We’re in Urinetown

In which I’m filled with symbolism and things like that

It’s the oldest story:

Masses are oppressed

Faces, clothes, and bladders all distressed

Rich folks get the good life

Poor folks get the woe

In the end it’s nothing you don’t know

: “Too Much Exposition”

For nearly a week now—beginning, with eerie prescience, shortly before domestic terrorists attempted a coup on the U.S. Capitol building—I’ve been attentively playing the soundtrack of the 2001 Broadway musical Urinetown, whose creative melodies and comical asides satirize our economic systems under a not-entirely-inconceivable premise. It’s relevant enough because of what a plausible mask-era production it could make. It’s more relevant because at present, with public health and political affairs in the state they’re in, my home country seems to be drawing closer than ever to the titular metaphor.

As we gain more and more of a perspective on the pandemic and the changes it’s imposed upon our lives (particularly the policing of what we wear and how we behave), I have tried to diagnose the special brand of misery that has swept the United States, a supposedly advanced nation with a host of really basic dysfunctions. My friends, family, and curated Twitter have documented a totally unique experience of hell and a totally unique hope to go along with it. Meditating on this documentation and why it feels familiar, all at once I realize that it reminds me of a show about literal hope—and heavy policing. That what I’m witnessing is both Urinetown the musical and Urinetown the location.

The plot, for those unfamiliar, follows a community impoverished by a devastating water shortage and by the resulting corporate privatization of public toilets (known as ‘amenities’). Essentially, everyone has to pay to pee. The most disenfranchised of the townspeople rally behind a young idealist, Bobby Strong, after he leverages his job at a local amenity to stage an uprising. Bobby faces a conflict of interest in the form of Hope Cladwell, daughter of the big corporation’s head honcho, which leads to a kidnapping and a standoff and other events necessary to a proper revolution. And all the while they are haunted by the spectre of “Urinetown,” the universal and mysterious punishment for citizens who pee freely and illegally. (“Did you hear the news? They carted old so-and-so off to Urinetown the other day.” “Is that so? What’d he do?” “Oh, such-and-such, I hear.”)

It’s kept from being a classic Robin Hood social-justice morality tale by two factors: the rebellion really isn’t very well organized; and the ruling establishment, while draconian, does in fact provide for the people by conscientiously managing the water supply. In any event, the action is set up and guided by Officer Lockstock, resident Sheriff of Nottingham, who has at least made his peace with brutalizing offenders and sending them to Urinetown even if he may not actively enjoy it. His partner on the beat, in case you hadn’t guessed it, is Officer Barrel—the names are pretty symbolic, if by ‘symbolic’ we mean blatantly obvious.

In a more innocent time I listed the opening number among my favorites. It introduces Lockstock and his narrative counterpart, an irreverent street urchin called Little Sally, as thoroughly self-aware characters in a show which they can tell is not going to be happy. But just because it isn’t happy doesn’t mean it isn’t fun…and the score arguably only gets better. Various styles of theatrical number are parodied, from the love duet (“Follow Your Heart”) to the angry-mob anthem (“Look at the Sky”) to the quote-unquote victorious finale (“I See a River”). And, like all good parody, they’re fine examples of those styles in their own right. There are equally excellent numbers which I think are meant to be taken at face value: the gospel-inspired “Run, Freedom, Run”; the How to Succeed-esque “Mr. Cladwell”; the jazzy, ensemble-based “Snuff That Girl”; the character- and scene-establishing “Cop Song.” You could easily leave a performance humming any of these tunes.

The overture, too, is first-rate. I’d forgotten what a model it is until this most recent listen. Clocking in at 1:13, it sets the mood with a choppy tempo and discordant melody, switching between major and minor modes, letting us know we’re in for a couple hours of bittersweetness and tension. It’s an independent composition—its musical ideas never resurface, nor is it a medley of the subsequent ideas—and yet it is unmistakably representative of the show’s personality. (I love the overture to West Side Story for the exact opposite reason: it gives us a taste of so many melodies which have since become classics, and once the orchestra reaches the “Tonight” section I know they’ve hit their stride and start to get really excited.) It asserts its point and then makes way for the story.

Not to mention you’d be hard pressed to find a musical theatre score which showcases the clarinet more superbly; it’s flooring how much love composer Mark Hollmann lavishes on the woodwinds.

