Cecil Beaton called her “that furious lesbian.” Who? Mercedes de Acosta, that’s who.

All right children, I know you’re thinking who the hell was Cecil Beaton, for starters. Beaton (1904-1980), was best known as a fashion and portrait photographer, though his career also encompassed costume and set design, interior decorating, and creating confessional diaries of his privileged life. He won two Academy awards, for set design for “Gigi” and “My Fair Lady.”

Merdeceds de Acosta (1893-1968) was born into the “gilded” New York society of Fifth Avenue, when that street still meant something besides retail. She wrote many volumes of overwrought poetry in the 1920s, before turning to equally overwrought plays, none of which were very successful, despite having famous names attached to them.

Forced into a marriage with a man, she nevertheless continued racking up affairs with the most prominent women of the early twentieth century. A list of her lovers would have to include: Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Alla Nazimova (1879-1945, “Salome” in a silent movie), Eva Le Gallienne (1899-1991, acted in Molnar’s “Liliom” on Broadway in 1921, the play was the basis of the musical “Carousel”), Isadora Duncan, Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978, Russian ballerina in Diaghilev’s Ballets russes), Pola Negri (1897-1987, silent film siren), Katharine Cornell (1893-1974, stage actress, played Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Broadway in “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” [1931]), Ona Munson (played Belle Watling in “Gone With the Wind”), Adele Astaire (1896-1981, older sister of Fred), and Tallulah Bankhead. They were not all equally appreciative of being outed by Mercedes in her autobiography, which appeared in 1960.

So that’s a lot of estrogen-rich references to explore, but you know how historians are. We don’t want anyone to be forgotten . . .

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

Carlos Acosta

The world of classical ballet is full of arbitrary, often punishing techniques that seek to create the artistic illusion that the sylphlike females and her male partners are, for that instant at least, not subject to the laws of gravity, earthbound like the rest of us poor sobs. Of course, it is just that: only an illusion. Dancers torture themselves to find the best ways to leap and twirl in what is, for most, a brief career as a performer. Only a handful ever reach “super” ballet stardom.

Continuing my mini-theme of “bad” boys who made “good,” I’m thinking today of Carlos Acosta (b. Havana, 1973), the Afro-Cuban premier danseur of London’s Royal Ballet since age 25. He has also danced with the English National Ballet, National Ballet of Cuba, Houston Ballet, and American Ballet Theater.

Born into Castro’s Cuba, his family was poor and large with eleven children, though close. Their neighborhood was rough and he often skipped school to engage in the more kid-friendly pursuits of break dancing, stealing mangos, or just playing soccer on a big empty field.

His truckdriver father, somehow, insisted that he attend ballet lessons as a child, already unusual in the macho Latin culture. By mysterious alchemy, his natural ability was developed, he took to the athleticism of it (though with reservations), and he was recognized. His bad-boy ways did not go away immediately however, and he skipped dance classes with some of the same energy as he had the scholastic classes.

The “click” happened at a large international competition in Lausanne, Switzerland, which he won at age 17. The same year saw gold medals in Paris, Italy, and Poland. He was launched. He gained the nickname “Air Acosta” for his breathtaking and fast leaps.

In 2010, he turned to “modern dance,” which offers greater latitude technically. Recall that I said a dancer’s prime career time is tragically short. Nevertheless, there is great precedent, Baryshnikov to name just one, and he is finding new creative fulfillment in this, his 38th year, and will be winding down with the Royal Ballet in 2012.

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

Remember when “rap music” was an innovative tool of expressing frustration with urban poverty and crime? Well, some of that “protest” core remains, especially in France, where rap was adopted quickly, but not co-opted by producers and turned into a cesspool of dirty language and sexual stereotyping, as happened in the US.

Remember when Islam wasn’t demonized?

A really “bad boy” who made good is Abd al-Malik. He was born Régis Fayette-Mikano in 1975 in Paris to immigrant parents who then moved to his father’s native Congo for a few years, then returned to a ghetto outside Strasbourg. You have to see the segregation that rings many large French cities to believe it. The picturesque “old towns,” from which tourists rarely stray, are often surrounded by concrete block thickets of hideous apartment buildings (“banlieues”), giving rise to a dangerous underclass of potentially uneducated, unemployed, and restless youth.

Régis was one of those boys, raised by a single mother (his father had deserted the family), and five siblings. Nevertheless, she insisted that he attend a prestigious Catholic school in the “white” part of Strasbourg, working herself to exhaustion to provide for her children. He showed exceptional intellectual gifts that were recognized by his teachers. However, to keep pace with his peers, he often skipped class to engage in petty crimes such as mugging, car theft, drug dealing and the like.

Instead of succumbing to the drugs, or losing his life in gang violence, he discovered a thriving Islamic subculture in Strasbourg.

