Load In/Load Out: Goodbye To Anna & The City Opera

I like living near BAM. On Sunday afternoon walks, I sometimes pass the Opera House or Harvey Theater when the stage doors are open, giving me a peek backstage during load-in or load-out. I relish any glimpse behind the curtain, at the great wide spaces that remind me of a bare factory floor, a theatrical Vehicle Assembly Building where absolutely anything can be created. Seen from Hanson Place, the backstage of the Opera House is cavernous, and to watch a few dozen stagehands hustle crate after crate off of two or three or four semi-trailers is to be awed by the work that goes into filling that stage. "We've got a budget," says BAM, "and we're going to use it."

There's great promise in a load-in. Watching load-out can be bittersweet, or just plain heartbreaking, as with the day I saw Santo Loquasto's beautiful scenery for The Master Builder  tossed into a dumpster on Ashland, the steeple that figures in the play's climax poking out of a pile of garbage. But that's theater. When a run is finished, it's over—the scenery discarded or repurposed, the space adapted for some other story. It's a cycle of renewal, and even when it's bittersweet, it is a happy thing.

This is different from some of the other bits of entertainment with which I fill my days. When I passed BAM yesterday, I was on my way home from the last Mets game of the season, wallowing in the particular anguish that comes with the close of the regular season. Baseball is a simple pleasure, endlessly available from April through October, but like all seasonal joys, we lose it suddenly and violently. The last day of the regular season is painful in the way that summer's last beach day, trip to the park, or icy mint julep can be. They are simple pleasures, but the close of the season is a reminder that one day we will get our last sunburn, fly our last kite, and watch our last ballgame. Remembering that is no fun at all.

Theater is not a simple pleasure. It is maddening, overpriced, doomed and pretentious. But it also offers something rare—that sense of panic that comes when a good play is ending, as we try to keep our eyes wide open, to take in as much of the scene as possible, knowing that we will never be able to see it again. (I plan to die the same way.) That straining desperation is a form of the sublime, and the sublime is nothing to sneeze at. 

On a sunny afternoon a few weeks ago, I passed the Opera House and saw a truck full of what appeared to be pink Lincoln Logs. "Ooh," I thought. "That must be for Anna Nicole ." I'd been waiting for the well-reviewed British opera to land in New York for over a year, and the sight of all that pink, sturdy-looking wood took my anticipation up another notch. "What could it be?" I wondered. "Does it all fit together to make a pink, uncomfortably ribbed sofa?" (That this was my best guess shows that I don't have much of a nose for set design.)  

When the curtain rose on the performance of Anna  I saw, it turned out that the Lincoln Logs formed the backdrop—a kind of pink log cabin wall meant to establish Anna's humble origins. And though the opera disappointed me bitterly—in the way that simpler pleasures never can—I'm glad I got to experience those months of anticipation, and the thrill I felt at seeing the set stacked up outside. I didn't know what it was, but I knew those logs were the raw ingredients for something magical. That's a cool thing to feel sure of, even when you turn out wrong.

Yesterday, as I tried to hold on to the fading flavor of another season of meaningless baseball, I saw Anna  being dismantled. What had come in with such promise was being taken away in disappointment. The logs had reverted to logs. After just a handful of performances, the show was over, and there could be no promise of rebirth. The Opera House stage will be filled again, but the City Opera is likely on its way out. That it died a shell of itself—staging an abbreviated season of half-baked British opera, begging on Kickstarter and performing far from its original home—does not make this collapse any more sad.

I was musing on the metaphorical death of summer, of baseball, of the pathetic Mets and their pathetic 2013, when I passed a real death on Hanson Place, and saw the body being dragged to the curb. 

The Half-Baked Spring Preview You've Been Waiting For

There are plenty of awful things about January, but it's not all bad. As we stagger across the hellish waste that is the first month of 2013, there are plenty of things to look forward to. More specifically, there are four.

Once, summer was dead. Heat choked New York City, forcing culture-consuming citizens to flee boiling theaters for polo grounds of the Hamptons or the sideshows of Coney Island. Even after air conditioning made culture possible year-round, the arts have never really given up the summer break. Opera is strictly a cold-weather pursuit. Almost no Broadway plays dare risk a July opening. Until cable TV upended the schedule, summertime on the tube meant reruns, game shows and more reruns. Even film, which feasts on summertime, follows its own nine month schedule, with January, February and March serving as the dead period.

