Top Five Songs: Dessa Rose

As far as Ahrens & Flaherty musicals go, Dessa Rose is a little hit-or-miss for me, but as is usual with this composing duo, when they’re on, they’re reallyon.  Here are my favorite songs from the show.

“Ol’ Banjar” – I feel Dessa Rose puts a bit too shiny a veneer on its story at times, but even though this is an upbeat song, it works for me.  That’s because it’s specifically about clinging to the few good things that make life bearable, and for Kaine, that’s two things:  music and Dessa Rose.  The simple but lovely tune fits it to a tee.

Best line:  “Ain’t no white folks down in Africa, / Ain’t no white folks near or far. / You own yourself / And you own your soul / and the music of ol’ banjar.”

“Something of My Own” – Just like music gives Kaine happiness, Dessa Rose’s unborn child gives her both hope and strength.  Her ode to how her child is already changing her and everything she’ll do on its behalf (especially her vow to “only name him free”) is gorgeous.

Best line:  “I could be as strong as thunder / With his hand in mine. / Tear the very storm asunder. / Make the sun to shine.”

“Twelve Children” – The Act I finale is a stunning showcase for Dessa Rose, introducing her newborn daughter to the stories of all the family she’s lost.  This beautifully-understated song validates Dessa Rose’s lost brothers and sisters, despite the repeated indifference of the white masters.

Best line:  “Some sold away. / Some passed away. / Some run. / Twelve children brought from her body. / All gone but one.”

“Better If I Died” – This is such a great drama!! song, with a strong driving rhythm and fantastic harmonies between Ruth and Dessa Rose.  It’s a fine release for everything that’s been building up between them in the second act.

Best line:  “Nothing more to ruin. / Nothing left to say…” – “Nothing left to take away.”

“Just over the Line” – Full disclosure:  I mostly love this song because the chorus is so blame catchy.  It pulls me in every time.  Plot-wise, I find it fairly incredulous, but ooh!  That music, especially when Nathan sings it; in general, I don’t think the show makes great use of Norm Lewis’s talents, but he’s just wonderful here.

Best line:  “Tuscaloosa, Pickens, Greene. / Counties we ain’t never seen. / But look who’s here! / Just over the line.”

Dessa Rose (2005)

I’m a bit on-the-fence about this Ahrens & Flaherty musical.  It has some really nice elements going for it, but I think it also stumbles in places.  In general, I’d place it in the middle of the pack for Ahrens & Flaherty shows I’m familiar with, with the score being somewhat better than the story (some spoilers.)

Based on a novel of the same name by Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose follows the lives of two women in the Antebellum South.  Dessa Rose is a teenage slave girl infamous among plantation owners as the “devil-woman,” due to having led a slave revolt.  The pregnant Dessa Rose is brought to prison to be hanged for her crimes, and upon her escape, she crosses paths with Ruth, a white woman who’s struggled to keep her farm running since the departure of her husband some time before.  The two women immediately misjudge and mistrust one another, but circumstances throw them together and, providing they can cooperate, just might offer both of them a way out of their situation.

I haven’t read the book this is based on, so I don’t know how closely the story follows it, but the narrative bothers me in a few places, mainly because I feel it underestimates what being a slave was like.  The first is an account of Dessa Rose being whipped as a punishment, with her master only striking her “‘round her private places” so she won’t have visible signs of disobedience and therefore be easier to sell off.  Now, this is obviously reprehensible and I have no problem believing that a slave owner would devise such a cruel punishment (although, with a female slave, they might not in the interest of making sure she could still bear children.)  On the other hand, I do think it’s naïve to think a potential buyer wouldn’t see her completely naked.  It seems to suggest a tiny shred of bodily autonomy that slaves just didn’t have.  (Note:  although the scenario problematic to me, I love one of the lines in the song dealing with it.  “Don’t damage the goods. / Don’t scar where it shows” – chilling.)  I also call foul on the relative ease with which Dessa Rose and the other slaves run their “scheme” of having Ruth repeatedly sell them, running away, and meeting up to be sold again.  It almost comes across like escaping slavery is a cakewalk, and I find it hard to believe that they wouldn’t have lost a larger number of their group, either from being unable to get away or from being killed in attempts to flee.

This frustrates me, because it can be really great at times.  I like the recurring theme of finding small joys and comforts to make the horrors of life bearable, particularly the importance of family, names, and passing on the memories of those you’ve lost.  Although the way things resolve between Dessa Rose and Ruth is a bit pat, I like the way both women learn to see one another better and work together as a result.  I always love Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s talent for mixing a modern Broadway-pop sound with the flavor of their setting, and here, the fiddles, vocal harmonies, and spiritual rhythms do a nice job of capturing the feel of the story.  It’s not my favorite score of theirs, but there are some excellent songs to be had (in part, it’s a little tough to get into the Off-Broadway cast recording, since there are a lot of dialogue tracks and so the music is broken up considerably.)  The original cast starred a beautifully-voiced LaChanze (who also worked with Ahrens & Flaherty in Once on This Island) who has some lovely songs to sink her vocal cords into.  Norm Lewis (who I know from the original casts of A New Brain and Side Show,) playing fellow slave Nathan, isn’t used as effectively, but it’s always a treat to hear his richly-gorgeous voice.

