Comedy of Confinement

From the Vault Dept.: I wrote this review little over a year ago, and I don't remember why. It wasn't published (until now), but it's a nice salute to the work of one of the most original writer-directors at work these days. I'm particularly looking forward to Iannucci's forthcoming film of "David Copperfield" (and you can see Iannucci pay tribute to Dickens here).

                                                                               

THE MOST TELLING MOMENT in Armando Iannucci’s film “The Death of Stalin” occurs as the dictator’s body is laying in state and the people – some of whom have traveled a great distance – throng past the bier. They are shocked and reverential, the uncertainty in their faces and manner an indication of the ideological lockstep in which they’ve been trained to march. Clearly, the cult of Stalin was wildly successful in its oppressive zeal.

We see them herded into this crowded space; previously, we’ve seen the mourners herded onto trains and then massing the city’s streets, many of them shot by overzealous security forces. Confinement becomes a central motif of the movie, whether it be the lonely confinement of a rape victim in prison or the ideological confinement of Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin), who continues to cling to the delusion that his wife was guilty of Stalin-invented charges even after the dictator’s demise.

It is 1953, and Stalin’s Central Committee must name his successor. These men are the supposed loyalists, the ones who endure too many late nights watching John Wayne movies with their leader, but who also deal in fear – both in its administration (Simon Russell Beale, as the loathsome Beria, casually directing family executions) and as its target (Molotov brings a chew toy to a meeting in a car so that his dog will bark over the conversation).

The Chance of a Ghost

THE GHOSTS OF VERSAILLES are there to greet you as you settle into your theater seat. They’re garbed in white; they languish in the gloom behind a scrim of, essentially, many strings. The stage is bathed in blue. The music starts – a plangent peal of woodwinds joined by a chorus of high strings – and more ghostly figures drift from the wings.

Brian Wallin, Emily Mirsch, Joanna Latini,
Kayla Siembieda, and Ben Schaefer
Photo: Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass Festival

The Ghosts of Versailles is the 1991 opera by John Corigliano and William M. Hoffman, inspired by the life and times of the polymath Beaumarchais, the man best known for his plays “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro.” He wrote a third Figaro play, titled “The Guilty Mother,” which becomes an opera-within-an-opera in this metafictional piece.

It’s a piece with a large cast, calling for the considerable resources that the Glimmerglass Festival has been able to lavish upon it – and a spectacular production is the result. “Another evening at the opera,” say a woman in the ghost audience. “I’m so bored,” declares a nearby man, winning a laugh from an audience puzzled at the outset by the keening sounds and haunted stagescape (with varied and thrilling set design by James Noone). The candelabra on the curving walls that dominate center stage suggest Cocteau; although these fixtures are still, the music’s unearthly sounds make the stillness seem animate.

The Rise of the Fallen Angel

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY the Patriarchy fell victim to what’s termed the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy, in which certain men, the dears, find sexual fulfillment only with reputation-tarnished women, reserving their admiration for the (as they see it) unsullied. The topic has been pondered by thinkers from Sigmund Freud to Naomi Wolf, and informs all manner of art and literature.

Kang Wang and Amanda Woodbury
Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival

Alexandre Dumas fils spun out a roman à clef in his 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias, recounting his own brief affair with a Parisian demimondaine (the term is a Dumas coinage) who died of tuberculosis (or syphilis, depending on who you wish to believe) at the age of 23. In the novel, this offers the character a kind of redemption, which was a handy device for the fictionist – although Richardson’s Clarissa, a century earlier, maintained her virginity for several hundred torrid pages, when she’s finally raped by the scheming Lovelace, she re-achieves a convoluted kind of innocence by dying fairly turgidly thereafter.

Dumas turned his scandalous novel into a scandalous play, and Verdi, with his keen sense of effective musical drama, quickly turned it into La traviata, which, after a rocky initial reception, has become an opera-house mainstay. The spectacle of a “fallen woman” achieving recognition and wealth through her profession continues to delight us, although we suspect from the start that hers will be an unhappy end. Transgressors must be punished, according to a hoary moral code, relieving an audience of guilt over any sense of unwonted pleasure.

Lost is Found

From the Glimmerglass Vault Dept.: My review of the Glimmerglass Festival’s world premiere of the opera “Blue” notes that librettist Tazewell Thompson has directed many other productions there, among them “Lost in the Stars.” My 2012 Metroland review of that production escaped a reprint on this blog back then; here it is now.
                                                                                        

AS THE SECOND ACT of “Lost in the Stars” gains momentum, Stephen Kumalo, an Anglican priest, faces a moral dilemma that threatens the foundation of his faith. “O Tixo, Tixo, Help Me!” he sings, and as rendered by bass-baritone Eric Owens, it’s a nuanced, soul-stirring number.

Brandy Lynn Hawkins, Eric Owens, and Makudupanyane
Senaoana. Photo: Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass Festival

Owens has a voice that can penetrate into the rearmost recesses of the Alice Busch Theater, and there are thrilling moments in the show when he pulls out all stops and his rich, warm thunder envelops you with stirring emotion. But the most compelling moments come when he drops to a husky pianissimo, whispering, as it seems, his plaint.

He’s also an outstanding actor. The character of Kumalo begins the show with a sense of himself as a man of the world, but, as he journeys through Johannesburg in search of his son, his sparkling innocence gets hammered out of him. By the end of the first act, when he sings the title song, Kumalo still has a measure of hope. By the devastating end of Act Two, he will need to rebuild his sense of everything.

Singing the Blue

OPERA PLAYS HAVOC WITH TIME. Like a novel, it can speed or slow a moment or more, but it enhances the emotional import of those moments with music. “Music is something terribly special,” wrote Leonard Bernstein. “It doesn’t have to pass through the censor of the brain before it can reach the heart.”

Kenneth Kellogg, Briana Hunter, and Aaron Crouch
Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival

Time accelerates as the first act of “Blue” comes to an end: An ugly confrontation between father and son, expertly written and realized, quickens the heartbeat. Then, as Act Two slowly opens, we’re mired in a time-stopping vale of grief. “Blue” is an emotionally overpowering piece that focuses on the peril of being a black man in America, even as the context of family and friends makes the experience universal. It’s a lean and expertly realized production, receiving its world premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival.

Unsettling sounds from the orchestra underscore the opening pantomime as The Father (Kenneth Kellogg) is confronted by a trio of policemen taking issue with the effrontery of him walking while black. But the mood shifts as they help him disrobe and then don a policeman’s uniform. He has joined the Force, a fact that dismays the trio of girlfriends who visit his wife, The Mother (Briana Hunter) when they learn she is pregnant. But the sequence that follows – “Go Figure!” – is more about the boy she will bear. Doesn’t she know the command for all African-American women? “Thou shalt bring forth no black boys into this world.” Take him to China – get that baby boy away from here, they warn.

Delicious Hole in the Wall

From the Food Vault Dept.: I had the pleasure of lunching in Beirut the other day. Not the city in Lebanon, however: the restaurant in Troy, NY. I’ve visited several times before and after reviewing it for Metroland Magazine in 2011, but it’s been a few years since I last stopped by. It’s still going strong, still helmed by the indefatigable George Hajnasr. Some prices have gone up a little since the report below, but it’s still crazily economical. (You can find the current menu here.)

                                                                                         

MY FAMILY’S CIVILIAN (non-reviewing) dining strategy is to seek, as I indelicately put it, “Some hole in the wall.” Which is understood to mean a place where the food is interesting and the people friendly. Beirut fulfills this like a dream. But like any dream, it’s not one over which you should expect to have complete control.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

The former Al-Baraki, it’s a tiny eatery on Troy’s River Street, about the only Lebanese restaurant that remains in the region. It’s small enough to boast only a half-dozen tables, with some outdoor seats available this time of year. Once you’re settled in, however, be prepared to spend some time there.