There is something reassuring about all this. How nice it is, at season’s end, to look back over the last nine months and remember when it all began. To rank your favorites, to remember the worst of the bunch, to mourn those plays or television shows that closed before their time. But even better is to be where we are now—in the middle of it all. The holidays, thank God, are behind us, and the next great wave of new stuff is about to hit. We have new plays, new operas, new TV shows, and the worst movies we will see until August. Some of it will be worth remembering—most of it will be trash. In either case, this is what I’m looking forward to loving or hating, across four formats—because in 2013, all culture is the same, so long as it’s longer than 140 characters.

But what are they, you ask? Bwahahahahahahahahaha. You have to click on it to see.

Do I Still Get Paid For This Gig?

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​This is a fine name for an album.

My brother and I have been playing a game this week which I'll call WikiLists, trading the longest, strangest or most surprising lists we can find on Wikipedia. We've found some good ones—Hats! Treaties! Fallacies!—but my new favorite is the brilliant, distressing list of entertainers who died during a performance. Some highlights:

We all know Molière died on stage, and it should be no surprise that daredevil Sam Patch died in pursuit of his art. I remember when Owen Hart and Steve Irwin bit it—I've never quite gotten over either of those, even though I was never into human wrestling or, uh, crocodile wrestling. But I didn't know that two opera singers died on stage at the Met—a tenor and a baritone—and both of them after singing lines that touched on the transience of life.

That last bit seems a bit too opera legend perfect though, don't it? It helps, of course, that your average aria is chock full of death.

There are lots of heart attacks on that list. As always, it gets more interesting when a gun comes onstage. 

Memphis blues singer Johnny Ace was only twenty-five, and had just bought a brand new Olds, when he made the mistake of playing around with a gun after a performance. Blind drunk and cheerful, he smiled when his friends told him to be careful and pointed the gun at his head. According to Big Mama Thornton, Ace's last words were, "It's okay! Gun's not loaded...see?"

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​I would prefer not to be murdered, thank you.

Trumpeter Lee Morgan, who was so talented it hurts, was shot through the heart by his common law wife in 1972, just after finishing a show at an East Village jazz-pit with the unlucky name of Slugs. The bar stood at 248 East. 3rd, between Avenues B and C. It appears there's a community garden there. Morgan was 33 and was working on a comeback when he died. As shocking as that is, the life of the woman who killed him beats all.

A mother at 13, a widow at 19, Helen Morgan was never going to let life kick her around. She moved to New York in 1945, and quickly fell in with the after-hours jazz scene, carrying heroin for the musicians who trusted her with their horse because they knew she didn't use. When she met Morgan, in the early '60s, he was dead broke and freezing, having pawned his trumpet and coat to buy drugs. Helen got his stuff out of hock and, according to an interview which she gave shortly before her death, did her best to keep him out of trouble. 

Helen got Morgan into rehab in the Bronx. When he got out, they moved to an apartment on the Grand Concourse—far from his old haunts. He took methadone to stay off heroin, and kept himself amused by shooting cocaine. (Kids—this is not a good trade-off.) He started staying out all night, and finally picked up a coke-addict girlfriend who was, unlike Helen, younger than him. As Helen tells it, she tried to end the relationship without quitting her work as his business partner, but he refused to leave their apartment, because "he had sense enough to know that what he was doing with her would do nothing but bring him down." 

Finally, Helen's patience ran out, and she went to confront him at Slugs, carrying the gun he had bought her in her purse. The show was over when she arrived on Third Street, and Morgan was with his girlfriend. Then...well, I'll let Helen tell it.

And about that time I hit him. And when I hit him I didn’t have on my coat or nothing but I had my bag. He threw me out the club. Wintertime. And the gun fell out the bag, and I looked at it. I got up. I went to the door.

I guess he had told the bouncer that I couldn’t come back in. The bouncer said to me, "Miss Morgan I hate to tell you this but Lee don’t want me to let you in." And I said, Oh, I’m coming in! I guess the bouncer saw the gun because I had the gun in my hand. He said, "Yes you are." And I saw Morgan rushing over there to me and all I saw in his eyes was rage.

Helen Morgan only served a few years in jail for shooting Lee through the heart.  The way she tells the story, at least, you can hardly blame her.

There's one more killer story on that list—one more at least!—but I've got a date with a buddy of mine to eat brisket and watch baseball, so y'all are on your own for the rest of the afternoon.​