liebstes Kind – Broadway’s Dearest Child

Posted on April 22, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

I was introduced to American musicals through German television.  Although I saw much music theater on stage growing up in Germany, it was all opera productions my mother (the coloratura soprano Catherine Gayer) was performing in.  I performed musicals at the German-American John F. Kennedy School in Berlin.  It developed a thriving drama department that staged many classic musicals.  But when that began in 1980 I was already 13 years old.  Until then my main source of exposure to musicals was whatever was shown on German television.

The ZDF logo

The ZDF logo

When I think about my childhood and musicals I think of “Des Broadways liebstes Kind” (roughly translated as “Broadway’s Dearest Child”).  That was the anthology television series, begun in 1969 and discontinued sometime in the 1980’s, that every so often would air classic Hollywood musicals on the ZDF, the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (Second German Television – back in those simpler times, there were only two main German TV stations, a third regional TV station, for example SFB – Sender Freies Berlin or Station of Free Berlin – for us in West-Berlin, and the two East German TV stations, which most of us in the West avoided watching).

German poster for Singin' in the Rain

German poster for Singin’ in the Rain

“Des Broadways Liebstes Kind” would be the umbrella name for all the musicals shown on ZDF, whether they were movie musicals of actual Broadway classics like “West Side Story” or “Camelot” or whether they were of movie musicals that originated in the Hollywood studios, like “Wizard of Oz” (renamed “Das Zauberland” – “The Magic Land” – for German audiences) or “Singin’ in the Rain” (renamed “Du sollst mein Glueckstern sein” – as in the song title “You are My Lucky Star”).  That distinction didn’t really matter to the TV programmers.

I loved watching movies in general and movie musicals in particular. The songs, the dancing, the spectacle, everything about movie musicals enthralled me as much as I was enthralled by the inventive suspense of Hitchcock or the thrills of science fiction and horror or the joys of animation. But there was one particular treat the Broadways liebstes Kind musicals offered that I could get no where else growing up in Berlin in the 1970’s: I could hear English performed on screen. German Television showed many American movies and TV programs, there was no shortage of culture from the Motherland, so to speak, but it was all dubbed into German. Except for most of the musicals. The dialog would be dubbed, but the songs would be in English with subtitles. Later German TV and movie theaters would offer more opportunities to enjoy films O.m.U. (Original mit Untertitlen – Original (sound) with subtitles), but when I was a child musicals on TV were for the most part the only way to hear English on screen or stage.

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The Wonderland “Cha Cha” Oopsidaisy

Posted on April 20, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

The other day the director Lissa Moira and I were conducting one of our regular weekly meetings, reading through the Speakeasy libretto and discussing production and staging possibilities. We got to the song “Wonderland” as sung by the Tweedle Sisters in the Wonderland nightclub, including the following lyrics:

IF THE MUSIC’S “HOTCHA”

AND THE RHYTHM’S GOTCHA

THINKING “GOLLY, WHATCHA

PUTTIN’ IN THE WATER HERE?”

THEN THE WONDER’S CAUGHTCHA

SINGING, DANCING CHA CHA

DRINKING, LAUGHING “HA HA”

GRINNING WIDE FROM EAR TO EAR

Lissa asked me whether I was sure the Cha Cha was already known in 1930. I assumed it was. I assumed I had done the research to make sure, just like I had done the research into so many elements of the libretto. But it turns out I hadn’t. A quick flurry of clicks into the internet confirmed that the cha cha wasn’t invented until 1953, over twenty years after the time “Speakeasy” is set. Oopsidaisy!

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Mister Danny and His Most Sung Song

Posted on April 18, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

I am a teaching artist. Which means that I freelance as a visiting music and drama teacher to conduct arts education projects in the classroom for limited time periods, usually 8-12 weeks, in schools all across the New York metropolitan area. With budget cuts having eliminated so many arts programs in so many schools, having a visiting teaching artist like me come in to do a theater or music project in the classroom is often the only way some students have any kind of arts education during their school year. It is not nearly enough, but it isn’t rare that that is it for the arts in some schools some years.

