The Great American Songbook: "Blowin' in the Wind"

Written by: Bob Dylan

First recorded by: Bob Dylan, 1963

"Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won't believe that. I still say it's in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it's got to come down some." That's how Bob Dylan described his folksy protest anthem "Blowin' in the Wind" in 1962. With his ragged voice and acoustic guitar, he laid it down on record the next year.

Like most rock-and-roll standards that rack up hundreds of covers (see The Beatles' "Yesterday"), this song rode on ideologies sweeping the nation but remained general, vague, poetic. If the answer is in the wind, does that mean it will float down to us someday? And will the wind ever let up? The words are political, but against mass death and suffering, not a harangue against the establishment. Addressing "my friend" calms the existential nature of Dylan's questions:

How many roads must a man walk down

Before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail

Before she sleeps in the sand?

Yes, how many times must the cannonballs fly

Before they're forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

The answer is blowin' in the wind.

In the spirit of community, a song isn't a true standard until another cover hits it big. Sunny-eyed folk singers Peter, Paul and Mary released their version in 1963, just after Dylan's, and the single hit #2 on the Billboard chart instantly. Many genres have adopted Dylan's lament, from country (Chet Atkins, Dolly Parton) to jazz (Duke Ellington); chanteuse Marlene Dietrich even performed the song in German. Stevie Wonder's blues rendition charted in 1966.

"Blowin' in the Wind" kicked off Dylan's second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and solidified his strengths as a songwriter. Was this (with its "white dove" reference) a plea for civil rights? Was he criticizing American foreign policy? And was he lamenting or singing of hope? There are just three verses, no harmonic or melodic change, with some harmonica filler. We can question the meaning all we want. The song, disconsolate yet inspirited, continues a tradition of standards that have lasted through the art and politics of the last century.

One Is the Loneliest Number

Review: A Single Man

British writer Christopher Isherwood, known best for The Berlin Stories that spawned the stage and film musical Cabaret, was one of the first authors to take up the gay liberation movement of the 1960s. His 1964 novel A Single Man was largely autobiographical, chronicling one day in the life of a British professor in California. The invented George Falconer, however, mourns the death of his longtime partner, while Isherwood remained with his partner until he died much later.

Fashion designer-turned-director Tom Ford floods the novel with fluid sound and imagery, carefully sculpted cinematography, and meticulous period detail. His directorial hand is omnipresent but never tacky or kitsch. His images cascade across the screen like the waters that George floats in, echoing how he sinks further into grief. It's easy to take a film like this at surface value. Colin Firth seems to play that Englishman we've seen before; yet his lack of showiness allows us to see the restless aching underneath. He appears sedate, but early on intimates that that he plans to commit suicide that night.

One feels Mad Men-inspired sixties-mania on display (aided by Jon Hamm's voiceover cameo). And the undulating music and delicate lyricism owe homage to The Hours, not to mention Julianne Moore's participation. Even she resists playing up the camp side of George's close friend Charley, who cloaks her anguish in stingers and swing. As a single woman, she tries to hide her feelings for George as much as he hides how he's lost his will to live. Ford's film feeds off the retro craze but foregrounds the alienation at its core with honesty and familiarity.

Survival of the Dumbest 3

A column of ideas we should not adopt, for our national sanity.

Whitewashing - The Second Time
Try to judge the protagonist's race based on this cover for Liar. African-American likely wasn't your first instinct, yet that's the real answer for Justine Larbalestier's heroine. The problem, as is evident, is that the cover Bloomsbury first printed last summer was faithful to the title of book but not to its racial integrity. To play devil's advocate: there are light-skinned black women, and the model to your left could very well be one.

But we're talking about marketing a novel. The cover is the only image, the only "logo" or representation most see of a book. If a girl's face is our only visual, it should be spelled out so that we don't have to question or second-guess it. The karmic touch is how shrouded the girl is, as if she's hiding something beneath her hair; and beneath the cover, readers might be surprised to learn about the (forgive the expression) white elephant in the room. It's not as if, in the digital age, nobody would notice the disjunction and set off blogging about it.

Fine. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice?

Bloomsbury just retracted their cover to Magic Under Glass. Jaclyn Dolamore has also written a novel with an African-American girl as the lead, but you'd have no idea from the cover. From my view, this one is even more deceptive in appearance than the first. Clearly it's not a metaphorical image or even a complex intellectual deconstruction of race: it's just bad marketing. And why would Bloomsbury repeat their blatantly un-PC mistake six months later?

On one hand, why waste space criticizing a cover that screams "Harlequin bodice ripper"? But on the other, this can't be a mistake. The marketing staff at the publisher must have known they were intentionally misrepresenting the book. Did they hold a conversation in which it was decided that white women are more market-friendly? Oprah and Tyler Perry would disagree.

We've all seen misleading movie trailers. Book jacket synopses that barely allude to the plot. But a cover is part of the reading experience: a marketing poster but also genuine iconography for a work's themes or characters. Even beyond racial sensitivity, to think the readers won't notice the incongruity reeks more of smoke and mirrors than magic.

