The Morning Line
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THE MORNING LINE DATE: Tuesday, June 16, 2015 FROM: Michelle Farabaugh, Melissa Cohen, Jennie Mamary Katie Aramento, Raychel Shipley PAGES: 11, including this page. C3 June 16, 2015 Review: ‘Preludes,’ a Hypnotist Tries to Get Rachmaninoff to Make Music Again By Ben Brantley Writer’s block turns out to be a lot more inspiring than you could ever have imagined — and sad and stirring and gloriously fun. In “Preludes,” which opened on Monday night at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center, Dave Malloy makes beautiful music out of a composer’s three years of creative silence. The suffering young artist in this case is one Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), the Russian whose late- Romantic compositions summon thoughts of crashing waves beneath skies illuminated by fireworks. You’ve probably heard his music, even if you’ve never set foot in a concert hall. And you may have been transported, embarrassed or repelled by its intensity of feeling. Rach, as our hero is known, is well aware of this possible variety of responses, and it paralyzes him. When “Preludes” begins, in Moscow in 1900, memories of the hostile reception to his first symphony in 1897, performed disastrously under the baton of a drunken conductor, still grip him in a stranglehold. So Rach (a fabulous Gabriel Ebert, with Or Matias as his expressive, piano-playing alter ego) spends his days doing pretty much nothing but massaging an open wound. The opening song of this show — conceived by Mr. Malloy with its director, Rachel Chavkin — is a catalog of the empty hours of his typical day. And anyone who’s ever felt guilty about killing, instead of seizing, time will feel the full sting of Rach’s self-flagellation. Gabriel Ebert, left, as Rach, paralyzed by writer’s block, with Or Matias as his piano-playing alter ego, Rachmaninoff. Credit Tina Fineberg for The New York Times Yet there’s nothing remotely sterile about the way “Preludes” portrays such aridity. As undeniable as it is, Rach’s pain is also our pleasure for the two phantasmagorical hours of this walls-bursting chamber work, an LCT3 production. Mr. Malloy and Ms. Chavkin have delivered the best musical about art’s agonies since Georges Seurat wielded a twitchy paintbrush in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George.” Mr. Malloy is the exuberant talent behind “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” (an adaptation of — gulp — “War and Peace,” on which he collaborated with Ms. Chavkin) and the enchanting concert piece “Ghost Quartet.” As a songwriter, he incorporates wildly diverse sources — classical, folk, electro-pop — into a form that exists defiantly beyond the quotation marks of postmodernism. He’s that rarity, a smart sentimentalist whose self-consciousness about his feelings in no way dilutes them. His embrace of Rachmaninoff, in all his emotional excesses, is that of a deeply empathic fan. And you have the feeling that Mr. Malloy is happily pointing a finger at himself when he has a character say of Rachmaninoff, “Serge can be rather indulgently maudlin.” That observation is made by Feodor Chaliapin, the celebrated Russian opera singer and Rach’s best friend, to Anton Chekhov. Chaliapin is played and sung (beautifully) by Joseph Keckler, while Chekhov is embodied with understated drollness by Chris Sarandon, who also portrays Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy and Czar Nicholas II. Mr. Malloy has reincarnated these real-life luminaries with the joy of an art-infatuated kid allowed to live inside an encyclopedia of culture, and the wit that Woody Allen brought to the Jazz Age literati of “Midnight in Paris.” (Those who know Chekhov’s dictum about plays and guns will be delighted by the use Mr. Sarandon makes of a hunting rifle.) But the most important names here are lesser-known. They are Natalya Satina (Nikki M. James), Rach’s long- suffering fiancée and cousin, and Dahl (Eisa Davis), based on the hypnotherapist Nikolai Dahl, who helped guide Rachmaninoff out of his artistic stasis. (Yes, unlike the historic Dahl, Ms. Davis is a woman; such extravagant liberties are taken throughout and never jar.) “Preludes” is identified in the script as “a musical fantasia set in the hypnotized mind of Sergei Rachmaninoff,” and it is an accurate description. But the show is also, implicitly and inevitably, set in the mind of Mr. Malloy inhabiting the mind of Rachmaninoff. And the interior landscape here is a deliberately anachronistic melding of past and present. The frame of reference bends to encompass the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries without strain. The use of contemporary lingo, verbal and musical, suggests the way we instinctively grope for equivalences in our current lives for things past, as we try to