(derekbaker)

...As Sara Jane Moore Might Say

Okay, Stephen Sondheim isn't retiring, at least he hasn't announced that he is. After all, there's at least one more book rewrite and another title left in Wise Guys/Bounce/Road Show alone, I'd say.

But if you're going to mark your 80th year -- and if you have pretty much indicated that, at this point, there'd be so much pressure for your next work to be such a hit out of the park that it basically dooms it from the start -- you could do worse than to do it the way it's been done this year. And since he composed so many of our favorite Broadway musicals (well, all of Tom's and almost all of mine, with a nostalgic detour for Meredith Willson and Rodgers & Hammerstein thrown in there by me), we decided to celebrate his birthday this year, too. Actually, if you were buying tickets to shows this year, it was kind of hard to avoid it.

First, in January, I think, we saw the revival of A Little Night Music, starring Angela Lansbury, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Alex Hanson, which we both said at the time was one of the most satisfying shows we'd seen in a few seasons. More recently, we saw the City Center "Encores" concert staging of Anyone Can Whistle. That assertion remains to be seen, but Raul Esparza and Sutton Foster sure knew how to put their lips together and sing. (Okay, enough with the heyday review-speak, right? Sorry.)

In there somewhere, we saw the Michael Feinstein/Dame Edna warring-but-costarring vehicle (sorry, I'm doing it again) All About Me. Dame Edna declared it a "Sondheim-free zone," given all else that's going on in town this year, but she nonetheless did a pretty well acted rendition of "Ladies Who Lunch" as one of her musical contributions to the show. (And if anyone still wears a hat, it's Dame Edna. And probably Michael Feinstein, actually. She's wearing some fantastic Ascot-worthy number; he's in a Homburg. Personally, I found it a fun show, but some people thought it a waste of time. I'd say they were people who didn't particularly like one or the other performers already, so they wouldn't like this. Whereas if you'd enjoyed both of them, singly, as we had, then you were more likely to feel it was a kind of party with some of your favorite people.)

Tonight was #3 (if you don't count Michael & the Dame) in our Year of Sondheim, and probably the big one for us of the year: City Center's One-Night-Only Benefit Gala in Celebration of Stephen Sondheim. We were led to believe that the hefty ticket price went toward the City Center refurbishment (this is the theater on West 55th St. just west of Sixth Avenue; home of the "Encores" series, but also a pretty serious dance performance venue, I understand, plus some other major productions and performance institutions in this town.)

This was a gift from "me" to "us" for Christmas, and it was a gift tonight as well. It was hosted by John Doyle, who has recently immersed himself as a director of Sondheim's works (Road Show) and the most recent revivals (Sweeney Todd and Company), and Mia Farrow, whose only claim to being onstage (besides being famous) is an apparently lifelong friendship with Stephen Sondheim. Thanks to her commentary in particular, he will henceforth in this post be referred to merely as "Steve."

The two of them did a great job, making their jobs as co-narrators for the evening feel both heartfelt AND rehearsed, which is a nice combination. And along with singers on the stage (we were led to believe, at least, and it was a benefit for City Center, after all), they donated their time for this performance. And it was a pretty fantastic -- nearly fantastical -- list of performers, I have to say.

Not in order of appearance, but giving prominence to the artists already mentioned above: Lansbury ("Liaisons"), Zeta-Jones ("You Must Meet My Wife" with Hanson and Len Cariou, who himself first appeared onstage in a trio of "Pretty Women" with Michael Cerveris and Mark Jacoby; later Zeta-Jones sang "Send in the Clowns"), Raul Esparza ("Being Alive," which was probably the best number of the night; he also had a lead part in the closing number), and Foster ("Anyone Can Whistle"). Along the way: Debra Monk reprising her darkly hilarious role as Sara Jane Moore in Assassins, and Joanna Gleason (looking not a day older) reprising her post-prince song "Moments in the Woods." As well as, not in order, but as they come back to mind: Donna Murphy (whom we saw most recently in Anyone Can Whistle as Mayoress Cora Hoover Hooper) reprising two of her heartbreaking songs from Passion; Chip Zien in a reunion with the original Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack from Into the Woods singing "No One Is Alone"; Nathan Lane using a combined Frogs "Prologue" and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum's "Comedy Tonight" as a jumping off point to do a send-up of Sondheim, although not without poking fun at John Doyle first (he walked onstage and started by trying to play the tuba and cello simultaneously; the cello was eventually destroyed in the process); B.D. Wong (with others) for "Someone In a Tree" from Pacific Overtures; and Maria Friedman, who from what I can gather is basically the West End's Sondheim answer to Bernadette Peters or Donna Murphy and who sang at least two solos and had a featured part in the final song from Merrily We Roll Along, "Our Time." (Her solos were "Children and Art," from Sunday in the Park with George, and "Broadway Baby" from Follies.)