It’s pretty much a one-man show, that man being George Hajnasr, who bought the place from its previous owner at the beginning of 2009. Hajnasr, trained as an artist and architect, had a hard time finding work in his chosen fields when he emigrated, so he pursued what was more of an everyday activity: preparing and serving food. “These are all family recipes,” he explained when we looked at the menu. “We are doing what was done here before, but I have made a few changes.”

It Keeps On Rolling Along

AS SOON AS THE OVERTURE STARTS and you hear the banjo in the rhythm section, you know you’re off to a very different era. The Glimmerglass Festival kicked off its 2019 season last Saturday with “Show Boat,” which is one of the finest productions of any show that I’ve seen anywhere, which covers a lot of time and spaces. There’s long been a phony divide between opera and musical theater, but this company, under artistic director Francesca Zambello’s guidance, has proven that no such thing exists.

Justin Hopkins with members of the ensemble.
Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival

What makes this production such a success is the combination of top-notch talent and a total commitment to the integrity of the piece. And a potentially troublesome piece it is.

It was troublesome when it premiered, nearly a century ago. Adapted from a novel by Edna Ferber, this tale of love and loss in a theatrical setting already made it an excellent vehicle for the stage, but it also addressed racial issues that Broadway wasn’t accustomed to dealing with.

The showboat is the Cotton Blossom, arriving in Natchez on a pleasant day in 1890. Leading lady Julie La Verne (Alyson Cambridge) is revealed by a jealous suitor to be bi-racial, thus (according to then-current law) invalidating her marriage to Steve Baker (Charles H. Eaton). Although they cleverly dodge the miscegenation issue, she is legally prohibited from performing, thus opening the way for young Magnolia Hawks (Lauren Snouffer) to take over the leads. This is excellent news for her father, Cap’n Andy (Lara Teeter), who runs both the boat and its productions, and anathema to her mother, Parthy Ann (Klea Blackhurst), who maintains a Puritan sense of showbiz as sin.

Boxed In

From the Racing Vault Dept.: The Saratoga Race Track is about to open for another season, swelling the small city into an urban blowfish as the out-of-towners cram in to get their betting thrills. New box seats and other amenities were installed last year, so the piece below is probably even more out of date. But it’s still a struggle to get those premium seats.

                                                                                       

THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE is here to welcome you; the New York Racing Association will make it as easy as possible (traffic notwithstanding) for you to get to the track. But behind the well-wishers’ smiles is a fact of the track that reminds us why they’re them and we’re not.

Photo: New York Racing Association

You’re not likely to get into a clubhouse box seat at the track this summer unless you’ve got some very good connections. Track wisdom says that someone usually has to die before a box is released, and then it usually gets handed down with the estate.

In fact, you can spend years at the track without really noticing that it’s there. We of the proletariat are deflected from its hallowed aisles by a track design that sends us to bleachers and grandstand. But the box seats afford the choicest view, straddling the finish line, just out of reach of the dust.

Ellen’s Quest

“I LOVE SWEETS,” are the first words we hear from Ellen West, as sung by soprano Jennifer Zetlan. “Heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream.” The tune is not pretty. She’s dressed in a heavy button-down duster, the colorless drab of the sanitarium she occupies. It’s a powerful moment both in terms of its musical setting and the fact that everyone observing this scene can sympathize in one way or another.

Lidiya Yankovskaya, Keith Phares, and
Jennifer Zetlan | Photo by Gary David Gold

In 1944, 23 years after a former patient committed suicide, a noted Swiss shrink published an account of her case and assigned her the pseudonym “Ellen West.” She was 33 when she poisoned herself. She was obsessed with food, enough so to be initially diagnosed as anorexic, but her obsessions also included unhappiness with her gender and her physical self.

Thirty years later, Frank Bidart fashioned a lengthy narrative poem from the West saga in which the eponymous character is given her own voice even as the story is shifted in time, evidently to the mid-1950s, to allow West to reflect on the career of Maria Callas, who also was troubled by weight issues.