Favorite Characters: Yitzhak (Hedwig and the Angry Inch)

Yitzhak is maybe an odd character to feature.  If Tommy Gnosis stands between Hedwig and the fame she wants, then Hedwig stands between Yitzhak and his.  Even with Hedwig’s admittedly piddly spotlight, Yitzhak is always in the shadow.  He’s the eternal backup vocalist, given no opportunities to show off and no outlet to be the beauty he longs to become.  In movie, he probably has less than a dozen lines.  And yet, I kind of love him.  (Note – I’m pulling in both the stage show and the film for today’s post.  Yitzhak-related spoilers.)

At first glance, Yitzhak looks out of place in the Angry Inch.  Hedwig – the high diva in command – is naturally at the center of everything, with audaciously tacky outfits, loud makeup, and wigs that deserve their own stage credit, and the rest of the band is styled in varying shades of punk/glam pastiche.  Next to all that color, glitter, and androgyny, Yitzhak doesn’t seem to fit.  Nothing form-fitting, nothing flamboyant.  Loose T-shirts and baggy jeans, bandanas and leather jackets.  Long, limp rocker hair and a goatee.  One of these things is not like the others.

And yet, right away, there’s more to be seen here.  Yitzhak is a male character, by all accounts a cisgender one, but he’s pretty much always played by a woman.  Miriam Shor, pictured above, originated the role of Yitzhak Off-Broadway and reprised it in the movie.  So we have this very traditionally-masculine-looking guy with kind of sullen impressions, but there’s something soft and feminine in his face.  His singing voice tends to be the same way, surprising the listener with sudden threads of femininity that seem to emerge from nowhere.

The movie keeps Yitzhak’s woes while skipping his backstory, so elements can feel a bit out-of-the-blue, but the stage show reveals that Yitzhak was once one of Croatia’s finest drag queens.  The Jewish Yitzhak needed to get out of the country, and when he met Hedwig, he was willing to do anything to leave with her.  She agreed to take him along, but at a cost.  Hedwig always needs to be the most beautiful person on stage, and if Yitzhak was going to join her, he could never dress in drag again.  “To be free, one must give up a little part of oneself,” she told him, echoing the words that led to her ticket out of Communist East Berlin:  her botched transition surgery.

That’s where Yitzhak’s head is when we meet him.  His own spark is dulled to make another’s brighter by comparison, and it’s not just with the heels or the wigs.  Hedwig is an incurable spotlight hog who feels threatened by Yitzhak’s talent; in the movie, the last moments of “Tear Me Down” tell you everything you need to know about their relationship.  As Hedwig gears up for her big finish, she’s resentful of Yitzhak’s riffing and coolly walks over to yank the cord out of his microphone.  As a sort-of couple (they’re married – might have been a green card thing for Yitzhak?), they’re hugely dysfunctional.  Hedwig constantly belittles and undermines Yitzhak, she takes him utterly for granted, and she’s hidden his passport.  Yitzhak wants to get out from under her thumb but doesn’t know how, and despite everything, he still can’t quite help loving her.  But for Yitzhak, the chief grievances are the first two – that Hedwig denies him his beauty and pushes his talent to the side.  He’s a natural star who can’t let loose, a gorgeous queen who can’t strut.  Shor does such a terrific job in the film bringing these injustices to the fore, packing a lot of emotion into wordless scenes and making you feel how incredibly important both issues are to him.  In a story where the protagonist has such a tangled, colorful history, it’s cool to discover that the taciturn backup singer has hidden dreams and inner turmoil as well.

Assassins (1990)

Strange as it may seem, this was actually my first Sondheim show.  Not Sweeney Todd, not Into the Woods, not A Little Night Music, not Sunday in the Park with George, but Assassins, the darkly comic musical about America’s actual and would-be presidential assassins.  During the 2004 Tony Awards, I fell in love with the Broadway cast’s performance and shortly thereafter bought the CD for the revival.  I discovered that Sondheim is tricky but supremely rewarding, that Doogie Howser has a nice set of pipes on him (this was pre-How I Met Your Mother – that’s weird to think,) and that, if Raúl Esparza couldn’t win best supporting actor in a musical for Taboo, the award was safe in the hands of Michael Cerveris as John Wilkes Booth.