Actually, Alexander Gemignani deserves special mention too, because not only did he perform with Michael Cerveris in the first number, in a duet between the two brothers in Bounce/Road Show, he also had a role in the Pacific Overtures number, carried Joanna Gleason onstage for her number (being a prince, you see); and was part of one other number that escapes me at the moment. No solos, I think, but still managed to be on stage a good amount of time.

The lesser-known, shorter-run shows got the bigger applause, as each person in the audience was obviously there to fly their Sondheim geek flag.

And that's all more (unless you are a die-hard Sondheim geek) than you care to know, I'm sure, and someone somewhere has probably already blogged far more complete and far more accurate details than I just have, if you really are that big of a fan. But we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly and when Mia Farrow brought him out on stage to a the audience's thunderous ovation, Steve seemed to have enjoyed himself too.

If he noticed that Len Cariou's voice wasn't what it used to be -- and of course he noticed, he always notices -- he didn't seem to mind. For that matter, Sondheim wrote some of his best songs for roles where the person doesn't necessarily have a great singing voice: for singing actors (as in musical theater) far more than for acting singers (as in opera), in other words.

Mia Farrow said, in her introduction, that Steve once gave one of her daughters, his goddaughter (don't ask; I have no idea how a Christian baptism with a Jewish godfather works, if that's actually what she meant; just go with it), a thesaurus as a present when she was four or five. I wish I had a good one right here in front of me to find a way to say just how much fun this evening was for Tom and me.

We still have an appointment for one more night of Sondheim, Sondheim on Sondheim. There will probably be some overlap with some of the songs we heard tonight (at least we hope there is: as good as Sutton Foster's was, Tom Wopat's version of "Anyone Can Whistle" is the best either of us have heard), but that's okay. If we're going to saturate on Sondheim it, this would be the year. We likely won't get another.

"Just remembering you've had an 'and'
When you're back to 'or'
Makes the 'or' mean more
Than it did before."

Labels: Broadway, music, New York, theater

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Further Evidence that the GOP Isn't What It Says It Is

A discussion with friends about how much a particular state has paid into the federal highway fund and gotten back from it (Oklahoma, which over the past 50 years has gotten back only 91¢ for every $1 it paid into the fund) made me start to wonder how the states' Congressional delegations compare with how they feed at the overall federal trough. (The "good" news for Oklahoma: federal highway spending aside, the state get $1.36 in federal spending for every $1 it pays in taxes, ranking it 15th. And it should be noted that 85 percent of Oklahoma's Congressional delegation are Republicans.)

These facts come from the Tax Foundation's annual reports and are for FY2005, the last full year they've analyzed as of this post.

So time for a quick red/blue analysis of the top 10 and the bottom 10 states that are feeding at the pork trough. (I should hasten to point out here that, "bridges to nowhere" notwithstanding, I'm not connecting the earlier discussion of highway construction and maintenance to pork — infrastructure is something we actually should be investing in in this country. But as it isn't possible to separate the fat from the lean in the federal budget, thanks to earmarks, this is just a look at federal spending per state overall, with the assumption that some major part of that is pork barrel politics rather than needed investment.

States' Federal Spending to Taxes Paid; Congressional Delegations
Rank	State	Fed Spend/$1 in Fed Taxes Paid		# Cong D's	# Cong R's	% Republican
1	New Mexico	$2.03		2	3	60%
2	Mississippi	$2.02		2	4	67%
3	Alaska	$1.84		0	3	100%
4	Louisiana	$1.78		3	6	67%
5	West Virginia	$1.76		4	1	20%
6	North Dakota	$1.68		3	0	0%
7	Alabama	$1.66		2	7	78%
8	South Dakota	$1.53		2	1	33%
9	Kentucky	$1.51		2	6	75%
10	Virginia	$1.51		4	9	69%
$Avg | Total		$1.73		24	40	63%
41	Colorado	$0.81		5	4	44%
42	New York	$0.79		25	6	19%
43	California	$0.78		36	19	35%
44	Delaware	$0.77		2	1	33%
45	Illinois	$0.75		13	8	38%
46	Minnesota	$0.72		62	4	40%
47	New Hampshire	$0.71		2	2	50%
48	Connecticut	$0.69		6	1	14%
49	Nevada	$0.65		2	3	60%
50	New Jersey	$0.61		9	6	40%
$Avg | Total		$0.73		106	54	34%