The poem resonated deeply with composer Ricky Ian Gordon, culminating in yesterday’s world-premiere performance of the opera he fashioned from Bidart’s text. Opera Saratoga commissioned and is presenting this premiere in collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects, which sends it to New York City in six months and thereafter on tour throughout the country.

Hots to Trot

From the Food Vault Dept.: An entertainment arena opened in Albany, NY, in 1990. Originally monikered the Knickerbocker Arena, fiscal sponsorship deals have lured it through different names. I wrote a series of articles about it for the Schenectady Gazette in advance of its opening, two of which are here. Here’s an entertaining third, which was supposed to be about the foodservice at the arena, provided by what was then known as ARA Leisure Services, and now is the behemoth Aramark, which provides the overpriced, mediocre food at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, much (if not all; it’s hard to find confirmation) of the SUNY college system, and many other such places around the world. Here’s the note I attached to the piece when I submitted it: “The outfit providing the in-house food at the Knick Arena was singularly uncooperative in providing information, never returning calls and getting downright belligerent by Friday. I offer the following as a much more enjoyable substitute.” The lede, by the way, is complete fiction.

                                                                                   

WHEN MY FATHER FIRST TOOK ME to the Saratoga Racetrack I was much too young to appreciate the subtleties at work. On the one hand there was the beauty of the racehorse itself to be considered; on the other, Dad's deft maneuver to get out from under Mom’s financial supervision and fling a few dollars luckwards – all in the name of my education.

I fear that most of his money went to shutting me up, however, because I discovered something that consoled me then and has since been a mainstay of my sporting and entertainment travels: concession stands. While to some people “hot dogging” is a form of ski travel, I use it to describe my tendency to eat my way from event to event. I have hot dogged from ballpark to theme park across the country, and I look forward to doing so in Albany next month.

Nine-Miles Delicious

WHAT SHOULD BE THE COST of a healthy meal? We know that it’s going to be more expensive than what we’re accustomed to paying, whether in supermarket or restaurant, although that’s a reality that I, at least, try to hide from. You can see the difference in your fruits and vegetables, but it’s the pesticide-laden produce that sparkles so gorgeously.

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

The camaraderie at a farmers market eases the pain. It’s less painful to slip those extra bucks across the counter when the amiable person behind it is the one who grew your lettuce. It’s more abstract at a restaurant, of course, where higher food costs are reflected in a higher bill, and you’re also paying for the ambiance and service.

But when you see the setup at Saratoga Apple, you’ll realize right away that you’re going to get a bargain. And you are. And you do. Twenty-five dollars for a four-course meal is an exceptional value for the home-grown fare that you get. The fact that it’s not served on anything fancy actually complements the rustic feel of the event.

9 Miles East is the farm that has been serving weekend dinners at Saratoga Apple. Not surprisingly, that’s also its distance from Saratoga Springs. “My wife and I started 9 Miles East in 2005,” says co-owner Gordon Saks, “with 29 acres and a commercial catering kitchen. Now we have 35 employees.”

Saratoga Stately

From the Vault Dept.: Thirty years ago, the Saratoga-area newspapers went into puff-mode overdrive with pieces about the city and its racetrack during the summer, and I contributed a few of those pieces. The one below was part of an improbable photo spread – improbable because nothing dims the charm of a house portrait more than black-and-white newsprint, Garry Brown’s photographic prowess notwithstanding. You can find current views of the properties mentioned on Google Maps Street View. I note that all of the addresses given in the piece (and the original captions, which I didn’t write but which I reproduce here) omit the “north” in what should be North Broadway; I have no idea why this happened.

                                                                                            

UNTIL FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT demonstrated that you could remove walls and even hide the front door and still have a good-looking house, American architecture featured a continual reinterpretation of things European.

QUEEN ANNE: The Kilmer House, 722 Broadway,
was built in 1887 and is a fine example of the Queen Anne
style with its many varied features – turrets and gables,
spindles and bands, wood, terra cotta, stained glass,
and differing kinds of roof. Photo by Garry Brown.

