A June Wedding at BTF

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Looking over last week’s story, I noted that the adjacent piece in my files reveals some of the Albany area’s theater offerings as noted forty years ago on this date. It thus is merely an exercise in nostalgia, and an easy way to fill a blog-slot.

                                                                                         

Berkshire Theatre Festival

ONE OF THE DELIGHTS AVAILABLE to natives of a town small enough to publish a paper only weekly is the information thus available about what your neighbors are up to. One of the heartbreaks available to adolescents in such a town is the-black-and-white evidence of the inevitable nuptials of those you’ve loved and, romantically, lost. This was the case in the town where I grew up, and it was both painful and amusing to note the two great wedding flurries: the first occured right after graduation from high school; the second took place four years later. I subscribed to the paper long after I’d left the town, just to confirm that the matrimonial axe was still picking ‘em off.

This is in reaction both to the month of June, with its flurry of gowns, tuxes, and raucous motorcades, and the observance of this tradition by the Berkshire Theatre Festival, which has opened its season with Carson McCuller’s “A Member of The Wedding.”

Setting the Stage with Shakespeare

From the Opera Vault Dept.: Paulette Haupt made her conducting debut at the Lake George Opera in 1973, with “The Barber of Seville, and liked the experience enough to continue conducting in Kansas City and San Francisco during the ensuing years. She moved to the producing end and served as artistic director for the Lake George Opera from 1981 to 1985 – which means she was already on her way out when she spoke to me for the piece you’ll find below. She was co-founder and served as Artistic Director for the National Music Theater Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center from 1978 to 2017, which she left in order to concentrate on her company Premieres, which she founded in 2001. She also founded the Music Theater Mentor Program, but it was killed by the pandemic. She continues to be very active in the development and production of new works. 

                                                                                     

Paulette Haupt

“I’M PARTICULARLY EXCITED about the balance of the season,” says Paulette Haupt-Nolen, general director of the Lake George Opera Festival. “‘Romeo and Juliet’ hasn’t been done here since 1969, so there’s been a whole turnover in audience since then. And it’s one of my favorite operas – it’s so lush with music and drama. The conductor, Cal Stewart Kellogg, wrote to me recently – he conducts all over the place and just came back from a tour of Italy and Israel – and said how honored he is to be conducting here this summer. He, too, raved about the score.”

“Romeo and Juliet,” which opens the LGOF season July 13, was written by French composer Charles Gounod to a libretto fairly faithfully based upon the Shakespeare play: according to the Victor Book of the Opera, “If there are fewer words than in the original,. there is, at any rate, the consolation of the music that is sweetly sentimental and sometimes of a dazzling brilliance.” 

The New Bone-Dust Theory of Behavior, or, Is Your Elbow All It Should Be?

Guest Blogger Dept.: Which I ought to rename Robert Benchley Dept., because I have featured Benchley essays more often than those by any other writer. They are gems. Some of them don’t age well if you’re thinking in terms of historical context, but all of them endure for his masterful use of language.

                                                                                      

A LITTLE WHILE AGO, it was your teeth that were to blame for everything. And now, after you have gone and had tin-types taken of your teeth, showing them riding in little automobiles or digging in the sand, some more specialists come along and discover that, after all, it is your glands that are the secret of your mental, moral and physical well-being.

Benchley by Gluyas Williams

A book called “The Glands Regulating Personality” claims that the secretions of the various glands throughout your body determine whether you are a good or a bad boy, cheerful or agile, Republican or Democrat. Anyone singing “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow” does not face the facts squarely. The words should go: “For he has jolly good glandular secretions, which nobody will deny.”

In order to be at least two jumps ahead of the game, we are prepared to set forward another theory to take the place of the gland theory when that shall have become scratched. All enthusiasts who want to keep abreast of the times will dip right into ours now; so that when the time comes they will be able to talk intelligently on the subject.

Briefly, the facts are these:

Balm for Mom

From the Food Vault Dept.: I missed Mother’s Day again this year. My own mom is long-gone, but I’m married to a mom. She, however, put in some years in a restaurant kitchen, as did I, and we thus became inured to the insanity that holiday provokes. Thirty years ago I put a hopeful spin on the occasion, which I hope can still be helpful these days.

                                                                                          

AN ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED culture-wide sense of guilt gets us schlepping Mom out to dinner on Sunday, resulting in the busiest day of the restaurant year – busier than Thanksgiving, busier than Easter, busier than the end-of-the-year holidays.

Which means that Mom might easily end up subjected to one of the worst meals of her life. Follow the instructions in this handy guide, however, and you might pull through relatively unscathed. This advice is based on the years I spent waiting on tables and, later, cooking. The scenario may have changed since then – but I doubt it.

The type of restaurant that can turn out 700 dinners on a Saturday night is generally well suited to Mother’s Day traffic, and usually can afford to put out a special menu with bargain prices. But the objective usually is turning over tables, so you won’t see many parties lingering over coffee and holding hands. Then again, it’s been years since I held hands with Mom after dinner.

So the most important things you can do when planning a meal at such a restaurant are to make a reservation, give an accurate count of the people involved and show up on time. Too many customers think that they’ve simply reserved a table for the duration and give themselves a half-hour of leeway here and there. And restaurants try to indulge that – it’s good business, after all, not to yell at the patrons – but they can’t afford to do so on Mother’s Day.