I know it's not so cut and dried as simple party affiliation: the top 10 states include West Virginia (thanks to Robert Byrd), with a delegation that is only 20% Republican, and North Dakota, which has no Republicans in Congress at the moment. And the District of Columbia isn't even among the rankings (at $5.55/$1), for obvious reasons, given where the federal government is itself encamped, and without any voting delegation in Congress. But by taking both the top 10 and bottom 10 as a group, as shown above, it does seem to further belie the claim that the GOP is the party in favor of "fiscal responsibility" and against "the redistribution of wealth."

(My previous red/blue analysis from past election years here and here.)

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Spring in Manhattan. Yes, Manhattan, New York.

Spring has hit New York City with a happy vengeance. Here's the view from my apartment as of last Thursday, compared with that same view today:

April 17, 2008	April 23, 2008

The early blooms (including the cherry trees and tulips) were already in full force last Thursday around sunset. Here's a further look at my corner of Manhattan in springtime.

Labels: Inwood, New York, politics

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Odd Sights in Inwood

A break from the political blathering to mention something I saw tonight on my way to the grocery store: a subway train, rolling up Broadway. And not on an elevated track (which we have up here) or somesuch. It went by pretty fast, and I was actually a block away, looking east toward Broadway, but I was able to see that it was actually on the back of a (large) flatbed truck, followed by another truck with what was probably a "wide load" sign.

Considering that there are train yards just east of Broadway way up here on the northern end of Manhattan, where they do repairs and such, it isn't the most surprising thing, but I hadn't seen a subway car rolling up the street before and I know I did a classic double-take. I wish I'd had a camera or cellphone camera to take a picture to show you. Trust me: it was the New York equivalent of seeing a jetliner being hauled up a highway — not that most people have seen that, either, I realize.

Labels: Inwood, New York, personal

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9/11 Fatigues

In my neighborhood, a group of locals created a memorial here in Inwood to the fallen of 9/11. In one of the large parks nearby, they commandeered a soccer field to plant 3,000 American flags in formation, to recognize the approximate number of victims on that day five years ago. I went down there just before the sun set on Thursday to get some pictures, and again just now.




It's impressive and touching in many ways: all those flags, hanging silently on their poles, standing in memory of a person who went to work or got on a plane that day and didn't come home.



Even from a distance however you can see that something seems wrong with these flags. As you get closer you realize that each one has a white strip, maybe 12 inches high, along the bottom, which in aggregate makes the field seem far more white than red or blue. Getting even closer, you can see that the white strip has printing on it.



On most of the flags, it says:



And, sure enough, on the white and red stripes are printed all the names known, as of this day three years ago, of those who died that day.



The flags around the perimeter of the field are Flag of Heroes™ flags. Using only the red stripes, these list the emergency service personnel who responded that day and, when the buildings collapsed, died trying to save a few more lives beyond the 15,000 they had already saved that morning.

Not everyone who died that morning was an American, of course. Being New York, there are bound to be citizens of just about any country affected by anything on a large scale that happens here, and this was one of the largest. So to the side of this field of flags they have placed the flags representing the countries who lost citizens on 9/11.



I understand and appreciate the impulse behind this field of flags. So it probably seems catty to say I think this memorial would have been a stronger statement if they'd just used actual flags, without the printing, especially the printing below the flag itself. And it sounds churlish to point out that, even if it's the names of victims of these attacks, there are generally no exceptions made for defacing an American flag.



But I can't deny the very real motivation that drove people to plant these flags. So it's not exactly the way I would have done it. Maybe my armchair stage-managing such an event is a worse motivation than their honest attempt.



At 8:46 a.m. five years ago, I was in a rental car, driving into the front entrance of my company's corporate headquarters in Westchester County. As I walked into the third floor for my 9 a.m. meeting, I noticed several of the executives who had TVs on their desks were watching something happening on the news. As we sat down in the conference room, someone came in to the meeting and said that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. From the way they said it, we figured it was a small twin-engine plane.

