The Ocean Beneath Our Feet

WE HAVE NEVER crossed an ocean before. We have never even taken a shore-hugging cruise. With airplane travel growing ever more hellish, our recent vacation destinations have been places reachable by car. This year, we decided to go for broke. And I do mean broke, as we’ve never spent anything approaching this amount of money on fun before. We have conflicting stories of motivation. Susan insists it was to celebrate our 40th anniversary. I say it’s because we’re at an age at which coevals are dropping dead. I suppose both are true.

Let’s back up a bit to see how we got ourselves on board the Queen Mary 2. The home stretch, so to speak, occurred as we wheeled off the elevator and turned the corner. We faced a long, a very long hallway, although it seemed too small for a hallway, yet too large for an aisle. It was flanked with doors, as you’d expect in a hotel. But this was no ordinary corridor. My wife and I were proceeding to our stateroom on the Queen Mary 2, beginning what would be a month-long getaway. I sat in a transport chair. Susan pushed. We anticipated, correctly, that my weakening legs would be daunted by aspects of this trip. Besides: A chair gets you places denied to those attempting ordinary ambulation.

A Life on the Ocean Wave, Part 1

ONE OF THE ANNOYING FEATURES of the 1976 Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor movie “Silver Streak” was the amount of time the various characters spent explaining why they were taking a train, as if making apologies for this time-honored means of travel. Airplane travel could be luxurious through the 1950s, but fares fell and the carriers figured out how to fit more and more people into those airborne shells. At one point in the 1960s, my father, a frequent air-traveler for his business, realized that a newly hatched cabin-seating plan was little different from slave-transport ships, a comparison that has picked up some internet life.

The 1965 Broadway musical “Do I Hear a Waltz?” has a Stephen Sondheim lyric that finishes “Your chance of survival is so remote,/You're far better off to cut your throat – /But who has the time to take a boat?/What do we do? We fly!” So it was bad even then and, as you undoubtedly know, it has become far, far worse.

Especially for me, as I am large both in vertical and horizontal directions. I’m the fellow that late-arriving passengers hope like hell not to be seated beside. I’m the one getting yelled at by flight attendants because my foot has intruded into the aisle. So when the subject arose of taking a post (such as it is)-pandemic vacation, I insisted on a domestic, driveable itinerary. Until a friend decried my short-sightedness and reminded me that there’s a ship that crosses the Atlantic.

Major Impact

AMY ENGELHARDT IS A VERY FUNNY PERSON. I hesitate to label her a comedian, although comedy seems to bubble from the soul of her being. But she’s also an excellent singer, as deft at ensemble singing as she is putting across a solo song. And that song may well be one of her own, because she’s an extremely skilled songwriter as well, whose solo recording “Not Gonna Be Pretty” is an amazing distillation of her talents. She also writes prose with the deft hand of one who lives comfortably among words.

Amy Engelhardt

So I should call her a comedian, because it’s the funny people who are most adept at being serious. They understand how irony works; they play with sounds and language to underscore serious points. And Engelhardt brings this all together in “Impact,” which I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s an intense hour of songs and words with Amy front and center telling a story she needed to tell. That it celebrates – in only most moderately joyful sense of the term – the tragedy of the airplane disaster in Lockerbie, Scotland, in a labyrinthine journey of heartbreak and grief, without lapsing into the maudlin or making a cheap sale of the heart-warming finish, is a testament to Engelhardt’s many skills, all brought together in a piece speaks to all of us who have been anywhere near a tragedy. In other words, all of us.

She establishes three things at the outset of her show: First, that’s she’s a Syracuse University grad; second, that she grew up in New Jersey; and third, that the story to follow will celebrate “thin moments.” Let’s take the last one first. Thin moments, she explained, are those moments in which you feel an uncanny resonance between whatever it is you’re up to and something related, portentous, and less-defined. It’s not déjà vu, although there’s some overlap, and it’s not the phenomenon of “thin places,” another Celtic term, but this one describing a resonant location.

I Put a Spell on You

THE WORLD OF SHAKESPEARE’S “Midsummer Night’s Dream” begins and ends in a nobleman’s home, taking us into the woods only after the plot has leapt into complications. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears fashioned an opera libretto that invites us into a fairy-kingdom right away, keeping us there until the final scene forces us back into a fancy drawing room. The emphasis thus shifts from quarreling nobles to the magic of this Athenian wonderland, even as the music that Britten wrote suggests uneasiness. “Take nothing for granted while you’re here,” it says. “However well you think you know the play, your expectations are about to be confounded.”

Puck (Oliver Barlow) and fairies.
Photo by Tristram Kenton.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is one of the more popular of Britten’s many operas, and this revival of Peter Hall’s 1981 production, playing through the end of August at the Glyndebourne Festival, is more spirited and charming than any other version I’ve seen. Why this opera is part of this season is examined below; why you should see it now follows immediately.

I like an old-fashioned curtain-up, and this one is thrilling. As conductor Dalia Stasevska leads the London Philharmonic through the unsettling glissandi that open the piece, we see sparkles, a forest, an aggregation of sprites. The glade of glistening trees ease back their branches and leaves to allow the spritely chorus to advance to the proscenium. The singing begins – and it’s an augmented Trinity Boys Choir, so the difficult music is effortlessly sung – and what seemed at first to be merely a moon-drenched sylvan woodland reveals itself as anthropomorphic, each black-clad tree wearing foot-baskets of shrubbery with leaves-laden branches for arms. John Bury’s designs were inspired by the art of Arthur Rackham, but if they’re of an era, it’s a timeless one.