conceive what life must have been like then. Every element of Ms. Chavkin’s splendidly inventive production exists in this era-melding state of mind. That includes Paloma Young’s then-and-now costumes, Bradley King’s stunning lighting, Matt Hubbs’s nervy sound design and Mimi Lien’s split-level set, which suggests an attic of cluttered memories. The impression is of one of those elaborate hidden-object drawings for children, and part of the show’s charm comes from seeing how those objects — a Byzantine robe behind glass or a big white sheet — are deployed. At center stage is a revolving grand piano. Its bench is often occupied by the gifted Mr. Matias (also the show’s music director), a charmingly bereft figure who plays music that melds Rachmaninoff and Malloy — and Bach and Beethoven and Mussorgsky — as Mr. Ebert’s Rach glowers and beams at his underemployed alter ego. (The program is invaluable in annotating the sources for each of the songs.) Wiley DeWeese and Emily Marshall, on synthesizers, fill out the aural landscape. Ms. James and Ms. Davis are lovely as the frustrated women who only want to help the unhappy Rach. An ode to the sources and selfishness of creativity, “Preludes” does not romanticize tortured genius or the martyrdom of those who live in its shadow. Ms. James, who won a Tony for “The Book of Mormon,” has a wonderful, double-edged number that suggests that this narcissist’s helpmate has her own impatient ego. Above all, there is Mr. Ebert, a Tony winner for “Matilda the Musical,” whose Rach is a marvel of acrobatic anxiety. Every movement small and large — from snapping pencil after pencil to grabbing a microphone stand and making like a rock star — and strangled vocal inflection ring true and exact. New York audiences have been spending a lot of time inside the heads of socially challenged geniuses. Think of those two recent Tony winners, the musical “Fun Home” (about a cartoonist’s unhappy family) and the play “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” (about an autistic teenage math whiz). Even in such celebrated company, “Preludes” stands tall. Along with “Fun Home” and the soaring, Broadway- bound “Hamilton,” this smashing production says that the American musical is not only not dead but also growing luxuriantly in places you never expected. C3 June 16, 2015 Monica Lewis Dies at 93; Her Apple-Pie Appeal Sold Chiquita’s Bananas By Sam Roberts Monica Lewis, the dimpled, diminutive chanteuse who made her Broadway debut as a teenager, taught Americans how to ripen their newly imported bananas as the ubiquitous voice of Miss Chiquita, appeared on the inaugural episode of Ed Sullivan’s television variety show in 1948 and durably continued to perform jazz and pop hits for decades, died on Friday at her home in the Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles. She was 93. Her death was announced by her former agent, Alan Eichler. The daughter of musicians, Miss Lewis had a fairy-tale career. She overcame early poverty, capitalized on lucky breaks, was discovered by Benny Goodman, crooned “Put the Blame on Mame” and “Autumn Leaves” as “America’s Singing Sweetheart,” performed with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, was wooed by Ronald Reagan (she said she rejected his marriage proposal), appeared in films and on television, and resumed her singing career in her 60s. Reviewing her performance at Danny’s Skylight Room in Manhattan in 1988, John S. Wilson wrote in The New York Times that while she “is not the same singer that she was 30 years ago, she has skillfully retained her basic qualities as a performer.” She was born May Lewis in Chicago on May 22, 1922. Her father, Leon, was a pianist, composer and symphonic conductor. Her mother, Jessie, was an opera singer. Miss Lewis studied voice with her. Squeezed by the Depression, the family moved to New York when she was 11. Miss Lewis was studying at Hunter College when she was hired as a $25-a-week vocalist on a radio wake-up program called “Gloom Dodgers” to help support the family. She soon had her own radio show, “Monica Makes Music,” and won the part of a singing cigarette girl in the short-lived Broadway show “Johnny 2x4.” (Among the other cast members was a young Lauren Bacall.) That led to an engagement at the Stork Club, where she could perform but was not old enough to buy a drink. She left school and changed her name to Monica, which she considered sexier. (“I feel much more like Monica and I look much more like Monica, too,” she told the newspaper PM in 1946.) In her autobiography, “Hollywood Through My Eyes: The Lives & Loves of a Golden Age Siren,” written with Dean Lamanna and published in 2011, she recalled that in 1943 Leonard Feather, the jazz pianist and critic, tipped her off that Goodman urgently needed a singer because Peggy Lee had eloped with the band’s guitarist, Dave Barbour.