By Laura Kennelly
So what happens to a musical, beautiful, bright young man with a gift for performing and a fire to compose, to be special, to be loved? Hershey Felder in Maestro: Leonard Bernstein, A Play with Music (to give the full title) offers one enthralling answer to that question. It’s just us listening and Lenny talking (with musical illustration at times) as he unburdens himself.
The Cleveland Play House Allen Theatre stage is simple: a piano, some lights, a camera, a couple of chairs, a scroll for images to be projected onto–you get the idea. It’s good that it’s simple because the man Felder attempts to capture was anything but simple. Best known for writing the music for West Side Story, On the Town, and Candide, Bernstein yearned to be famous as a composer. His fame, however, as he laments in the play, was as a conductor and teacher (he made numerous educational videos about classical music still used today). Felder (as Bernstein) asks the audience directly if they can hum any of his “serious” works. No one in the opening night audience volunteered.
Felder’s vision of a young Bernstein draws a picture of an ambitious lad who can not please his cold and demanding father. Is it any wonder that when a series of conductors form close relationships with the aspiring conductor, very close connections are forged? Although Lenny eventually marries and has a family, his “other life” as it is referred to, remains a big part of his life.
Felder’s clever characterization makes one wonder if indeed, these are the things Bernstein told himself about his life. At one point Lenny rages against “the writer” (he means Tom Wolfe although he’s not named) who embarrassed Felicia. One wonders if Bernstein really did object so self-righteously to Wolfe’s magnificent send up of not only Lenny and his wife, but of the whole upper-crust New York establishment who enjoyed slumming with the dangerously criminal element known as the Black Panthers. Radical Chic, Wolfe’s cutting essay (perhaps his best work) likely didn’t do half the damage to Felicia that her huband did (as Lenny, to his credit, quietly admits in the play) with his cheating ways.
That’s part of the charm of this production: between the gossip and the music it’s a spellbinding performance that made for a great evening. I didn’t even check my watch in this 90-minute show–though I was distracted once and fought the urge to bound across the aisle and grab the cellphone that went off during the ultra-romantic and (let’s face it, orgasmic) rendition of Wagner’s “Liebestod” (a speciality of conductor Bernstein)–I mean, really! the worst possible moment to break a mood.
Bottom Line: If Bernstein wasn’t really like Felder’s brilliant, self-absorbed character, maybe he should have been. A one-person show is hard to carry off but this one shines and shimmers (I would have said “rocks,” but LB was, after all, a classical music kind of guy so terminology must be appropriately elevated).
Maestro runs until August 4 at the Allen Theatre at PlayhouseSquare. For tickets go to http://clevelandplayhouse.com.
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.
Cleveland, OH 44115