Two musicals

Spent a lazy Sunday afternoon watching a couple of musical films on DVD - both alas rather seriously flawed by casting mistakes. I'd forgotten that, of all people, Francis Ford Coppola directed Finian's Rainbow. This has never been a favourite of mine, though it has a couple of good numbers by Burton Lane -'How are thing in Glocca Morra' and 'When I'm not near the girl I love', which got a Tony award for David Wayne as Og.. Alas, Og is played in the film by Tommy Steele, unutterably winsome - butter could not only melt in his mouth but covers him from head to foot. Not keen on Miss Clark either; but nice to see that Fred Astaire, nearing the end of his career, could still twinkle a toe or two. Actually the whole show seems very clunky now; what on earth persuaded Coppola to direct it, I wonder?
 The other film was of Hello, Dolly!, with that wonderful score by the great Jerry Herman - remarkable how it was dismisssed by some critics as being without any tunes!  Gene Kelly's direction, as one might expect, produces excellent dance numbers, and he deals with the crows scenes very adeptly (striking opening to the film, too). But oh dear, Miss Streisand is almost a caricature of herself in the title role - cast no doubt because  Carol Channing wasn't a big enough international star. Channing was stunning in the first spage production: it's a real ragedy she didn't get the screen part. I remember the critic Walter Kerr on her: 'Channing opens wide her big-as-millstone eyes, spreads her white-gloved arms in ecstatic abandon, trots out on a circular runway that surrounds the orchestra, and proceeds to dance rings around the conductor . . . With hair like orange sea foam, a contralto like a horse's neighing, and a confidential swagger, [she is] a musical comedy performer with all the blowzy glamor of the girls on the sheet music of 1916.' But Even dear Dora Bryant, in the London stage production, was a great deal better than the squeaking, squealing, gesticulating over-the-top-in-the-wrong-way Miss Streisand.The film well worth watching for the immortal Walter Matteau, however, and interesting to see Michael Crawford, with little tatters of his best-known TV character still sticking to him, and little sign that within a few years he was to play a sensational Phantom in the first production of Mr Lloyd Webber's little piece. And however much the producers paid Satchmo for his tiny appearnce, it wasn't too much.

Don't just sit there . . .

For some reason - and I don't know whether the Good or Bad Fairy was active at my birth - I simply can't 'do nothing.' When I was working full out, in the '60s and '70s, writing and broadcasting four or five programmes a week, I used to fantacise about sitting in a chair on a nice warm patio sipping a cool drink and thinking of nothing. But it was never going to happen, not in real life, and still hasn't. I can sit on the patio with a cool drink and a book for perhaps an hour, then I get the nagging feeling that I should be doing something - whether it's compiling a concert for finemusic - you can listen on your computer at finemusicfm.com - or writing an article to (hopefully) sell to someone or even just writing a blog. Reading is sometimes, maybe always, 'doing something', as is listening to music (or used to be before my hearing let me down) - provided there's an intention, provided one is learning someting fromthe boook or really feeding one's soul with the music. Even reading or listening 'for pleasure' is in a sense 'doing something'. But just being 'busy doing nothing', though it isn't exactly a sin - there's no moral dimension about it at all - isn't on. It's being mentally or emotioonally inactive that I can't stand.
I don't suggest this is in any way something praiseworthy; life being what it is, five minutes after I breath my last I cease to be of the least impoirtance, and nothing I have written or done is likely to be read or remembered for longer than - what, ten years? I don't in any way feel I should be working, or doing what passes for work. So whence the compulsion? And to how many people does it apply? If someone is'bored' does it mean they really need to be 'doing something' - even if it's just putting a washer on a tap? And why do we, alone among the animals, feel this?
Answers on one side of a postcard, please.

Gay marriage, and all that jazz

I can't say I'd go to the stake for the right of homosexual couples to get married (whatever they mean by the word), but I've certainly no objection to it, and it's difficult not to be appalled by the violence of those who do object. I have to say it seems to me that - if you set aside those people who believe they have been instructed by some nonentity in the sky that gay marriage is almost as bad as covetng their neighbours' ox - the objectors are those who have some more or less secrect horror or cotempt for any sexual activity between people of the same sex. Where this comes from, I can't say - humans seem to be the only beings on earth who are worried about it; animals happily gambol about irrespective of what sex they are, and planets seem on the whole disinterested where sexual activity is concerned. In any case, surely what people do with this or where they put that is a matter for them provided they don't, in the famous phrase, do it in the street and frighten the horses. The objectots aren't identifiable by classs or politics - indeed it's one of the few prejudices shared by left and right, though the right in the shape of Mr Murdoch's Press was pretty violently opposed until the climate of opinion changed and it was obvious that most readers either didn't care a damn or were on the side of gay marriage.
The Australian Government is one of the last bastions of prejudice as far as the West is concerned, and the reason seems mainly because the majority of members of the Prime Minister's cabinet, incuding himself, are Roman Catholics. Their eagerness to explain that they are against gay mrriage because it's a left-wing plot got up by the Labour Opposition is pathetically weak. They will of course give way sooner or later, probably sooner, if only because of the votes they'll lose if they don't. Mr Putin and the Duma may be another matter.