"I don't have anybody to thank."

The 2010 Golden Globes opened in rain and ended with James Cameron saying he no longer needed to urinate. So goes the cycle of movie awards season. Last night's Globes ceremony repeatedly, emphatically pointed out how superfluous the whole shendig can be. First piece of evidence: Robert Downey Jr. was nominated for being Robert Downey Jr. Second piece of evidence: Robert Downey Jr. won. (They will carve something like Sherlock Holmes* on his trophy, but it's really more of a career retrospective. A welcome back into the fold.)

But his undeserved win was almost justified by a witty acceptance speech that took down everybody else's gratuitous shoutouts: "They needed me. Avatar was going to take us to the cleaners. If they didn't have me, they didn't have a shot, buddy." Michael Stuhlbarg still should have won for a turn both desperate and good-humored in A Serious Man. But he's a theater actor, and long-overdue Hollywood veterans get dibs on these things.

At least Stuhlbarg was noticed. A Serious Man, judging by his nomination, was eligible as a comedy. Tough category, I suppose: how could a modest Coen brothers film best masterworks like It's Complicated**, Julie & Julia, and Nine?

Beyond the deserving Mad Men and Alec Baldwin, the TV awards shook things up. Great to see Michael C. Hall (Dexter) and Chloe Sevigny (Big Love) finally recognized. John Lithgow's creepy turn on Dexter slashed Jeremy Piven's reign. Tina Fey, always wonderful but feted many nights already, was allowed to sit back and swill champagne while Toni Collette and Glee swept in. I'm sure she didn't take the awards seriously. Nobody else did.


*Sherlock Holmes in brief: Jude Law's swell. Guy Ritchie values intellect only if it's visceral. He casts Rachel McAdams (comely, banal) so we don't confuse Law and Downey's kinship for something more. He's a man's man, my dear Watson... but not like that.

**It's Complicated in brief: How novel: a rom-com with two equally matched contenders! Will Meryl Streep choose gleeful Alec Baldwin or gentle Steve Martin? Crackerjack cast (especially John Krasinski) makes most of Nancy Meyers' character sketches, plus her home decor and croissant fetishes.


One more thing: Are the Vulture copyeditors serious today? I quote from their site: "There's an obvious explanation for this: the amazing Rickey Gervais. We'd like to thanks, everyone, for not making us look like idiots." Too late for that, folks.

Something Sort of Grandish

Review: Finian's Rainbow
St. James Theatre, New York
January 6, 2010

Leprechauns! Pots o' gold! Sudden romance! Then, on the turn of a dime... credit crisis and deep-seeded racism? With one of the most inventive, stylistically diverse, fanciful scores written for the theater, the 1947 musical Finian's Rainbow is an old devil indeed. It's a strikingly curious work, swooning one moment and satirical the next.

A run-of-the-mill forties chorus opens the show, harmonizing about mortgage, but before we can catch up, the sweet-and-sour melody of "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" unwinds. Bewitched are we by the pixieish whimsy of this half-Irish fable, but bothered and bewildered soon follow. By the end of act one, an Irish lass whose father has hidden a magic pot of gold in the poor Southern county of Missitucky wishes a bigoted white senator to turn black. When Shears and Roebust (the satire is never hard to identify) are alerted to gold in their land, the town goes shopping, naively believing in the power of credit.

The pleasures of songwriters Burton Lane and Yip Harburg, famous for The Wizard of Oz's songs, are too great to portend anything but a happy ending. Lovers are united; racism and poverty overcome! It's to the credit of director Warren Carlyle that the current staging stays simple, finding the delicate tinge of sadness within the fantasy. For what is a rainbow without rain?

Out of a uniformly excellent cast, Jim Norton and Kate Baldwin as immigrant Finian McLonergan and daughter Sharon contribute most to the gentle wistful spirit. After years playing Irish drama, Norton is down-to-earth yet light as air, a permanent twinkle in his eye like a septuagenarian cherub. The sweet and spirited Baldwin sings "Glocca Morra" as naturally as breathing, then becomes more vivacious in her duet "Something Sort of Grandish" with the leprechaun Og. As played by Christopher Fitzgerald, the increasingly mortal Og is as human as the rest (but still as eccentric as his environment). Eyes agog, spring in his step, Fitzgerald lands the comedy with frequent subtlety.

The full ensemble, especially Terri White in one socko gospel spot, prospers vocally, with no small thanks to an orchestra of twenty-seven. Rumors circled these past weeks that Andrew Lloyd Webber, of all people, would finance this fine revival to relocate to a smaller theater in the spring. Alas, fleeting whimsy; their run ends this Sunday. How apt for the show's final moment: Finian, with his pot of gold turned to dross, ventures off toward another valley, to the hill beyond yon hill. He leaves their world all the better for having known him. May we all meet again in Glocca Morra one fine day.

"Liaisons... What's Happened to Them?"