At 9:03 a.m. five years ago, the meeting was just getting underway. Someone else came in to say that a second plane had hit the other tower. I suppose because we still had no idea that these were major jetliners and not just some small prop planes, we continued with the first item on our agenda, whatever it was.

At 9:37 a.m. five years ago, I was in a meeting, wondering why two planes had hit the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, someone came in to tell us that yet another plane had crashed into the Pentagon. At which point the person chairing the meeting said that we had more important things to worry about, obviously, than whatever we had been discussing before that. It was hearing the Pentagon was hit that I remember going from "I wonder why two planes would hit the World Trade Center within minutes of each other" to the cold realization that the country was under attack. Everyone had that moment on that day at some point -- probably earlier if you were watching TV rather than hearing about it second hand. For me the realization came about 9:40 a.m.

At 9:59 a.m. five years ago, I think I was watching CNN on one of the TVs in the conference room when the South Tower fell. Or else I was already out in the cubicle area, crowded around a smaller TV on someone's desk. At some point that morning, I called my parents to tell them that I was okay, not even in the city that morning, safely in Armonk.

Around 10:06 a.m., when Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, I was probably trying to leave a message for my mother at the school -- my alma mater middle school -- where she taught, so that when she heard about the attacks in New York, she'd also hear that I was okay.

During all of this, the television was reporting rumors that an explosion had occurred at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, that the Sears Tower had been hit, and other such things that hadn't happened.

At 10:28 a.m., I think I was sitting in the conference room again. I've seen the footage so many times -- saw it nearly 100 times that day alone, I'm sure -- I can't remember if I saw the North Tower collapse when it happened or not.

Many of us there in the office that day -- including Tom and me -- lived in Manhattan, but everyone was probably equally stunned. Tom even lived across the street and one block south of the New York Stock Exchange at the time, and I remember for a long time he had no idea whether or not his building and any of the other buildings in the blocks around the Trade Center were still standing.

Since all of us in the conference room were part of the company's communications staff, we had work to do immediately. Over the next few days, we learned that we had lost two employees that day -- one on a flight, another at the World Trade Center for a meeting. I was editor of the intranet at that time, so I had several updates to make that day and other questions to field from various areas.

In one of the only moments of grim levity I remember that day, someone fielded a question from the site operation for a local office in, I think, North Carolina. Or maybe it was Minnesota. Or somewhere else. Driven by that very human and very admirable motive to help, to do something, anything, they wanted to know -- perhaps around noon or a little after -- if they should be flying their flags at half-mast. We all looked at each other in confusion and disbelief that that was what someone was worried about, when finally someone said, "Tell them to look out the window to see what the post office is doing, and follow their lead."

Not very funny, I admit, but there wasn't much funny that day. Tom and I ended up staying at a friend's apartment in Westchester that evening, since all the bridges and tunnels back into the city were closed. (Our friend was stuck in Dallas, because his flight home had been canceled along with every other flight in the country, but another friend of his had a key to his apartment, which we were able to retrieve.)

That's some of what I remember about 9/11 -- before "today" became known as "9/11" or the "World Trade Center" was called "Ground Zero."

It's inevitable, of course. We experience tragedy and we remember and memorialize it in human ways -- emotionally, greedily, hopefully, fearfully, spiritually, mawkishly. We may even be driven to war by the memory.

The site of the World Trade Center is a burial ground. Ground Zero, however, is the first of many battlefields.

As a burial ground, it continues to keen loudly in this town and will probably do so at least until new buildings and grassy berms are allowed to scab over that wound.

But as a battleground, it demands satisfaction, however unsatisfactory it feels, and even if that leads us into countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 and between factions not represented here on that day.



The tragedy represented by those 3,000 flags didn't end that day. The death toll on 9/11 was, officially, set at 2,973. As of today, however, the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan and Iraq has grown to 2,999. How many of those had to die to rout the Taliban from Afghanistan, to eliminate al Qaeda and capture Osama bin Laden? And -- because we've obviously been sidetracked from that mission -- how many didn't?

I went back down to look at those flags again a few hours ago. The weather today was, yes, exactly like that day five years ago. But seeing that field again made me wonder just who those flags stand for now.

Labels: history, Inwood, New York, personal

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