Wait just a minute, why have I gone off about the music? Well, if you think about it, the soundtrack to 2020 was undeniably strong. Good music doesn’t stop us getting where we’re going. Sometimes it simply highlights it.

This is a work of folk horror, as charming as it is chilling, as winking as it is wicked. (Like Midsommar, only way funnier and way better.) It makes you laugh even in the face of the grim truths it presents about your world—as Lockstock retorts to Little Sally’s criticisms, “Don’t you think people want to be told that their way of life is unsustainable?” Even first-time offenders of the peeing regulations get Urinetown: the authorities famously take no prisoners. Which would mean, if we were to apply that principle to our own mask mandate, that the U.S. population would be reduced by half. It’s a discussion of how much/little difference individual choice makes in a society preoccupied with surviving. And yet the bureaucrats sit at the top of this society, not only surviving but thriving.

The original Broadway production rang almost too true to its time, more so than the cast and crew could have imagined while preparing it. That is to say it opened nine days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, and what was already a dark comedy became, well, a really dark comedy. Think about the immense contextual implications of a line like

What is Urinetown?

Urinetown is here

It’s the town wherever people learn to live in fear

Likewise, the art released since last March has been lent a new resonance by the atmosphere—Fiona Apple’s record, for example, was made largely in her home featuring many household surfaces as instruments, long before we were ever instructed to stay indoors. These artistic statements bear the mark of the environments that receive them; they become even more meaningful than they were on merit alone.

So what if it’s distasteful content, or an ugly title? It’s no uglier than the situation we’re faced with now. And at least they’re not squabbling over toilet paper—I’ve reason to believe that would get you Urinetown as well.

Dedicated to Celeste and Christa, whose respective productions made me a fan in the first place.

Image: original Broadway cast

Lit Review: THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT

In which I play the Cecilian Defense

*WARNING: SPOILERS*

I suspect I was always one nudge away from playing chess.

Growing up I might have had the makings of an enthusiast if I hadn’t devoted almost all my energies to literary pursuits. Or if I hadn’t been so troublesome at board games, a jealous player and a sore loser. Besides, whatever I chanced to learn about the game and its attendant environment was decidedly off-putting. Competitive chess seemed like an insular world full of…not very nice people. Through no fault of their own necessarily, but the trend is there. (Bobby Fischer was a noted misogynist.)

Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit and its Netflix incarnation, which I consumed in that order, seem largely to subscribe to this atmosphere. In a way, Beth Harmon is made for such a world. Orphaned at eight, she is quick to strategize, frank and open only when it suits her—hence her conscription of Mr. Shaibel, the orphanage janitor, to teach her the fundamentals of chess. She advocates for herself in a way that befits her situation, briskly and ruthlessly, asking questions and challenging authority until she has everything she needs to go after what she wants. This practice serves her incredibly well in her craft and also expedites her downfall.

Normally I’m leery of men writing women, so I suppose the fact that I regularly forgot that the author was male is a good sign. (Both Tevis and Nate Hawthorne did a pretty good job, and they’re the only ones who come to mind.) But then my experience of the book was filtered through a female voice on Audible; I felt the narrative firmly in a woman’s control. My impressions of certain characters were also influenced by the reader’s choices—for instance, she lent Alma Wheatley an accent that the actress in the series lacked, which highlighted the decisions (even the assumptions) I made about the character completely unconsciously. Always remember that the human voice is an instrument of power.

The book reads like a meticulous step-by-step thought process. Beth approaches her goals, from winning a match to scoring extra tranquilizers, with the same steady method and the same unbound desire behind it. This blind forge ahead, letting the reader know no more than she knows, makes for a narrative which often entranced me. The series brings that thought process to life with arresting visuals; I liked watching Beth tear open the canopy on her bed for a better mental picture of the board on her ceiling. And the small details are just as revealing, like the hotel room scene where Beth and her mother drink beer together for the first time, their legs crossed identically, foreshadowing a perilous life cycle. It won’t be long before Alma is gone, and by then Beth is on a self-destructive path.

In both the book and the series, I appreciated Alma’s nuance and depth. She is an active participant in her adoptive daughter’s story; she commits to her maternal role, doing a significant part to help Beth along to success (saddling her with emotional baggage, too, but hey, parents). She pursues independence; she has a fling with Manuel in Mexico City; she plays the piano, and is eventually able to accept the praise of listeners. It made me realize how many Orphan Stories default to neglectful, abusive, or just plain absent adults. Mr. Alton Wheatley fits that stereotype, showing little regard for anyone’s welfare but his own, and it would be too easy for Alma to check out after he abandons her. But she subverts our expectations and determines to change her life; by investing in Beth, she invests in herself. Not to mention she gets a sex life, which we hardly ever see for middle-aged women. Take that, Dickens!

Meanwhile, Beth’s circle widens. The Russian boy Girev wants to know all about drive-in movies. Viewers see Benny Watts as an amusing, intriguing Lone Ranger type; readers know him as meeker-looking, though no less capable of blowing up at her when she asks him to join her in Moscow. And then there’s my bid for the greatest character—Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jo-leeeeeene!—with whom Beth’s relationship is much more complicated in the novel than in the series. One day at the orphanage Beth calls her, to her face, a word we don’t say anymore. This exchange comes on the heels of a sexual encounter Jolene tries to initiate while Beth lies awake immersed in her ceiling game. They are, respectively, thirteen and nine.

Jolene backs off when Beth rejects her, steering clear of assault. But in light of Beth’s own encounters later on, I would classify the scene as queer-baiting: leading us to believe queerness will be a plot point or source of self-actualization for the protagonist, then never bringing that idea to fruition, making her by all appearances heterosexual. What’s more, the experience affects Beth’s future perceptions—sex disappoints her, whether with Harry Beltik or Benny or anyone else. There is no redeeming moment, as in the series when she is with Benny in New York and gasps, “That’s what it’s supposed to feel like!”

Perhaps all that was a bit too real for Netflix. Too little glamour, too much grit.

Anyway, these personalities collectively softened me toward Beth and induced me to feel for her in a way I probably would not have otherwise. I found her too calculating at times, especially in the novel—now I will drink, now I will have sex, now I will fly in a plane—narrowing her itemized list in accordance with how she thinks a human life ought to be spent. Her maturing did strike me as more organic onscreen than on the page, for what it’s worth.

I recognized a bit of myself in her, which could explain my wariness. While I can’t remember having played a single full game of chess, I can remember sharing Beth’s ambition to be the youngest, sharpest, fastest in the room. In the series, when she crosses paths with Townes in Las Vegas, he tells her she has outgrown ‘prodigy’ status, an observation which in the novel is reserved for her own inner monologue. This only adds to the pressure. The ambition, and accompanying paranoia, is as self-sustaining as it is corrupting: the longer you stay at the top, the farther you’ll go to maintain your post, and the more distorted your worldview becomes.

Over the course of the narrative, up to and including the end, I wished to see Beth truly love something or someone. The novel’s third-person narrator remarks during her fateful match with world champion Vasily Borgov that the only thing she is certain that she loves is “a win.” Having journeyed with her, I understand the attachment. But I feel I have yet to see her truly happy. Even winning at chess she takes with the detachment and cool composure that she brings to playing it. And the hunger, always the hunger. Each win spurs her on to a bigger, better, more prestigious win.

Either that, or I wanted to see her lose to Borgov. Face up to her own shortcomings—including the permanent repercussions of her addictions—then ready herself for a comeback, like Scarlett O’Hara scheming to win back Rhett Butler.

Now, you jaded readers know as well as this jaded writer does that life provides few proper resolutions. I don’t claim that the story should end with one. Since she begins with herself and chess, though, I hoped Beth would finish with something more than…herself and chess. Maybe it’s all she needs. Maybe her telephone teamwork with Benny and the guys, brief reunion with Jolene, and frenmity (?) with Borgov are enough for her. Obviously she plans to vie for the title in two years’ time. If she’s satisfied, well, far be it from me to begrudge a fictional character her solitary success.

One final note: had it been up to me, my instinct would have been to call it The Sicilian Defense, given Beth’s long-standing affinity for the move. But I can see how the author arrived at his title.

Image: from E3, “Doubled Pawns,” during a classic erotic setup—a photo shoot, courtesy of Townes—that goes wrong

The Greatest Jazz Album…?

