13. Benign Irrationality: Review of “I Married an Angel” by Cheryl S.
Because she has reservations about the Encores series as the main local venue for revivals of her beloved A.M.C. (American Musical Comedy), Louise Ebersdorf invited me and my assistant Sandy to use her tickets for its semi-staged concert revival of I Married an Angel last week at City Center. Louise and I are in talks about my making a pas de deux for two of her protégés, Albertine and Paco, and we haven’t spoken yet about my fee, but along with the two tickets she sent me a gift: a thin gold necklace with a pendant jade teardrop of luminous black. So beautiful. Louise says I’m to wear it when I rehearse new work as a “protective charm”. Notice she didn’t say for “good luck” but for protection. Interesting.
I’ve watched the videos she provided, talked about their themes with Sandy, and researched the Japanese tradition of the Cat Demon. Here’s what I’ve worked out for the choreography of my video-dance (with Sandy’s help), to be titled Nekomata. First, you see the Husband’s dead body prone on the stage in a pool of light. He has a small silk handkerchief across his face indicating that he is a corpse. His Wife approaches and kneels beside him in quiet widow’s grief. She slowly changes into a supernatural feline (a Cat Woman) and nuzzles his dead body, leaning across his face and breathing cat’s breath through the cloth covering. She lifts the handkerchief from his face, dabs tears from each of her cat-eyes with it, and places it in her hair as a covering. Then she stands, uses her pointes like claws against the earth, and we see that the dead body is now breathing, slowly arching its back, until the Husband sits up and rises – zombie-like -- to join the Wife. She now partners her restored Husband in a dance, leading him, prompting him. They dance until he is strong enough to begin partnering her in an erotic pas de deux. At its climax, the Wife bends around her Husband’s torso, wraps herself about him, and bites his neck. Mortally wounded, he falls to the floor. The Wife removes the handkerchief from her hair, dabs each corner of her mouth with it, kneels and places the cloth back on her Husband’s face. She sits beside him in composed feline triumph. Blackout.
The music I have chosen is by the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Sandy has been perfect as the Husband in our run-throughs. I hope Paco will be as imaginative. Sandy has been planning camera positions and moves for the video. I’ve taken the part of the Wife so far, of course. That will become Louise’s Albertine, if she cooperates. I have to let Louise know we are ready to rehearse whenever her new studio is finished. And I wonder how easy or difficult it will be to transfer the material onto the French dancers? Also, a contract has to be signed when the fee is agreed upon. The video should appeal to Millennials (the audience for the movie Us). And the Chinese, perhaps, in Louise’s long run. Whew! So much accomplished so fast.
At City Center Sandy and I were happy to hear the wonderful songs of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, the Encores Orchestra’s rendering of the original Broadway orchestrations for Angel, and the lengthy musical arrangements for its dances and ballets, which were invented in 1938 by George Balanchine to feature his muse-wife at that time, Vera Zorina. We were both impressed with Sara Mearns in the Zorina role of the Angel who descends to earth to marry Count Willy, a Budapest banker-bachelor, only to discover that mortals must regularly lie and deceive in their social and monetary dealings. This creates comic misunderstandings. Sandy says he overheard discussions during the intermission about whether the show was worthy of an Encores revival, but he and I agreed that the score and lyrics alone justified the production.
Mearns did not try for a foreign accent, thankfully, as Zorina probably would have used vocally to suggest the otherworldliness of her Angel. Instead, Mearns made her character very American-Girl-Next-Door. This worked because the zany comedy and the climactic Surrealist ballet provided a context: what could be more Surreal today than a Girl-Next-Door? Musical comedy conventions allow this show to bring up all kinds of issues for satiric commentary: you see the relations of men and women from a variety of angles, some quite serious. For example, the bachelor’s sister, Countess Peggy, is a Ms.-Been-Around, and she asserts that Truth is not always Beautiful, as Keats’ poem claims. After a number of marriages, she has learned that Truth is sometimes Ugly. In the original production Peggy was played by the great Vivienne Segal. I really identified with the sister, even though the Encores performer (Nikki M. James) made her a bit too brash, IMO.
Sandy says I Married an Angel is a good example of the delicious whimsy that musical comedy could once engender. Its effect is what he calls “benign irrationality”. Where-oh-where is that quality in the arts today? Maybe in my dances to come? I wish!
Sandy also praises what he calls the “satiric forum” that Louise’s American Musical Comedy represents. The form allows an interplay of distinct voices, tones, and ideas, so as to guard against group-think and authoritarianism, including today’s emphasis on that bore Political Correctness. And A.M.C. does all this with a light touch. I Married an Angel mixes the deliberate irrationality of a Roxy Music Hall number with the moral questioning of a character like Peggy. What have we come to when we have to defend such a vigorous art? Maybe this explains the generally puerile quality of new musicals on Broadway in 2019. Today’s audiences may not demand complex adult entertainment.
Sara Mearns danced very well, but the real surprise was how charming and funny she made the Angel, and how well she handled dialogue scenes, especially the lengthy one when her sister-angels visit and give her advice in rhymed couplets. Is it possible that Mearns is really a Dramatic Ballerina at her home NYCB and would benefit from new dance roles that exploit her gifts for acting and comedy? That would put her in a category with ballerinas like Nora Kaye, Lynn Seymour, and Natalia Makarova. Something to ponder.
The staging and choreography at City Center were by Mearns’ husband Joshua Bergasse. Sandy and I were most impressed by his satiric Surrealist ballet – the Roxy Music Hall divertissement, where references to Magritte were used to handsome effect. Bergasse’s tap and ballet dances were fairly standard-issue pastiche throughout. In the original show, the Honeymoon Ballet in the first act climaxed with the married couple snowbound, maybe in the Alps? That way their honeymoon ends perfectly since they can’t return to ordinary life but must remain in each other’s arms until spring. But Bergasse didn’t find a way to communicate that idea. He brought on a mobile sleigh to suggest that this honeymoon tour would simply continue, forever. Not the same.
Bergasse’s skill-set reminded Sandy of Alexi Ratmansky’s at American Ballet Theatre. Ratmansky, he says, is also more of a music-hall talent, adept at light revue material rather than any work in a balletic tradition. When Bergasse and Ratmansky introduce a metaphor, they complicate the spectacle with yet more metaphors, sometimes props or mime, often non-dance. When a Balanchine introduces a conceit (for example, in his Slaughter on Tenth Avenue ballet), he develops it in the subsequent dance materials, sometimes with quite elaborate choreographic invention. He doesn’t overuse theatrical analogies, like a Susan Stroman on today’s Broadway. He permits dance design to create another extended logic for the spectacle. Also, Sandy says that Balanchine will state an essential idea immediately and clearly and then let the dance take over. Bergasse and Ratmansky have difficulty with initial distilled statement. Their governing conceits can lack clarity, and this failure leads to a lack of consequential dance development. It’s as though they are rummaging around in a theatrical trunk trying to find a – any -- workable idea. While Balanchine’s dance atomizes, Ratmansky and Bergasse are busy shuffling hypotheses. Their Bad. I think my Sandy may be onto something.
I am so glad that Louise Ebersdorf knows the background of Broadway musicals because I was able to email her with my questions about the original production in preparation for this essay. (She didn’t see Angel herself n 1938, but she knows its context.) And Louise was kind enough to respond to queries. For example, I was haunted by a lyric from the “I’ll tell the man in the street” number that Peggy sings in act two. The song goes: “I’ll tell the man in the street / and everyone I meet / that you and I are sweethearts.” It is delivered with a satiric accent on the climactic word “sweethearts”. Why does it resonate, even today in 2019 (at least to my ears)? True, the character Peggy is supposed to have been a former operetta singer on the road – could she have sung a role in a production of the Victor Herbert show Sweethearts?
As Louise explains in her email, Vivienne Segal had a substantial early career in operetta, so this song was written for her “Peggy” by Rodgers and Hart with that background in mind. And the reference is not to Victor Herbert so much as to Sigmund Romberg’s Maytime, which featured a song -- “Will You Remember?” -- that has the repeated refrain “Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart”. Vivienne Segal was filmed singing “Will You Remember?” with John Charles Thomas for a short subject in 1927 (Vitaphone release no. 495 – I love Louise’s historical detail). But in addition, when I Married an Angel opened on Broadway in April 1938, Louise says its audience would have had the Romberg refrain fresh in its memory from the 1937 hit film of Maytime starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. This is why the word “sweethearts” can chime in “I’ll tell the man in the street.” It presses several buttons from the operetta tradition – Herbert, Romberg, Segal, Vitaphone, MacDonald-Eddy. The Rodgers and Hart satire of that tradition is amplified in Angel when Willy sings “Spring Is Here” – another reference to the Maytime, Lilac Time, Blossom Time line of shows. (Springtime for Hitler lay in the future.)
Louise points out that Rodgers and Hart continued writing wonderful songs for Segal. In A Connecticut Yankee, they gave her the hilarious “To Keep My Love Alive”. And in Pal Joey she had the extraordinary role of Vera Simpson, the older woman who is keeping the young heel Joey, and there she gets to sing the awesome “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” As Louise puts it, Vivienne Segal was a true A.M.C. sorceress of acting and singing. So you see what artistic witchcraft is at work in I Married an Angel. One word in a song lyric can evoke so much. I want to make work where one dance movement or phrase can resonate equivalently. Like Balanchine refers to Swan Lake in his Serenade.
I suppose Angel appeals primarily to an older, educated audience, and what’s wrong with that? I asked Sandy what he thought about the reaction of our young internet audience (made up of intensely sought-after Millennials) should it find itself transported from The Shed to City Center one evening. “Well,” he said, “they wouldn’t object to the idea of an Angel as a lead character. What they would reject today is the idea of marriage itself -- to anyone.”
To guarantee both young and older viewers for our work, maybe I should call our video-dance I Married a Cat Demon!
C.S.
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