The outdoor barre

Julia has had a ballet barre fixed out on the deck of the patio. This morning it's 8 degrees, so there aren't many plie's going on.

But -

 

More trouble at the Opera House

Covent Garden may not be the most beautiful of  opera houses – I suppose the Fenice would carry off the prize – but we grew extremely fond of it, as one does for any theatre which plays a large part in one’s life (I felt and feel the same way about the Old Vic, and that most beautiful of the world’s theatres, the Theatre Royal, Haymarket). But the Garden certainly has provided me with enough anecdotes to fill a gap in any conversation. The booking queues were always good for a story. In those days the fruit and vegetable market was still alive and kicking all around us as we lay in our sleeping bags on the pavement (three nights a minimum for, say, the first London appearance of the Kirov company). There was plenty of banter with and from the market porters. ‘You’re all mad,’ one guy said cheerfully as he stepped over us. ‘Well,’ someone said, ‘you’d sleep out for a cup final ticket.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but then you get a result.’

Then there was the moment when I was greeted in the crowded crush bar one evening by a young man who clearly knew me; I knew him, too – but couldn’t for a moment remember where or why. I heard myself say, in a voice loud enough to cut through the hubbub, ‘Oh, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.’ I usually saw him in the sauna at the gym (I knew no good would come of going to a gym). There was a certain frisson in the air as people cleared a space around us. No gays ever went to the ballet in those days, but the crowd clearly thought there might be an exception.

Fellow members of the audience in our favourite stalls circle (usually £2 10s a seat – round about £60 now) were usually well behaved, but occasionally there were exceptions, such as the lady who munched chocolates and talked audibly to her companion through the first act of Giselle. In the interval I asked her if she would mind perhaps not talking quite so much during Act II. ‘Why?’ she said incredulously – ‘it’s only music.’ To which I could really think of no reply.

I’m a fairly inoffensive person and not given to violence; the only time I have almost hit someone was at the London Coliseum when Reginald Goodall was conducting his magnificent, but decidedly leisurely Ring. The two seats in front of us were empty until the very last minute, when a couple shuffled into them. It soon became clear that the man disagreed fairly violently with Goodall’s tempi, for he began ostentatiously conducting the first act of Valkyrie. After a while his movements became really irritating, and I prepared to deliver a karate chop to the side of the neck when he turned to speak to his companion and I recognised the unmistakable profile of Leonard Bernstein. My hand stopped in mid-air. I might have been banned for life.

Trouble at the Opera House - I

Fifty years ago, I was at the centre of an Unfortunate Incident at Covent Garden Opera House.

On May 4^th I caught the night bus from Notting Hill at 3.30,  arrived in Bow Street at four, and was 264^th in the queue for tickets to hear Callas and Gobbi in Tosca. Orderly queue, as always, but alas the queue leader had only brought 280 tickets, and made the mistake of telling late arrivals that they could just sign his book, safely go away, and return later to take their places. After a while, he went off himself for a slow half-pint at the Nag’s Head. Sure enough more and more late- and later-comers came to join the end of a queue which they were surprised to find considerably shorter than they had feared. At half-past seven or so those who had left, returned, shocked that ‘their  places’ had been taken by other opera enthusiasts extremely reluctant to give them up. When the queue-leader returned at a quarter to eight or so, he was quickly surrounded by unhappy queuers. The discussion became extremely heated, and  despite typically humorous attempts to break the tension (‘If you don’t shut up, all we’ll get is tickets for Moses und Aron!’, one wag shouted) I began to fear that the incident might eventually be concluded in the courts across the road. Only the appearance of the much-loved and usually amiable Sergeant Martin, the Major-domo of the House, quietened things down. You didn’t argue with Sgt Martin, late of the Guards.

I got two tickets for the first Tosca after the Royal gala performance, and turned up on July 12^th  to find another Unfortunate Incident had occurred: Madame Callas, having sung for the Queen, had decided that enough was enough, and gone off to Paris about other business. However, once George Pretre raised his baton we still heard a marvelous Scarpia from Gobbi and an excellent Tosca from Marie Collier.

The refund the management arranged, on the spot – queue at the box-office as you leave - was extraordinarily generous: we got £3 15s back on our £5 stalls tickets , which was a help later in the year when I was 82^nd in the queue for a Fonteyn-Nureyev Giselle, and Cinderella at Christmas with Helpmann and Ashton as the Ugly Sisters. In the end, everything comes to he who queues.

Vivat Obama!

What as astonishing wave President Obama is riding. After a tenure of the White House during which he has been continually battled and frustrated by the lunatic right in Congress, suddenly Obamacare has been approved and embedded in the constitution, gay marriage has been approved by the Court, it at last seems possible that he may be able to make some progress about gun control . . . The view of him as a 'disappointing' President stems completely, surely, from the fact that he has been tied hand and foot by the Republican majority in Congress, and the splenetic fools of the NRA. He may after all be remembered as one of the  best and most progressive presidents since FDR.