Or, a Christmastime observation

I’m relying on holiday tunes more heavily than usual this year to keep the spirit of the season alive in relative isolation. I can’t help listening a little more closely, perhaps only because I can. Among the records on regular rotation is, for self-evident reasons, the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s soundtrack to the 1965 TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas. And I’m coming to conclude that it might just be the strongest collection that the school of jazz has produced thus far.

I don’t say this because the songs are the most virtuosic ever to be committed to vinyl or even necessarily superlative compositions in and of themselves—with the exception of “Linus and Lucy”—but because this album has almost singlehandedly induced generations of people to accidentally enjoy jazz.

Jazz is a maligned, polarizing genre. People use it against one another: it’s either “I like jazz, which makes me sophisticated, therefore I’m better than you” or “Jazz is for stuck-up snobs, and I see through that façade, therefore I’m better than you.” Over a couple days in the studio, these guys made the brilliant move of filtering the elements of jazz through traditional Christmas melodies and original additions, acclimating even the most casual listeners and giving them something simultaneously accessible and novel. The improvisation, which seems to be the component that intimidates or turns off many avowed non-fans, is low-stakes and easygoing in this setting: “O Tannenbaum” is a relaxed meditation within a familiar chordal context. And the set of lyrics to “Christmas Time is Here” beats the set of lyrics to “Sleigh Ride” by leaps and bounds. (That was an orchestral piece for a reason. Leave Leroy Anderson alone.)

Although I think I prefer the instrumental anyway; it has a certain inimitable atmospheric melancholy. The brushwork on the drums is just otherworldly. It sounds cold.

The whole really exudes a wintry chill, the sonic interpretation of a Christmas fraught with loneliness and depression, which is what the TV special is all about. And yet there remains a lightness, a levity, a spark of hope that there is some rhyme or reason to the whole holiday rigamarole. Regardless of whether you celebrate Christmas, you can identify with that search for higher meaning, especially at the end of another year. Jazz is a precarious balance of order and chaos, freedom and structure, a host of barely contained ideas and themes gingerly strung together. Isn’t that Christmas?

So that’s what sets this album apart. It manages to become the very thing it attempts to describe, and, in doing so, unite listeners of all musical proclivities. It rings true; it lets disbelievers know that there is truth in jazz. Despite your protestations that you could never or would never ‘get into’ the genre, if you like this album, you kind of already have.

I also think piano-based jazz is easier to digest for those who are not immersed in the oeuvre. Or maybe I’m biased toward the piano. Or maybe I’ve drunk too much wine over the past two weeks to have any regard for the people who would say that the point of jazz is not to be easy to digest. Or maybe it’s the Italian in me, going for composers with Italian names.

If anything, I’m reminded with each passing post that the Peanut I resemble most is Linus, as I am full of facts and quotations that no one has any use for. Maybe I should start dragging a blanket around too.

My Year in Song

In which I compile an eclectic playlist for an eclectic year

As we commence our closing tricks in the death-defying circus act of 2020, let me gift you with a soundtrack to help us carry them off. These picks more or less sum up each thirty-day cluster; some are snapshots of the state of my soul, others are themselves the songs I kept on repeat at the time. Never in my memory has my situation—physical, psychological, financial, etc.—seen such dramatic change on an almost monthly basis, and so I figured I would retrospectively try to make sense of it in the way I know best.

A few of the following reinforce my hunch by appearing on my Spotify Wrapped. All of the following have my endorsement.

January: “Stuck in the Middle With You,” Stealers Wheel

February: “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” Taylor Swift

March: “Everybody Loves Me, Baby,” Don McLean

April: “Adore You,” Harry Styles

May: “Boy Problems,” Carly Rae Jepsen

June: “Mean Girls,” Tiger Goods

July: “Rosa Parks,” OutKast

August: “Quando você chegar,” Novos Baianos

September: “I Concentrate On You,” Frank Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim

October: “Newspaper,” Fiona Apple

November: “All You Wanna Do is Dance,” Billy Joel

December: “200 Du,” Sally Yeh (from the soundtrack to Crazy Rich Asians, the best rom-com I’ve seen in a LONG time)

And oh what the heck—

Album of My Year: Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Fiona Apple

What music has defined your year?

Image: Waidmannslust, Berlin, mid-December. We are still here.

Also, longtime readers will notice we got a sprucing-up! Just another way to leave 2020 in the past.