Old houses in Saratoga Springs offer an amazing array of styles, reflecting the changing tastes of an affluent turn-of-the-century town that was lucky enough to suffer a financial decline during the recent decades when similar cities razed such buildings.

One of the pleasures of a day or two in the city is the chance to perform old-house detective work and identify the styles that were once so fashionable. In the realm of Victorian design, this city offers an example of just about every notable style – and these examples have even rated a mile's worth of North Broadway houses to gain National Register of Historic Places recognition.

Two architects who contributed heavily to Saratoga's 19th century look of opulence were R. Newton Brezee and Samuel Gifford Slocum, both of whom were born in New York State and maintained Saratoga offices.

Banking on Banks

From the Actual Vault Dept.: For many years I was quite happy to write to order, so long as the checks came in, and I produced a number of pieces for the dry-as-dust Capital District Business Review. Here’s one that presents a very nostalgic picture of the area’s banking industry just before all the interstate banking laws were changed. Wish I’d made a few of the investments suggested below!

                                                                                        

TIME WAS WHEN INVESTING IN A BANK was something done by nervous elders looking for security. It was absolutely safe, promising a small, steady increase in earnings.

But in this decade there have been a slew of banking deregulations that have changed small-town banks into branches of big-city conglomerates, and not without substantial profit for savvy investors.

“If you had bought 500 shares of Citizen’s Trust of Schenectady back in 1950, it would have cost you $500. Today, you’d have KeyCorp stock worth $125,000,” said Michael Brockbank, who owns Brockbank Investment Research, an investment advisory firm in Schenectady.

The history of that stock is a history of the changes characterizing all banks. Citizen’s Trust became National Commercial Bank, which became Key Bank N.A., a part of KeyCorp.

“The dramatic rise in value only occurred in the last ten years as we’ve entered an era of banks acquiring other banks and going on to become holding companies,” Brockbank said.

Mark the Polo!

From the Vault Dept.: Saratoga Polo is about to begin its season, a tradition that begin there in the first year of the 20th century. Thanks to a search through the Saratogian’s clip files (this was back in the filing-cabinet days) and a piece in a 1902 Harper’s Weekly, I assembled the story below. The photo came from Harper’s, too, but the Gazette never returned the original – what you see is a scan of a clipping. Saratoga Polo lost its facility in 2020, and as of 2024, its future is bleak. But here's where you might find updated information: The Saratoga Polo Association.

                                                                                      

RACING ALWAYS STEALS AUGUST’S ATTENTION, but the ancient sport of polo is again attracting notice in Saratoga Springs. When it was introduced here, 88 years ago, it was front-page news. Ten years ago it returned after a break of almost 45 years, and it is again bringing the world’s best players to a small, lavishly-maintained lawn just over the city line in Greenfield.

From left: Kingdon Gould, Jay Gould, Benjamin Nicoll,
and George Jay Gould. Photographed in
Saratoga Springs, July 1902.

In the very early days of the sport, a player simply assaulted an opponent with his horse or anything else that was handy, but dignity and skill replaced brute power as the game evolved. It’s not surprising to realize how little polo has changed throughout the century; what is surprising is to see how little its social aspect has altered. The millionaires and royalty may not take to the field so much, but the air of glamor remains.

William Collins Whitney furnished the original field, near a popular golf club, in 1901. For the first season, professional teams competed for the Hitchcock, Ballston, and Sanford Cups. A year later, over 200 polo ponies arrived in Saratoga during August.

The Sound of Silents: The Charles Chaplin Film Music Anthology

MY FIRST VIEWING OF “CITY LIGHTS” took place in a midtown-Manhattan revival house in the mid-1970s. I went to a midday showing with a high-school friend who had landed a job with a nearby ad agency. The half-filled theater was populated by men, mostly, men in business suits, taking, I suspected, an extra-long break from the workday.