The musical itself is deliciously theatrical.  It’s not so much a concrete story as it is a series of vignettes that flit through time, framed in a strange sort of limbo in which notorious figures from different points in history can interact.  It opens with a vaguely sinister carnival proprietor trying to entice assorted malcontent oddballs to try their luck at a game of chance:  “Shoot a prez, win a prize!”  It’s an interesting device, giving a festive backdrop to such awful events.  And yet, we lurch with the chaotic whirl, and we see the dark undertones behind the lights.

And really, the classic Americana imagery of the carnival motif also strikes an unsettling discord with the story of these assassins, regarded as some of the least American people in U.S. history.  The show’s other main narrative device, an itinerant balladeer who spins the assassins’ tales into song, is similarly all-American.  As the assassins try to speak for themselves and get us to understand their reasoning, they get increasingly frustrated with the balladeer’s tuneful interruptions.

Much of the music combines folk with Sondheim’s usual style, and the result is an intriguing musical potpourri.  All of the ballads are catchy, clever, and all-around fantastic, especially “The Ballad of Booth.”  In it, Booth rails against the balladeer’s more cavalier version of his story and tries to explain “why [he] did it;” it’s a song with a lot of depth, one that unflinchingly examines what can cause a man to turn to unforgiveable actions.  “Unworthy of Your Love” – a duet between John Hinckley Jr. and Squeaky Fromme, respectively directed to an absent Jodie Foster and Charles Manson – is as creepy as it is audacious.  I also love “Something Just Broke,” in which a collection of ordinary citizens recall what they were doing when they heard news of a president’s death by assassin.

Not to mention, this show makes for a great history lesson.  I’d never even heard of Leon Czolgosz or Charles Guiteau before Assassins, but now I have a good understanding of all four presidential assassinations and five unsuccessful attempts.  I’ve learned more about the history behind them and interesting bits of trivia related to each one – plenty of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction moments!  I know that it doesn’t approach Sondheim’s greatest works, but I’ll always enjoy it as my first, and I’ll always appreciate it for its boldness, originality, and instructiveness. 

Warnings

Dark subject matter, violence, swearing (including one N-word,) and sexual references.

Top Five Songs: A Little Night Music

A Little Night Music has an exquisite score.  It’s meticulous, sumptuous, heartfelt, clever, and funny, and it’s one that pops up to say, “Hey, what about me?” any time I start thinking another Sondheim score is my favorite (not that I’m saying it is my favorite, just that it keeps the competition fierce.)  If I could only have five songs from this show, here’s what I’d choose.

(Pictures are from assorted productions.)

“Now” – The whole “Now / Later / Soon” sequence is fabulous, but you can’t beat Fredrik’s intro.  This fussy, pedantic number, which weighs the pros and cons of ravishing his young wife, is a riot.  It establishes Fredrik and his situation with Anne in a marvelously entertaining manner.

Best line:  “In view of her penchant / For something romantic, / De Sade is too trenchant / And Dickens too frantic, / And Stendahl would ruin / The plan of attack, / As there isn’t much blue in / ‘The Red and the Black.’”

“In Praise of Women” – Carl-Magnus might be my favorite character; this self-important, deluded philanderer is so amusing.  It’s fun to hear his mental gymnastics as he tries to quell his suspicions that his mistress is cheating on him, and I love his condescending “praise of women.”

Best line:  “God knows the foolishness about them, / But if one had to live without them, / The world would surely be a poorer, / If purer, / Place.”

“Every Day a Little Death” – Anne and Charlotte make a good team, since Anne is so naïve and Charlotte is so cynical.  I really like Anne’s wake-up call here as Charlotte opens her eyes to the reality of men, marriage, and infidelity.  The round is gorgeous, and Charlotte’s internal struggle between love and scorn is terrifically compelling.

Best line:  “He smiles sweetly, / Strokes my hair, / Says he misses me. / I would murder him right there, / But first I die.”

“Send in the Clowns” – Come on, I had to do this one!  Overexposure aside, it really is an excellent song, even more so in context.  Desiree’s quiet, wistful regret is beautifully heartbreaking, and I like the way she compares her ease onstage with her tumultuous real life.

Best line:  “Isn’t it rich? / Isn’t it queer, / Losing my timing this late / In my career? / And where are the clowns? / There ought to be clowns. / Well, maybe next year.”

“The Glamorous Life (Film Version)” – A bit of a cheat maybe, since this version isn’t in the show, but it’s so amazing that I couldn’t leave it out.  I adore everything about Fredrika’s ode to her famous mother, especially the stiff-upper-lip way she insists she’s okay with Desiree touring, gallivanting, and never being home.  The melody is so sweet and lovely, and the lyrics get me every time.

Best line:  “Ordinary mothers needn’t meet committees, / But ordinary mothers don’t get keys to cities. / No, ordinary mothers merely see their children all year, / Which is nothing – I hear. / But it does interfere / With the glamorous…”