A Brief History of A Cappella

In which I sing the praises of a much-misconstrued genre

The above image, whose painter I could not identify for the life of me (drop a comment if you can), does not depict the a cappella style we know, as there are instruments present. However, it does depict (again) that musical troublemaker St. Cecilia, plus a cherub who seems happy to jam with her, so it pertains.

Back in high school, I would spend this time of year singing Renaissance madrigals and richly harmonized Christmas carols with the premier choir at my school. The choir’s signature sound, heard throughout the city at traveling carol sing-alongs and its scripted Elizabethan feaste—yes, with an extra E—was a staple of the holiday season and a highlight of the school calendar. To say I remember my three years in the group with joy would be an understatement. Many of our arrangements, especially of the madrigals, are as near and dear to me as if I had sung them yesterday.

I mean…actually I was singing one yesterday. Just to myself. It’s fun to bounce between voice parts.

Concurrently with that teenager’s revelation, America has seen something of a cappella renaissance. A cappella being a genre of unaccompanied music presently associated with glee-club renditions of pop hits. I’ll first point out how the phrase has been bastardized along the way. It is spelled a cappella, two words, from the Italian, meaning ‘in the style of the chapel.’ Let’s get it right.

I bristle out of dedication to two things: the Italian language, and spelling. Now, it’s difficult for people to care about either if they are uneducated in the genre. That, presumptuous as I may be, is where I come in. And before you call me too presumptuous, this is also where I tell you that I’ve unearthed my own miseducation: the term as defined in the 1800s, and as I accepted it, turned out to conflate a few styles and has become too popular for the mistake to be corrected. My research is the only thing saving me from myself.

So here we are. How did we get here?

The genre now called a cappella originated—you guessed it—in sacred spaces, with composers adhering to institutional and/or textual rules. Variations appeared in Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions. At the time it referred to more than simply unaccompanied music: stringed instruments were frequently played in unison with the voices, blending to sound as though the voices were singing alone. But just as frequently the voices were singing alone, so the ambiguity remains. The goal was a minimalistic texture that would direct worshipers’ focus toward the text and praise instead of the performance or performers. Note that Latin was de rigueur for the Christian Church, and they had a lot of sway in those days.

As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, and art got more sophisticated and human-centric, polyphony seeped into the liturgy. A fuller, more colorful sound paired well with the exponentially ornate cathedrals springing up across the continent. The cantatas and oratorios seemed to filter harmony the way stained-glass windows filtered light, and thus further glorify God. By the late seventeenth century, rock stars like George Frideric Händel and my man Johann Sebastian Bach—both of German origin, though Händel would make a name for himself in London—were composing elaborate works for 4+-voice choir. Secular polyphony had also been gaining traction since the 1500s, coming out of Italy, Germany, France, England, and those weird pan-European states like Flanders that no longer exist as such. Crucially, this offshoot allowed for the use of the vernacular. One common form was the madrigal, again derived from the Italian (madrigale, “mother tongue”), whose subject matter covered everything from women gossiping about their husbands to how great Queen Elizabeth I was to a guy watching a swan die (a personal favorite).

But those aforementioned cantatas and oratorios were helping to jumpstart the popularity of keyboard instruments (like the one discussed here) and chamber orchestras, so by the eighteenth century the lone human voice had fallen out of fashion. Cue montage of minuets and sarabandes and gigues. In the mid-nineteenth century a renewed interest in Baroque polyphony—prompted, I suspect, by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn’s championing of Bach’s catalogue—sparked a resurgence of the performance style. It was somewhere around then that a cappella came to be defined as strictly vocal music, to the exclusion of all other instruments; we’ve operated under this definition ever since.

Once the craze crossed an ocean, the momentum was sure to be sustained. The first a cappella choir in the United States was founded at Northwestern University in 1906. Barbershop quartets were becoming a thing, too, alongside the expansion of a uniquely American songbook. The groups and the material progressed in step—to sum up, there were the Four Freshmen, then there were The Beach Boys, and then everyone wanted in on that harmonic density. By the turn of our century, the proliferation of pop music and the co-opting of vocal jazz into academic programs yielded a higher volume of a cappella music than ever before, as well as media representations like Glee and (perhaps even more notably) Pitch Perfect.