What knowledge I had of Chaplin’s movies was gained from TV showings of his silent shorts, movies that had been mangled over the years and were interrupted by commercials. I fell in love with them anyway.

“City Lights” transported me to a very different place. Now I was enjoying Chaplin’s work with an audience around me, raising the delight factor even as the shared laughs caused the timing of the gags to land as they were intended. Released in 1931, it was a silent movie thumbing its nose at the newly born talkies. But it wasn’t at all silent.

Chaplin long had been telling his stories with little or no dialogue. Part of his genius lay in using the constraints of the screen and the versatility of framing and cutting to convey or heighten the emotional changes that inform the universe he evolved. He knew that pathos and comedy effectively complement each other, and combined them to greatest effect in “City Lights.”

Dinner and a Movie, Maybe

From the Food Vault Dept.: Somehow I managed to experience a dinner-and-a-movie venue in Saratoga Springs without actually seeing the movie, and I was very kind about the food weendured. But this was in 1997, when the world was young. The place endured for at least a decade, but it succumbed to Saratoga’s upscale pretentions, and is now an Embassy Suites. Which was the only photo I could find of the complex.

                                                                                    

“SPORTS BAR? I HATE SPORTS BARS,” I muttered as we pushed our way into the place. Too much football regalia. Too many TV screens. Too much – but then I spotted the baseball stuff. Baseball stuff is good. And I’m too much of an Anglophile to resist a dartboard, even if I don’t take a crack at it myself.

What's there now.

My wife and I were in the Broadway Joe’s half of Joe O’Hara’s sports and movie complex, in the former Grand Union at Congress Plaza, a half-block down East Congress Street from Broadway, across from Congress Park.

Our intention: to check out the dine-while-you-watch movie theater. Our problem: we weren’t really crazy about seeing any of the listed movies.

The politest way to get from the sports bar to the theater is to go outside: there are separate entrances. (You could squeeze by the ticket counter, but I hate dislodging service staff trying to get their work done.) “Here for Star Trek?” asked an usher/waiter.

The Century Club

AS WE CONTEMPLATE the implications of the life-changing choices we make, we’re dogged by a persistent worry: What will the neighbors think? For Joan and Stevie, recently settled in a Florida condo-style residence, it’s more than a worry. Their new neighbors start by mistakenly occupying Joan and Stevie’s residence, and it goes downhill from there as scatterbrained Helen and imperious Ray undermine what little remains of the other couple’s sense of well-being.

Kevin McGuire, Colleen Corcoran,
and Keith J. Conallen.
Photo by Richard Lovrich

Richard Dresser’s “100 Years,” which is getting its world premiere in a production by Troy Foundry Theatre, puts us not too far into the future as two couples contemplate the implications of a life-changing decision they’ve made. They have signed up (at great expense) to undergo a mysterious process that requires them to live in this cookie-cutter community and consume nine large portions of some kind of shake each day, shakes that seem to have all the appeal of a dose of Miralax.

“I don’t like all the rules here,” Joan declares early on, and it’s easy to see how stifled she feels. Colleen Corcoran has a beauty of a role with this character. Her relationship with husband Stevie (Keith J. Conallen) is, on the whole, a happy one, but we see a credible range of contention and discontent as they grapple with their odd new life and odder new neighbors. Conallen also conveys the complexity of such a relationship, as well as deftly giving us a character who isn’t as tough as he’d like us to think.

And just as we’re getting used to them, the neighbors appear. Helen is Raymond’s second wife. His first, she explains, died in a sinkhole, an accident that “didn’t have to happen, but, then again, what does?” In order to marry Ray, Helen gave up her job consulting for trauma victims – “Talk about a growth industry!”

Heil, Brooklyn!

HIS FIRST INKLINGS of the immediacy of Nazi atrocities took place in a neighborhood bakery, in 1956, where the four-year-old Bobby Rosen spotted the tattoo on the forearm of a woman working the counter and coaxed a whispered explanation from his mother. This opens an awareness of the ubiquity of such signs in his neighborhood, and why “A day never passed when I didn’t hear somebody express an opinion about the Nazis – usually my father,” a World War II veteran who was particularly infuriated by the sight of German-designed cars. “Yeah, we all hated the Nazis,” Rosen continues, “and if anybody didn’t, he kept his fool mouth shut about it.”