From his memoir:
“I lived Islam as a body of commandments that I only needed to put into practice scrupulously. My satisfaction was made all the greater when I noted everything my discipline was allowing me to escape. While we were keeping vigil, the youth at the foot of the buildings were smoking joints and knocking back one half-liter after another of 8.6—those well-known cans of Dutch beer that are 8.6 proof alcohol. These kids would drink and carry on, shouting unbelievable insanities and violently fighting among themselves when everything else had worn them out.
Most of the time the whole scene was enlivened by the squealing tires of stolen cars—a kind of background music. We, on the other hand, were certainly not large in number, but our meetings took place in an atmosphere that was serious and one of real solidarity. At that time, our ideal was to live the way Muslims had during the time of the Prophet as it was described to us in the books of piety. For us, the modern Western world, with its insipid and materialistic values, its contempt of dignity and human spirituality, constituted an aberration in history, a cancer even, that only Islam had the tools to cure.”

He converted to Islam at 16, but became at odds with the religion’s prohibition of music, as well as its sometimes violent anti-West rhetoric. He traveled to Morocco and met with a Sufi leader.

“Sufi” is a mystical dimension of Islam “beyond any one religion.” It seeks “spiritual essence” beyond words, and is something like the deepest aspect of Buddhist “Nirvana.” Malik’s personal relation with Sufi stresses the unity of all men, despite superficial differences. While developing his New African Poets group and releasing his first albums, Malik also attended university, gaining degrees in both Classics and Philosophy.

In 2004, he released a book of spiritual essays titled “May Allah Bless France,” showing his profound desire for a more compassionate world, rather than allowing himself to be turned into a tool for the more radical Islamists in the post 9/11 world.

His music defies easy categorization, including elements from blues, jazz, and slam poetry, always with a mystical and very romantic openness that seems to fly in the face of the usual “raw anger,” misogyny and homophobia we’re used to hearing in “typical” rap.

Explore his message if you dare! (Knowledge of French is helpful.)

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

It’s New Year’s Eve. What do you think of? Drinking? Hangovers? Times Square? Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians? Dick Clark? Ryan Seacrest?

I think of Bach’s little organ chorale setting from the Orgelbüchlein (Little Organ Book) “Das alte Jahr vegangen ist” (The Old Year Is Passed Away, BWV 614). With its anguished chromatics, I don’t get the sense of optimism that a new year is coming, but the heavy regret that yet one more precious “old” year has been spent and will never come again, a typically (18th c.) Lutheran preoccupation in an age of generally short lifespans and lots of illness and child mortality.

I also think of “Father Time” (representing the old year) and his sickle, somewhat like the Grim Reaper, sweeping away everything in his path. Then there’s the new-year baby in diapers crawling onto the scene, unaware of what may be in store.

Speaking of Father Time also reminds me of one of the former “mighty oak trees” of Broadway: George Abbott (1887-1995). Yes, he died at 107! And he was active until a few weeks prior to his death.

He was one of the most ubiquitous producers, directors, and book writers of the Broadway stage. There was a time when it was impossible to lack an Abbott production on Broadway. From humble New York state upbringing, and a stint at a military academy out west, he then went to Harvard, where he was bitten by the theatrical bug.

After a short, undistinguished run as an actor, he quickly became known as a “show doctor,” the person who tinkers with a show that is having a rocky out-of-NYC tryout somewhere before being brought to Broadway. Today, the out-of-town tryout is a dying breed, though I think it should really be reinstated, before they spend millions to mount something on Broadway only to have it flop.

A short list of Abbott productions (either as producer, director, or book writer, sometimes all three) would include these iconic shows, and this is only a fraction:

“On Your Toes” (1936), “The Boys From Syracuse” (1938), “Pal Joey” (1940), “On the Town” (1944), “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1951), “Wonderful Town” (1953), “The Pajama Game” (1954). “Damn Yankees” (1955), “Once Upon a Mattress” (1959), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962), and “Flora, the Red Menace” (1965).

So, check out one of Abbott’s “children,” and have a healthy new year!

© 2011 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

I downloaded Schiller’s (1759-1805) play “Don Carlos” (1787) and didn’t make it through Act 1. And I consider myself a sophisticated reader, fond of antiquities.

Hmm, antiquities and “download” don’t really belong in the same sentence.

Thank goodness for Verdi and his librettists (Méry and du Locle for the original French version, 1867). They “solve” the issue with abbreviation, and of course the stirring music.

The historical play, loosely based on the real Don Carlos of Spain (1545-1568), was set to music four times in the 19th century before Verdi. Schiller himself based his play on an earlier (17th c.) French novel.

Poor old Carlos, son of King Phillip II, was an epileptic, and probably what we would call “neurotic” as well. Yes, he died at age 23. It’s a soap opera without soap. Phil’s wife, Elisabeth de Valois, was Carlos’ fiancée originally. Then there’s Princess Eboli, in love with DC.

Everything about the Verdi opera is fluid, from the massive reworking(s) he gave it over a twenty year period, translating it into Italian. You can never see a real “authentic” Don Carlos, only someone’s version of it.

The arias and ensembles are grand, some of Verdi’s most complex. Favorite themes of masquerade and betrayal, along with political ideals, fuel the drama.

I remember Delora Zajic planting her big tree trunk legs in the stage of the Met and singing Eboli with the furious intensity and big sound that Verdians thrill to, even if her acting was less than subtle.

As DC says: “Those who watch men’s looks and carry tales about, have done more mischief in this world of ours than the assassin’s knife or poisoned bowl.” Take that TMZ.

© 2011 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs