Southern Bookman

Bernadette Peters thrills Atlanta audience with exploration of Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein songbooks

Bernadette Peters in an appearance with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Saturday night took an ecstatic audience on a rousing tour of Stephen Sondheim and Rodgers and Hammerstein classics. 

Sondheim considered the Broadway star the best interpreter of his music. Performing a deep selection from Sondheim's songbook, Peters displayed the acting and singing brilliance that Sondheim praised. She made each song a character portrait evoking its original musical.

At age 76, Peters possesses a strong voice and dynamic energy.

In a shimmering silver dress, she made one departure from the Sondheim and Rodgers and Hammerstein menu with a dazzling, sexy performance of the Peggy Lee standard "Fever," in which she perilously climbed stairs in her high heels to recline on music director Tedd Firth's piano.

Swinging her gorgeous legs, Peters echoed Lee's resonant voice, ranging from seductive low notes to brash higher registers.

Firth's piano enhanced the emotional complexity of Peters' more intimate songs. He also conducted the ASO with flair. The orchestra's musicians seemed to enjoy the swinging freedom of playing jazzy songs while smoothly backing slower-paced ballads.

Drummer Cubby O'Brien of Mouseketeer fame and bass player Kevin Axt from Peters' band joined the ASO. Axt and O'Brien gave a pulsing beat to Peters' "Fever" performance, building its dramatic momentum.

Peters reached one of the evening's high points with her aching interpretation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "It Might as Well Be Spring" from the movie "State Fair." Hitting the song's high notes with crystal clarity, Peters uncovered the poetic richness of Hammerstein's simple lyrics.

Remembering Elaine Stritch, her fellow accomplished Sondheimian, Peters said farewell to her ardent admirers with thrilling performances of "Send in the Clowns" and "Being Alive."

Peters with her soaring voice and emotional range turned Sondheim's anthems of remorse and despair into affirmations of the human spirit, night music for the soul.

 

 

Atlanta Opera's arias to ring out at Bobby Jones Golf Course clubhouse

Opera, theater and film will find a new home at a historic golf landmark in Buckhead. 

The Atlanta Opera this week announced a $45 million renovation and expansion of the Greek Revival showpiece that served for years as the Bobby Jones Golf Course clubhouse. Reminiscent of "Gone With the Wind's" Tara, the clubhouse was abandoned several years ago when the Bobby Jones course, dating back to the 1930s, was converted into a reversible nine-hole layout.

Located on Woodward Way near a wealthy neighborhood, the clubhouse site sits along the not yet fully developed Beltline, which might receive mass transit in the future. 

Under the plan, the expanded complex will house a 200-seat recital hall for concerts and theater, a film studio, rehearsal and education space, a library and administrative offices.

However, the Atlanta Opera will continue performing at the Cobb County Galleria Center, with no future plans to build a major opera house. Several years ago, the company abandoned a lagging fund-raising campaign for an opera venue at Woodward Arts Center.

The Opera's renovated clubhouse will be another jewel for the area. Nearby are the Georgia Golf Hall of Fame and museum, a lavish putting green, the renovated Bobby Jones golf complex, Bitsy Grant Tennis Center and the popular Boone's Restaurant.

A busy walking trail winds through Memorial Park, site of the bloody battles of Peachtree Creek and Tanyard Creek during the Civil War.

With the World Cup and other major sports competitions, the growth of Ga. Tech and other universities in starting and attracting high-tech businesses, and ambitious projects to revive downtown, Atlanta's cruising into a new era as an international city.

Yet, as columnist Maria Saporta recently pointed out in her Saporta Report, an essential source of Atlanta news, Georgia and Atlanta fall short in supporting the arts, for which Georgia ranks last in per capita spending.

Chastising Atlanta's futile campaign to attract the Sundance Film Festival, Saporta called for the city to increase arts funding and establish a department devoted to culture.

For years, Atlanta arts institutions have depended on wealthy private donors and the contributions of regular arts supporters to make up for insufficient public funding.