I have been lucky enough – in addition to the short term teaching projects most teaching artists cycle through – to have an ongoing relationship with one school, the Children’s School in Brooklyn, which has asked me to return every year for over 15 years so far to teach music and drama and create original music theater projects with their Pre-K, Kindergarten, first and fourth grade students. The school employs full time art, music and dance teachers, but it also makes resources and time available to include me in the classrooms to conduct special music and theater work.

In school I am known as Mister Danny. The children call all adults by their first name with a Miss or Mister attached at the front. Miss Margaret, Miss Sandy, Miss Beth, Mister Doug, etc. Usually Miss, especially in elementary schools, where at some sites the custodian and I might be the only male adults in the building. At the mid-sized Children’s School there are about 8 adult males in the building, which constitutes one of the higher number of male teachers I have found in one school building in NYC.

Which probably explains why there are always some kids in Pre-K and Kindergarten who will call me Miss Danny during my first sessions with them. They are not trying to sass me. They just haven’t yet realized that there is a “Mister” as well as a “Miss” that one uses when addressing the adults in the room.

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The Walk in the Park that Conceived “Speakeasy”

Posted on April 16, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

I came up with the idea for “Speakeasy” while strolling in Prospect Park with Ed six or seven years ago. But I had the ideas that would lead to the idea for Speakeasy many years, even decades before that moment.

By which I mean before I had that incisive moment in the park that crystallized what Speakeasy would be, I had a whole bunch of primordial ideas: melodies that begged for an outlet, a staging concept that needed a story, and a strong passion to create a powerful Queer musical.

Like most songwriters I have an archive of unfinished songs, from melody snippets to nearly complete songs, sometimes with some lyrics attached, maybe just a title phrase, but usually without any words.   I call them “Orphan Songs” or “Orphan Melodies”, musical ideas that are still looking for “placement” in a musical or project, still needing an outlet to be shared. Some of these Orphan Melodies get written down and archived and then forgotten until I look them up again. Some “haunt” me by sticking in my memory, a tune I will hum to myself again and again, feeling its emotional content even if I didn’t yet know its actual lyrical content. Those songs especially nag at me, tugging at a subconscious sleeve, looking to be fully composed and performed somehow. Once they are “placed” in a show and are performed, they tend to stop tugging at that subconscious sleeve, no longer “haunting” me.

I noticed years ago that a lot of my orphan melodies felt like songs written in the 1920’s or 1930’s. And with that realization I started imagining a musical set in a nightclub, or rather that the nightclub was the staging area for a story set in the 1920’s and/or 1930’s: not necessarily every scene took place in a nightclub, but the nightclub “presented” every scene. That was all fine and well, but I still had no idea what the actual story might be for this possible musical using all those 1920’s /1930’s song ideas.

Jazz Age Nightclub Continue reading →

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How this young chum came to the Cabaret

Posted on April 14, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

“Life is a cabaret, old chum, come to the cabaret”

This Christmas one of my “stocking stuffers” from Ed was the gift that thrilled me the most this holiday season: a (battery operated) votive candle with an actual screen cell of Liza Minnelli singing the title song from the movie “Cabaret”.   I don’t pray, and I wasn’t raised Catholic, but I am tempted to use this votive candle as a way to make daily obeisance to the musical gods.

I could go on and on about what makes “Cabaret” not only one of the great movie musicals of all time but simply one of the great movies of any time, period (and I will probably come back to wax happily on various aspects of “Cabaret” in many future posts). It richly deserves every one of the 8 Academy Awards it received, and probably would have won 9 and not earned the distinction of being the movie that won the most Oscars without winning Best Picture if 1972 had not also been the year of “The Godfather”.

cabaretposterGerman TV showed “Cabaret” soon after its theatrical run. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first watched “Cabaret” curled up on a couch with my parents in our West Berlin basement TV room, probably with the fireplace crackling, but I must have been pretty young, because I remember it as the movie that first introduced me to many adult concepts about history and sexuality.