To shift gears from narrative into transparent opinion, I don’t care for Pitch Perfect. I saw it well after its debut and was disappointed: neither the humor nor the singing did anything for me, and most of the characters ranged from regressively stereotypical to aggressively unsympathetic. I lacked the heart to admit this to the girls with whom I performed the film’s final mashup at our college’s spring musicale, and otherwise I’ve had no occasion to talk about an uninspiring experience. I find it difficult to draw a through-line from the Elizabeth I groupies to the Jessie J imitators. It doesn’t check out that the endgame of the genre Wikipedia claims “could be as old as man itself” is a group of overgrown students shouting five bars of “Hey Mickey” only to segue into “S&M” by Rihanna. I just…something feels off.

Religion has its problems, as I discover in more unsavory detail with each passing year—this is not to suggest we revert to remixing Tantum ergo for the rest of our unaccompanied musical lives. But anyone who has sung Bach (as, back-door brag, I have) knows his stuff is more than enough to keep you occupied and rehearsing a good long while. For the next phase of a cappella development, I think it wouldn’t hurt us to visualize the sort of thing we might sing in a chapel and run with that.

Of course, my dad would argue similarly against Straight No Chaser, and I love those guys! (At the very least, they’re a crucial addition to the festive season.)

All pith aside, the fact is that the teenager who set her sights on that choir as soon as she set foot in high school didn’t know what a madrigal was. She had heard them sung at concerts and in churches; but the term, however oft dropped in her community, meant nothing to her. Being a bit older and more knowledgeable now, she thought others—maybe even teenagers—could benefit from the knowledge. Here’s hoping they do.

Happy holidays, reader. May they bring you comfort, cheer, non-life-threatening togetherness, and a resilience that you never need to exercise. Così faccio io thanks you and loves you.

Dedicated to Brian Germain. Teachers really do change your life if you let them.

Image: “And this one’s called ‘Only the Good Die Young.’ Haven’t decided who I’m gonna give it to yet.”

Every Beatles Reference in “You’ll Be Back”

In which I send a fully armed battalion to remind you that all you need is love

Hamilton’s George III, our favorite mad king, steps out in the middle of Act I to the most fanfare since, well, Hamilton stepped out. He proceeds to introduce himself with a tune I can only describe as Late-Stage McCartney—late-stage within the Beatles era, anyhow. Lin-Manuel Miranda has confirmed his intention to characterize the king through scattered compositional and instrumental references to the Fab Four. When you listen closely, or really even when you don’t, that intention is clear.

But why exactly does the number sound like a studio outtake from 1967?

Glad you asked.

The bass. Sgt. Pepper is held by many listeners—at least, myself and some like-minded listeners—to contain McCartney’s best bass tones, recorded on his Rickenbacker 4001 and engineered for maximum buoyancy. Coupled with the syncopated lines he wrote into the songs (“With a Little Help from My Friends,” “Getting Better,” “Fixing a Hole”), the effect is that of a rubber ball bouncing deep in the mix. “You’ll Be Back” replicates this technique, sometimes with an electric bass and sometimes with a cello pizzicato. It helps that the time signature swings similarly, with a feel of 2. This, I think, is the element that gets your foot tapping, and by then you’re halfway there.

The harpsichord. Not only is the instrument chronologically appropriate, having been all the rage at 1770s parties, it hearkens back (or forward?) to its famous use on “Fixing a Hole.” And the steady rhythmic 4 it beats out evokes multiple tracks: “Little Help,” “Getting Better,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”—even “Penny Lane,” which was part of the Sgt. Pepper sessions and meant for the album. Had George III dabbled in time travel and jumped a couple centuries, hearing this record would have made him feel oddly at home.

The jazzy piano interjection. The aforementioned harpsichord largely overshadows the piano due to the ‘period’ atmosphere the composer was after, but the old joanna isn’t entirely robbed of its moment. In the bridge, the king’s line “And no, don’t change the subject” is answered by a honky-tonk jangle of keys (a minor-sixth interval, if you insist on knowing). I trace this orchestrational choice back to “Lovely Rita,” whose piano interludes are played by yet another George (Martin). That piano is more prominent than this one, but then Miranda and arranger/musical director Alex Lacamoire spotlight the instrument plenty elsewhere.