A revitalized commitment to the arts will raise Atlanta to new heights.

 

Rachel Kushner's "Creation Lake" raises literary firestorm

Rachel Kushner's"Creation Lake" is this season's literary lightning rod, drawing extreme critical reactions.

The 55-year-old Kushner's new novel, long-listed for the Booker Prize, received extravagant praise Sunday from The New York Times' Dwight Garner in the newspaper's Sunday Book Review, and condemnation from American novelist Brandon Taylor in the current London Review of Books.

While Taylor questioned why the novel was even written and joked in an X feed that the book "gave him Lyme Disease," Garner in his review said the book "consolidates Kushner's status as one of the finest novelists working in the English language. You know from this book's opening paragraphs that you are in the hands of a major writer, one who processes experience on a deep level. Kushner has a gift for almost effortless intellectual penetration."

Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles agreed with Garner, gushing that "Creation Lake" "bears all the hallmarks of her inquisitive mind and creative daring." In an expansive review in the Atlantic, Lily Meyer called the book a "swerve" that "suggests Kushner is ready for big change."

While the Guardian lauded the book, the Wall Street Journal reviewer Sam Sacks was lukewarm, relegating "Creation Lake" to his fiction roundup in the WSJ's Saturday Review.

Garner's review likely will do more than any other to boost the book's sales. Garner is the Times' most important book critic, now mainly writing for the Sunday newspaper rather than the daily Arts section, and the Sunday Book Review is the nation's leading literary arbiter.

Kushner's novels "The Flamethrowers," "Telex from Cuba" and "The Mars Room" also stirred heated critical debate, as did her essay collection "The Hard Crowd."

It'll be interesting to see if "Creation Lake" lands on the Times' best-seller list after garnering such media attention. These days, fantasy, horror and romance novels dominate the list, rarely crashed by "literary novels."

 

Keats' "To Autumn" followed Peterloo Massacre

John Keats wrote "To Autumn," his last great poem, inspired by a walk along the River Itchen near Winchester on Sept. 19, 1819.

"How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it [...] I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now [...] Somehow a stubble plain looks warm – in the same way that some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my sunday's walk that I composed upon it," Keats said about the poem's origins, writing to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds.

"To Autumn" was the last of Keats' breakthrough of great odes, begun in the spring of 1819. Foreshadowing his death in Rome from tuberculosis a little over a year later, the poem on one level is a farewell.

Keats composed "To Autumn" a little over a month after the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, in which 18 people where killed and 400 to 700 injured when the British Army's 15th Hussars led a cavalry charge into a crowd of 60,000 gathered at St. Peter's Field to protest economic devastation.

Britain's agricultural economy slumped after the Napoleonic Wars, and conditions worsened because of failed harvests and soaring bread prices caused by the Corn Laws, which imposed tariffs on grain imports. The protesters demanded an expansion of the right to vote, then held by just 11 percent of adult males.

The cavalry attack followed the arrest of radical orator Henry Hunt before his scheduled address to the protesters. Manchester Observer editor James Wroe invented the Peterloo Massacre label in a headline, comparing the carnage to the Battle of Waterloo four years before.

Keats read newspaper accounts about the massacre and witnessed the arrested Hunt's triumphant entry into London on Sept. 13, 1819. Yet, outside of a reference in a letter to his fiance Fanny Brawne, he never overtly mentioned the event, in contrast to fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who responded to Peterloo in "The Mask of Anarchy" and "England in 1819."

Critic Tom Paulin believes Keats made coded references to Peterloo in "To Autumn," a view disputed by most readers.

The poem expresses joy and sorrow at the arrival of autumn, with its natural bounty shadowed by the awareness of death. It describes the stubble fields at the end of the harvest, not the pastures full of grain.

Keats mourns the loss of Britain's agricultural past, the wrenching change that caused the Peterloo tragedy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remembering Battle of Antietam on 162nd anniversary

The Antietam Battlefield stretches toward the horizon, peaceful and bucolic.

