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Chicago Sun Times Review of A Long Gay Book
"A Long Gay Book" is a little jewel of a musical that celebrates love, language, human eccentricity and the sheer pleasure of observing all that the world has to offer. It also is a tribute to Gertrude Stein, the American-bred modernist writer and artistic gadfly whose work is all too often dismissed as highbrow nonsense dispensed by an expatriate living in a gilded Parisian salon in the 1920s--a place where figures such as Picasso, T.S. Eliot and Hemingway were known to gather, and where Gertrude's beloved "wife," Alice B. Toklas, happily listened, tossed salads and decked herself out in a collection of distinctive accessories.
Director-adapter Frank Galati has had a long love affair with the word-drunk musings of Stein--crafting a memorable theater piece from her writings, "She Always Said, Pablo," nearly two decades ago, directing "Four Saints in Three Acts" and "The Mother of Us All," the operas for which she wrote librettos, and teaching her work to his students at Northwestern University. Now he has overseen the world premiere of "A Long Gay Book," an 85-minute "musicale" that features a radiant score by Stephen Flaherty (the composer with whom he collaborated on "Ragtime"), stylish vaudeville-style choreography by Marc Robin and exquisite musical direction by Brad Haak, who also collaborated with Flaherty on the glittering orchestrations.
The highly polished cast appearing in a brief engagement at Northwestern's Ethel M. Barber Theatre is composed of seven immensely polished student performers, plus a single professional guest artist, Cindy Gold, who portrays the older Gertrude Stein--the solidly built woman with cropped hair, all-seeing eyes and matronly clothes who was immortalized in a portrait painted by Picasso. Similarly, four of the six members of the band (led by Haak) are students who are clearly ready for the real world.
The show, which draws on excerpts from many different pieces by Stein, is framed by the brilliantly lucid, provocative and mischievous lecture on language, writing and being that she delivered at the University of Chicago in 1934. As she explained in that lecture: "I began to wonder if it was possible to describe the way every possible kind of human being acted and felt in reaction with every other kind of human being and I thought if this could be done it would make a long gay book." (The word "gay" clearly meant filled with delight and spirited energy, but it also may have been an early use of the coded word for homosexuality.)
The lecture is about observing and listening, about how language is a way of knowing ourselves and others, and about how the ideas in her book The Making of Americans came to be. It also is about her theory of repetition--about how crucial the whole notion of repeating can be in figuring out who other people are, and thus in making art. The rest of the work illustrates her art and artifice and also serves as semi-autobiographical journey.
The older Stein speaks. The young one (played by Christine Mild, whose caramel-rich voice has an irresistible warmth and brightness) sings. So does Toklas (the slyly amusing and enigmatic Jenny Powers, who can do quite a smoky blues). And so do that fey and fashionable pair of vocal artists and lesbian lovers, Miss Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene (played and sung with great charm by Nicole Grothues and Lauren Robinson), and a trio of song-and-dance men (the fleet Brian Ogilvie, Jeremy D. Cohen and Chris Yonan), who can do a tango and soft shoe, and who develop crushes on one another. (Throughout, Michelle Tesdale's Edwardian costumes display great panache.)
Flaherty's tunes run the gamut from ragtime to jazz to quasi-operatic, with blissfully lovely harmonies. The music, like the overall production, has a luminosity about it--an exhilaration and optimism and positivism, as well as a sense of yearning and expectation.
A sense of preciousness and coyness also can creep into "A Long Gay Book" from time to time. There is a flirtatiousness about it all, but not a sexiness. In addition, despite Stein's assertion of the power of repetition, her work can take on a quality of affectation that comes close to undermining the profound ideas she is expressing.
Despite the fanciful surfaces of this piece, there is a sadness in it as well. You hear it when Stein talks about how war can make a year seem like an eternity. You feel it when all the playful language at times begins to seem like a way of hiding from life as much as celebrating it. And you know it when the older Stein makes a quite unceremonious exit near the end of the show. For all the savoring of life, death inevitably waits in the wings.