Rosen describes his boyhood in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in his new memoir Bobby in Naziland (Headpress). It’s his third book, following the best-selling Nowhere Man, an account John Lennon’s final days, and Beaver Street, a look at the porn industry as experienced by Rosen when he was an editor of erotic magazines.

Bobby in Naziland takes an episodic stroll through a Jewish neighborhood that seemed stuck in its own kind of timelessness, colored by the multi-directional progression of prejudices reported throughout the book. Anyone who is German is, of course, a target, which for Rosen included his building’s super, Mr. Kruger (“My father called him ‘that damn Kraut’”). “We also routinely beat the shit out of his blond and suspiciously Aryan-looking twin sons ... who were my age.”

But there also were Catholics to despise, and Poles and Puerto Ricans. “It was garden-variety bigotry, inane and vicious at the same time.” What Tom Lehrer parodied in his song “National Brotherhood Week” played out for real in Flatbush, where “everyone ... I knew hated black people – Jew and goyim alike.” Although racial integration of the Brooklyn Dodgers made it seem as if the borough “were some kind of racially harmonious mecca,” in truth it was bad enough that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had to be applied to Brooklyn as well as the former Confederacy.

Can’t Help Falling

From the Opera Vault Dept.: We’re gearing up for summer opera season, so here’s a re-visit to a time, thirty years ago, when the NYC Opera performed in Saratoga Springs each summer. When the NYC Opera existed at all.
                                                                                        

THE NEW YORK CITY OPERA’S opening production of their short Saratoga Performing Arts Center season this year was marred only by two adversities: the weather, about which no one is able to do much, and the perennially unkind acoustics, about which ditto.

Marilyn Mims

Other than that, it was a glorious trip to that fancified Paris of “La Traviata” Wednesday night with a die-hard crowd that sloshed into the amphitheater to share in the magic of Verdi’s masterpiece.

Marilyn Mims and Walter MacNeil sang the roles of Violetta and Alfredo, the lovers whose affair, you get the feeling, is doomed the moment she starts coughing in the first act.

The opera is a soprano’s showcase, both in talent requirement and the skill with which the part is written. Mims did a lovely job transforming herself, during the first act, from a live-for-the-moment character into a woman seriously touched by Alfredo’s attention. She echoes the elements of two of his first act arias and then launches into two difficult arias, back to back: “Ah fors’e lui che l’anima” and “Sempre libera,” all of which was sung with strength, precision and a keen sense of grace.

Lesson Number One

Guest Blogger Dept.: Hello again, Mr. Benchley! The estimable Robert is here again with a piece that’s more timely than ever.

                                                                            

FRANKLY, I AM NOT MUCH OF A HAND at machinery of any sort. I have no prejudice against it as such, for some of my best friends are of a mechanical turn of mind, and very nice fellows they are too. But the pencil sharpener in our office is about as far as I, personally, have ever got in the line of operating a complicated piece of mechanism with any degree of success.

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

So, when George suggested that he teach me to run his car, it seemed a reasonable proposition. Obviously, some one had to teach me. I couldn't be expected to go out and pick the thing up by myself, like learning to eat olives. No matter how well-intentioned I might be, or how long I stuck at it, the chances are that I never could learn to drive a car simply by sitting in the seat alone and fooling around among the gadgets until I found the right ones. Something would be sure to happen to spoil the whole thing long before I got the hang of it.

The car was, therefore, brought out into the driveway at the side of the house, like a bull being led into the ring for a humid afternoon with the matador. It was right here that George began to show his true colors, for he stopped the engine, which was running very nicely as it was, and said that I might as well begin by learning to crank it, as I probably would spend seven-eighths of my driving time cranking in the future.