It's hard to imagine that the bloodiest battle in American history took place 162 years ago on those rolling green hills near Sharpsburg, Md.

The Civil War battle on Sept. 17, 1862, at last fell silent with 22,727 Americans killed, wounded or missing. Two days after the battle, the bearded Scotsman Alexander Gardner took photographs of the dead's bloated bodies, the first photos taken of soldiers killed in battle.

Famed photographer Matthew Brady a month later displayed the Antietam photos at his Broadway gallery in New York City, drawing huge crowds shocked yet mesmerized by the horror of war.

Robert E. Lee's invading Army of Northern Virginia clashed with Gen. George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac on that late summer day, changing the course of the war.

Famous sites that Gardner visited remain unchanged, familiar from his photographs. The Dunker Church and the nearby cornfield, where the armies fired their first shots. The quiet Sunken Road, filled with Confederate dead in Gardner's images. The Burnside Bridge crossing idyllic Antietam Creek.

In fierce afternoon fighting, soldiers of both armies battled  for control of  the majestic bridge, at last captured by Gen. Ambrose Burnside's federal troops.

While not achieving a decisive victory, McClelland's army forced Lee to retreat to Virginia, ending his incursion into Maryland. The Union success led President Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, shifting the war's purpose to ending slavery as well as preserving the union.

Many of those who sacrificed their lives at Antietam rest in a national cemetery there. Like those soldiers buried at nearby Gettysburg, they "gave the last full measure of devotion... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom," as Lincoln said in his Gettysburg Address a little over a year later.

Welcome back: Shakespeare, Wilder, Sondheim and Mamet to return to Broadway

William Shakespeare's the hottest New York theater playwright.

Born 460 years ago, the English theater titan will reach 21st century Manhattan audiences with Broadway revivals of "Romeo and Juliet" and "Othello" and a new production of "King Lear."

Opening this month, "Romeo and Juliet" at the Circle in the Square Theater stars Kit Connor, best known for his performance in Netflix's "Heartstopper," and Rachel Zigler, who received raves for her portrayal of the Juliet-like Maria in Steven Spielberg's movie version of "Westside Story." Connor and Zigler will make their Broadway debuts in Shakespeare's tragedy of two doomed teenage lovers unable to escape the snares of their rival families.

The production will be directed by Sam Gold, lauded for his recent production of Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People." Jack Antonoff composed music for the revival.

Film and stage heavyweight Denzel Washington and Hollywood star Jake Gyllenhaall star in "Othello," which opens in February at the Barrymore Theater. English stage and film actress Molly Osborne plays the tragic Desdemona to Washington's doomed Moorish general Othello, and Gyllenhaall's duplicitous villain Iago.

Lauded Shakepeare actor and director Kenneth Branagh stars and directs a production of Shakespeare's "King Lear" from Oct. 26-Dec. 15 at the Griffin Theater at the Shed, located in New York's Hudson Yards development.

Along with Shakespeare, classic American theater will also return to Broadway with productions of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," Stephen Sondheim's "Gypsy" and David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross."

Directed by Atlanta's Kenny Leon, who also will helm "Othello," Wilder's nostalgic classic about residents of a small New England town returns to Broadway for the first time in 2o years.

Starring Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes, Zoey Deutch, Ephraim Sykes, Billy Eugene Jones and Richard Thomas, the production begins this month at the Barrymore Theater.

Six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald takes charge of the famous role of Momma Rose in Sondheim's beloved "Gypsy," beginning in November at the reopened Majestic Theater.

In a stirring contrast to Shakespeare, Wilder and Sondheim, Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" returns to Broadway next spring in a revival starring Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr.

With a dazzling array of Hollywood stars bringing fresh energy to the classics, Shakespeare, Wilder, Sondheim and Mamet will light up Manhattan stages for longtime fans and a new generation. 

 

 

 

 

Arrival of autumn weather revives love for Walker Percy

The arrival of fall weather in late summer brings memories of reading Walker Percy.

Percy said that storms like the recent Hurricane Francine, which brought sweeping winds and cooler temperatures to Georgia after causing flooding and power outages in Louisiana, actually make us feel better, thrilling us with drama and danger.

