February House

PROGRAM NOTE

Opera, a wise man once said, gives extraordinary treatment to extraordinary emotions. People love, die, commit suicide, alone or en masse-- statues wake and warn sinners and whole countries shake in fear at vespers. Musical comedy, on the other hand, works by giving extraordinary treatment to ordinary emotions: people go to clambakes, wash their hair, dream up a better gimmick for a strip-tease, feel sorry and grateful at the same time, gamble on cheese cake, develop a cold. These everyday feelings become, in the best of the American musical theater, the material of melodic elaboration and literary intelligence, a cause for wit and lyrical beauty. That capacity, to make the quotidian seem celestial, or at least significant, for two and a half hours, is why those of us who dearly love the form love it as much as we do -- and why we have worried, and even grieved, over the past thirty or so years, when it seemed as if that form was passing away in front of our eyes. There were many shows with songs, to be sure, and some that carried audiences away with them, often for years. But for the most part, that era just past of Euro-Bombast, to coin a name and a rhyme for it, amounted to giving ordinary treatment to extraordinary emotions, with mediocre music attached to material better suited for operetta or opera in the first place than for true indigenous musical. It sometimes seemed as if Sondheim and his small band of disciples were alone in keeping the other, superior musical tradition alive, like the last true Jews worshipping in a cave in Spain after everybody else had been ejected. What made this circumstance still worse is that we so obviously have been living through an otherwise amazing era in the history of popular song, with everyone from the two Pauls, McCartney and Simon, to James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen finding amazing new ways to sing the small feelings of the heart. And yet how little of this sound arrived, organically, on the American stage! (One excepts jukebox musicals, where songs already loved were simply back-storied.)

Now, though – suddenly, unexpectedly – we seem to be in the midst of a renaissance of true musical theater, firmly rooted again in ordinary life and new American sounds. Adam Guettel’s “Light In the Piazza” Sheik and Sater’s “Spring Awakening”, Lin Manuel Miranda’s “In The Heights”-- all are original song-scores that are as far from the juke box musical or operetta as they are from the concept album. They speak the new language of song, from hip-hop to acoustic folk, as naturally, and as skillfully, as their great predecessors on the New York stage spoke the jazz-inflected pop language of their time -- but like them, the new generation puts their music to the work of true drama, memorable conflict, what works on stage.

There is no brighter herald or instance of this – well, call it a Renaissance -- than this score, Gabriel Kahane’s for the musical he has written with Seth Bockley, “February House.” No smaller-seeming emotions could have been found as the foundation for a musical show than the ones here, with the “crisis” being the perpetual New York one of housing, with war and history heard only in the distance. Based on a true story of how a group of acquaintances, under the guidance of the Harper’s Bazaar editor George Davis, decided to share a house in Brooklyn in the 1940’s m the show, and its songs, go about the work of weaving experience, fights and reconciliations and pains and losses, into two acts of feeling. The friends, to be sure, are a remarkable crew: The incomparable modern poet, W.H.Auden, the stripper and novelist Gypsy Rose Lee (herself the subject of perhaps the greatest of the previous golden age’s musicals); the composer Benjamin Britten and his lover, the singer Peter Pears; the budding novelist Carson McCullers and her not-entirely agreeable husband, and Auden’s beloved, the louche but brilliant Chester Kallman. With George at their center, trying to will this marriage of real-estate convenience into a true marriage of household love, the inhabitants of February House manage to become symbols of modern dislocation, and our longing for home, without ever losing their particularities as people.

Kahane has crafted music and lyrics for this story that are subtle and various, poignant and original, and as dramatic in treatment as it is contemporary in texture. The beauties and merits of the score are here for the listener to discover, much better than a writer can describe…but let me mention, at least, how daringly and beautifully the show starts, in terms of the conventional “grammar” of the musical theater, not with a rousing chorus-based number but with a plangent invocation of place, “Light Upon The Hill”, a song built around a haunting, revolving banjo riff that puts one in mind of the music from Joni Mitchell’s “Blue”. Not that the demand for exhilaration and wit, so essential to a musical, is scanted: “A Room Comes Together” is a small masterpiece of jaunty, even camp, good humor, that takes a sudden turn towards something darker and more personal than such songs most usually provide. The Porterish, “ I get such tingles when furniture mingles /like debutantes out at a ball/I grow ecstatic when something dramatic/is done up to one up a wall/yes, I hear the interior calling! “ gives way to the inner reflections of a gay man brought up in an inhospitable place: “we’d play cowboys and Indians and we’d only eat cake /and at night we’d lie under the stars wide awake/ That never happened but still I can’t shake /the lingering feeling that I’m meant to make/ a family...”

The making of a family, however precariously, and for however short a time, is the show’s theme, and the love songs that illuminate are all touched, I think, by the need not for a love so much as for company, someone to keep. Two “art song” settings stand out as particularly, well, ballsy – for it is brave man who would set Auden’s lyrics to his own tunes, as Kahane does here, twice, in “Refugee Blues” and “Funeral Blues”, with absolute success. And, as with any good American musical show, it is the small songs, the in-between songs, that move us as much as the big numbers: “ Coney Island” Carson McCullers’s melancholy (and premonitory) song of the sad New York scene where the lonely, hunting heart can imagine, for a moment, that it can end quest, may, I think, emerge as the “standard” from the collection.

Happy songs, witty songs, poignant songs, above all theater songs, songs made for a particular moment and able to work the magic of “completing an arc”, using music to make a character pass from one emotional state to another--- the extraordinary thing about “February House” is how little it depends on its character’s fame, or notoriety, for its effects. Ordinary feelings, extraordinary treatment; songs of rooms, bedbugs, Coney Island, impending war and uncertain love, above all of Brooklyn, of all improbable romantic places in the world. This is the sound of a new generation finding itself on a too-long-abandoned stage. The house may be February’s, but this music sounds like spring.

— Adam Gopnik, July 2012

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