Review: A Little Night Music
Walter Kerr Theatre, New York
January 6, 2010

"Of course the summer night smiles. Three times... At the follies of human beings, of course." So Madame Armfeldt says as Trevor Nunn's minimized A Little Night Music opens, which winks more than usual at Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. During the evening, touring actress Desiree (Catherine Zeta-Jones) reunites with her old lover, Fredrik (Alexander Hanson), married to the younger Anne, but must fend off her military dragoon Count Carl-Magnus (Aaron Lazar) first. The farcical exchange of partners feels grounded here; the fates are watching, much like the summer night. A ghostly vocal quintet--Nunn's best touch--is wise to the cast's frivolities, for these five appear to have also dabbled in love and lust.

Oh, isn't it rich? Well, not entirely. While Nunn's scaled-back staging draws out the tragedy simmering beneath the effervescent comedy, the orchestra of eight (reduced from twenty-seven) sacrifices grandeur. Stephen Sondheim's endlessly witty score deserves swells of sweeping swings, in its permutations of the "Night Waltz" and full-cast chorales like "A Weekend in the Country."

Where's passion in the art? Mme. Armfeldt would ask. And what of the cast? "The first smile," she relates, "smiles at the young, who know nothing." Indeed, the three youngest characters (putupon Henrik, virginal Anne, and the sensual maid Petra) offer unsophisticated characterizations. The second smile is more promising: "at the fools who know too little." Lazar dials down the Count's pomposity (and uses his tenor to great advantage). Erin Davie surprises with a more emotional take on bedraggled wife Charlotte: bruised by the charade, but still clinging to her piquant exterior. Hanson, meanwhile, is a charming, sturdy Fredrik prone to laughing it all off.

But even his mask falls during the show's hit, "Send in the Clowns." Zeta-Jones is radiant and luminous as Desiree until then, though she pushes hard on brittle one-liners. When she arrives at "Clowns," she sheds the theatrics and delivers the song with beautiful understatement.

The night's third smile is for "the old who know too much": Angela Lansbury, now 84 years old, who lords over the production. In her scenes as Mme. Armfeldt, she is arch and deliberate; in her song "Liaisons," suddenly warm, wise, and even giddy to be gifted "a tiny Titian" from an ancient affair with a duke. She's not what one expects of the wry, weary matriarch, but more than the rest, she gets Sondheim and the interplay of artifice and pathos. Send in the pros.

Bali Ha'i May Call You

Review: South Pacific
Vivian Beaumont Theater, New York
January 5, 2010

Evening after evening at Lincoln Center, the sensuous revival of South Pacific whispers, as if on the winds of the seas, here am I, a wartime story relevant as ever. Americans still fight on foreign shores, we are still carefully taught to hate whom our relatives hate, and some even meet strangers across crowded rooms. South Pacific in its present incarnation (from 2008) is no stranger; director Bartlett Sher has taken a sensitive and grounded look at a familiar chestnut.


There are surprises still. Sher has reintroduced dialogue into many scenes, and the song "My Girl Back Home." Nurse Nellie Forbush, weaned on Little Rock prejudices of the forties, now explicitly refers to Emile de Becque's Polynesian lover as "colored." Racial politics emerge even in the lighthearted "There Is Nothin' Like a Dame," where black marines stand to the side, isolated from their white counterparts.

I can't remember a more detailed physical production that I've seen. The World War II-period costumes, the lighting that shifts from golden sunbeams to mysterious and foreboding slats of light peeking through windows. Lincoln Center's wisest move was to faithfully recreate the original orchestrations with a thirty-piece orchestra, who are given their due during the overture and entr'acte.

When I saw South Pacific in July 2008, Kelli O'Hara gave a sweet performance as a forthright Nellie, less rambunctious than Mary Martin and more womanly than the girlish Mitzi Gaynor in the film. Laura Osnes, who has assumed the role, follows O'Hara closely, but her youthful appearance returns the Nellie-Emile relationship to its original May-December romance. Her Nellie is more of a knucklehead and so innocent she shouldn't need to wash anything out of her hair.

Loretta Ables Sayre and Danny Burstein continue to impress almost two years later. Sayre's Bloody Mary is wry and somewhat dangerous; she's not the typical comic caricature, especially as she spins eerie tales of "Bali Ha'i." Burstein plays Luther Billis like the descendent of Bert Lahr: a lion finding his nerve. Andrew Samonsky, alas, gives a darker spin on Lt. Cable to ill effect. In an odd musical lapse, his "Younger Than Springtime" has too rushed a tempo to allow him true fervor.

The ace up this show's sleeve is Paulo Szot, who has won considerable acclaim and awards for his Emile. Younger than most, his Emile is virile and impassioned but also playful. He only indulges in full-out operatic song at key moments; "This Nearly Was Mine" builds from an almost hushed, rueful lament to an all-out cry for the "promise of paradise." Thanks to a few wonderful performances and a team that trusts the material, this revival fulfills that promise.