The guitar layering. The final chorus gives us our strongest nod: a direct melodic interpolation of the guitar ostinato that begins and ends “Getting Better.” Granted, the repeating G note doubles the tonic (this number is in G major), whereas it doubles the dominant in the Beatles song (which is in C major). Still, the pitch is the same, and you couldn’t tie the tunes any closer together than that. “Getting Better” could well be my personal favorite Sgt. Pepper track—it has a quintessential Beatles sound, impossible to mistake for any other group—so a song or production that pays it homage wouldn’t have to do much more to curry favor with me. Hamilton, of course, goes above and beyond.

All these winks and nudges within the song’s structure culminate in a…Beatleness, an abstract quality comprising concrete quantities. In a show full of un-classic strengths, this number, being its sole representative of ‘classic’ musical theatre, makes a tasteful statement indeed. God save the King.

And hang on—even the title tips its hat! Or, should I say, its crown…

Image: Jonathan Groff originating the role on Broadway

So Beautiful It Hurts

In which I direct my readers to a departed talent

Gwendolyn Brooks, poet and relentless voice, left us twenty years ago today. For those unfamiliar with her name on sight, she was the mastermind behind the oft-misread “We Real Cool,”

She was also:

The first Black writer (of any discipline) to win a Pulitzer Prize

A poet whose publishing legacy began at age thirteen

An industry figure who promoted and patronized Black-owned presses and businesses—even leaving her big-name publisher for one in the 1970s

An inhabitant of both deeply personal and deeply political themes

A generous public-reading giver, translating her own words into eloquent speech

A writer very much concerned with colorism (within the broad spectrum of racism)

A literary celebrity of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s—decades with pretty drastic differences if you ask me, or better yet anyone who was actually there

A master of the line break and of subtle, half-buried rhyme

A champion of the Illinois Poets Laureate Awards and Significant Illinois Poets Awards

Re: the above, basically synonymous with the city of Chicago

Readings I recommend:

The “Anniad” (and all of Annie Allen)

“Cynthia in the Snow”

Maud Martha

“kitchenette building”

“Gay Chaps at the Bar” and “Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity…”

“Strong Men, Riding Horses”

“To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals”

“the mother”

Remember her today. Read her starting today. I promise, once you’ve started you’ll find it hard to stop.

Dedicated to Susan Gilmore, through whose eyes I first appreciated Brooks.

Image: from the National Endowment for the Humanities

The Prisoner Who Just Wanted Some Soup & the Man Who Refused to Give Him Some

In which I review a groundbreaking play

So goes the title of this slice of mid-aughts theatrical life—written by Sam Puckett, performed to intriguing effect by the playwright and her co-star Carly Shay on an episode of their equally iconic web series “iCarly.” The production is short and sweet, as was the playwright’s probable intention, consisting of one thrice-repeated exchange:

“Just gimme some soup!”

“I ain’t gonna give you no soup!”

Each repetition is so nuanced and subtle that the whole requires multiple observations to appreciate to its fullest extent. Puckett’s star turn as the wayward soup seeker is gritty, grating, and single-minded, while Shay’s mannerisms as the individual vested with the power to grant soup (for whatever reason) suggest that the very idea of a prisoner requesting soup is worthy of mockery. That both these roles are male in nature but originated by women upends any traditional notions of gender, representing—dare we say it—the forward-thinking ideals of the young generation. As for the premise, we the audience are left to puzzle over the missing pieces. What has the prisoner done to deserve his sentence? Just who is this ‘man’? Are we to presume that he would have been called a guard if he were such? And yet, if he exists unattached to the prison industrial complex, how would the prisoner have come across him? Perhaps we catch a glimpse of the pair in medias res, with some elaborate escape scheme underway at whose details we can only guess. Indeed, the beauty of this piece lies in its minimalism, leaving us with as many questions as answers.

Puckett remarked on air that the teacher who had assigned the work awarded it a D+. Grades, however, have proven wanting as arbiters of true influence. Even head tech Freddie Benson, known to share an antagonistic relationship with Puckett, was seen to be enjoying himself and the players during filming. No doubt there is a creative force here to be reckoned with, or at least to keep an eye on.

Image: Puckett (left, as portrayed by Jennette McCurdy) and Shay (Miranda Cosgrove), from Common Sense Media