If “Cabaret” wasn’t my movie introduction to Nazis and Anti-Semitism and the history of the Nazis coming to power in the 1930s, it surely was the one that prompted my first questions to my parents about these concepts, seeing how deeply and intractably they effected all of the movie’s characters. And if “Cabaret” wasn’t my introduction to the concept of homosexuality, surely it was at least the introduction to the concept of bisexuality, as I clearly remember asking my parents to explain this explosive exchange between Sally (Liza Minnelli) and Brian (Michael York) about their rich friend Maximilian (Helmut Griem):

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THE SPEAKEASY INTRODUCTION – A fantastical musical of Prohibition era NYC Queer life.

Posted on April 12, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

SP door

The following is the official introduction/synopsis for Speakeasy. While you read it, you may want to listen to the Wonderland’s Master of Ceremonies Chet Cheshire sing the Speakeasy opening number:

(If you are “greedy” and want to listen to more Speakeasy demo tracks, they can be accessed here.)

“Speakeasy – John and Jane Allison in the Wonderland” is a big full-length musical, generously over-stuffed with memorable songs, that cleverly adapts Lewis Carroll’s Alice books to take its audience on a fantastic journey through the little known vibrant Queer culture of Prohibition era New York City.  Love and Identity in their many facets are explored in surprising, whimsical and ultimately profound ways in an evening full of song, dance, laughter, heartbreak and adventure.

John and Jane Allison are newlyweds in 1929/30 New York.  Although they love each other, they have desires they haven’t even acknowledged to themselves, let alone explored.  But after giving her neighbor Roberta White a kiss, and running after her, Jane enters a basement Speakeasy to find herself in a strange world where time and space and identity don’t appear to follow conventional rules.  John too enters this world in his own way: after accepting a sexual proposition in a public men’s room he mysteriously slides through the bathroom mirror.  Thus Jane goes “down the rabbit hole” and John falls “through the looking glass”. Their adventures, first separate, then together, mirror Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, only with Carroll’s characters and events transformed into characters and events from New York City’s Prohibition era culture.

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THE FIRST “NOTES FROM A COMPOSER“ BLOG POST … Or Why am I doing this, really, why?

Posted on April 11, 2015 by dannyashkenasi

Why am I starting this blog? Did I really have this great need to share my views on the arts in general, music and theater in particular, and my own experience in creating music theater very particularly? Um, actually no, I’ll admit I didn’t have that desperate desire but had and still have rather more ambivalent feelings about writing a blog. However I have a hunch that may change as I dive in to the wild woolly world of “blogging”.

So what gives? Well, I’ll admit outright there are ulterior motives besides “expressing” myself on the www. I am planning to produce a showcase of my most (terrifyingly) ambitious musical “Speakeasy” next year, and it occurred to me that a blog may be a good way to talk about the show and create interest and an audience for it. Then my co-producers basically said, yes you have to do this (and for a while I started backtracking and felt like Michael Keaton in Birdman mumbling something about wanting to just focus on the work and shouldn’t people other than me talk about it and then Emma Stone shouts at me about getting on social media or else I or the work don’t even really exist, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because we are all going to die… OK, I digress, and I need to see that movie again, because I’m sure I have just grossly misrepresented something). Anyhow…

God forbid this is just a blog about “my great new musical – y’all come see it next year, dates to be announced…” How about we expand beyond that, and create something more interesting? People who meet me at dinner parties or some such social gatherings tend to be genuinely interested in my work as a composer, and so me sharing some idiosyncratic stories about music and theater and the arts, from a very personal perspective, might make for an enjoyable way to give and partake on the internet.

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