The Constitution’s first amendment and infringements on it are always in the news. A currently threatening for-instance would be running the risk of saying the word “gay” in a Florida classroom.
So a new production at LaMaMa is extremely welcome. Of course, it might have been at any time since it was written. The worthy piece is The Beautiful Lady, which regular LaMaMa associate Liz Swados (1951-2016) created in 1984 working from earlier translations by Paul Schmidt (1899-1970).
Why this is the musical’s Manhattan bow is not the point. The impressive point is that the entirely insistent intermissionless piece is finally here, as bracingly directed by Anne Bogart from Jocelyn Clarke’s book adaptation.
The freedom of speech spoken (and subsequently not to be spoken) in The Beautiful Lady happens to be Russian, but assaults on speech are destructive and therefore relevant to cultures everywhere today. Those speaking in the Swados-Schmidt work are Russian poets prominent before, during and after – though some not much long after – the Russian Revolution.
The year when the politically and literally heated action begins is 1912. Seven poets are gathered at a new spot run by Boris Pronin so that artists with nowhere to go can meet—and further inspire each other. Closing in 1915, it was called the Stray Dog Café, possibly because Alexei Tolstoy had mused about local St. Petersburg artists wandering around like stray dogs.
The Stray Dog Café was in a basement, which explains why the habitués – one of whom characterized the regulars as “revelers and whores” – repeatedly sing about “the underground.” (New York City dwellers from the 60s may flashback on the arrival of a developing “underground.”)
United by initially championing the Revolution through their poetry – and being praised for it, several dubbing themselves Futurists – they are eventually condemned and hounded for the very persistence of their free-spoken poetry. By the emergence of the Bolshevists and the 20s, many of them have become enemies of the state, a couple of them suicides, a future denied them.
Hosted by café owner Pronin (Starr Busby, sexy and highly energizing), and enthusiastically bristling throughout, they are the perhaps most recognized stateside Osip Mandelstam (Henry Stram), perhaps the second most recognized stateside Anna Akhmatova (Kate Fuglei), Marina Tsvetaeva (Ashley Perez Flanagan), Alexander Blok (George Abud), Vladimir Mayakovsky (Djoré Nance), Velimir Khlebnikov (Tom Nelis), and Sergei Yesenin (Andrew Polec).
Though their names may not be front and foremost to 2023 poetry lovers, the truly motley group is reintroduced not so much in a story but rather in a jubilantly confrontational oratorio reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Swados has them singing in Kris Kukul’s arranged and rearranged groups and solo. For the most part her music is muscular and catchy. (It may be that one song, “Take Me to Paris,” is already known to longtime Swados followers.) Given that most new musicals this season come up short on winning scores, Swados’ is that much more welcome – and deserving of a cast recording. Let’s hope one arrives with the same five-person band playing.
And now to director Bogart, working so prodigiously with set designer Andromache Chalfant, costumer Gabriel Berry, lighting designer Brian H. Scott, sound designer Charles Coes, and, perhaps most importantly, movement supervisor Miki Orihara.
The acclaimed theater vet may have shuttered her SITI home base at the end of 2022, but here’s proof, if at all needed, that she hasn’t run dry of theatrical ideas. She keeps her troupe – including ensemble members Paula Gaudier, Jacob Louchheim, RED, and Maya Sharpe – on the go and on the qui vive.
Arranging and rearranging white chairs and tables on the wide and deep LaMaMa stage, they look as if they could be arranging and rearranging furniture on the Titanic. Not that they look as if they’re panicking. They look anything but – as if they’re defying panic, even as they enact the series of stylized deaths Bogart fashions for them.
Incidentally, Vladimir Putin gets a before-closing mention for which neither Swados nor Schmidt can be responsible. Undoubtedly, he’s name-dropped for contemporary emphasis. It’s unnecessary, but let it pass.
What’s significant is that a major Liz Swados work has been meaningfully rediscovered. Give thanks. Give even more thanks for having renewed attention brought to these poets whose verses are for the most part not fully quoted in The Beautiful Lady. Of the poets’ eventual fates, Akhmatova writes in “Intimacy,” “To lose the freshness of speech, the simplicity of feeling/Isn’t that, for us, like a painter losing the power of sight…?”