When I was young, Percy's early novels "The Moviegoer," "The Last Gentleman" and "Love in the Ruins" served as scriptural texts for me and others. Percy's characters Binx Bolling, Will Barrett and Dr. Thomas More gave us philosophies about how to live.

I doubt that Percy's books are much read anymore. Younger generations, especially males, no longer value novels as moral guides.

Percy's novels remain on my bookshelves, but I have not looked at them in years. The autumn weather recalls the melancholy and search for deeper meaning in Percy's philosophy, stirring a desire to return to his books. Now that I am old, I hope that he still speaks to me.

 

 

Falcons loss brings early chill to Atlanta fans

Atlanta suffers again from its chronic seasonal malady: Falcons angst syndrome.

Highly anticipated quarterback Kirk Cousins struggled in a disappointing opening game loss to Pittsburgh's offensively challenged Steelers. Dumped Falcons coach Arthur Smith now directs the Steelers' attack, which failed to score a touchdown but kicked six field goals.

If you like field goals, the NFL is now the sport to watch.

After the 18-10 loss, the Birds stare at a likely 0-3 start with a Monday night game at the revived Eagles and a match against two-time Super Bowl champion Kansas City.

Fear rages that Cousins hasn't recovered from a torn Achilles injury. The AJC's venerable Mark Bradley, a veteran diagnoser of Falcons woes, pointed out in Thursday's column that the Falcons apparently limited Cousins' formations and plays to reduce stress on his surgically repaired ankle.

As an aside, thanks to Bradley for disclosing the difference between the shotgun and pistol formations. I never knew that in the pistol, a back is placed in front of the quarterback, while the QB stands alone in the shotgun.

AJC Falcons beat writer D. Orlando Ledbetter in his game post-mortem observed that Cousins was rusty after not playing in any preseason exhibition games.

If Cousins' woes continue, the Falcons can always turn to surprise rookie draft selection Michael Penix Jr. Many other teams are trying to make a go with first-year quarterbacks.

That's why quarterback mediocrity grips the NFL.

Don't panic, Falcons faithful. Although the Saints and Bucs won, the Falcons still stand a good chance of winning the NFL South.

An upset in Philadelphia will restore Atlanta's Super Bowl delusions.

 

Remembering The Atlanta Journal's Sept. 11, 2001 coverage

On the anniversary of Sept. 11, I remember my Atlanta Journal-Constitution colleagues who've died since that momentous day.

I also honor the firefighters, police officers and workers lost when the World Trade Center towers collapsed in massive clouds of dust.

In one its last hurrahs, the afternoon Atlanta Journal put out a special edition reporting on the terrorist attack. The late Frank Hyland's on deadline account remains one of the most gripping in its urgency, factual details and dramatic writing. An old sportswriter, Frank was among the great rewrite men.

I recall seeing the late Bill Husted on the elevator that day, and how he gave me an encouraging smile. Bill wrote the pioneering "Tech Buddy" column, guiding many into their first forays into the new world of the Internet.

On the Journal copy desk, the late Frank White, the consummate jazz scholar, performed his duties. The Journal's desks heroically responded to the devastating event.

The newsroom was electric, with meetings and plans for wide-ranging coverage. The next morning's Constitution delivered a thorough package of stories and columns, but to me Hyland's piece for the dying Journal set the standard.

Many other newspaper colleagues have passed away in the 23 years since the terrorist attack shocked the nation. The rest of us have aged, fighting various ailments.

The Atlanta Journal soon ceased publication after more than 100 years of "covering Dixie like the dew."  The newspaper rose to a last moment of glory on Sept. 11, 2001.

 

Erik Larson's "The Demon of Unrest" examines nation's drive toward Civil War

South Carolina and six other deep South states had already seceded from the Union before Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration as president on March 4, 1861.

Following South Carolina's lead, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas formed the Confederate States of America after the little-known Illinois Republican's election in November 1860. The Southern states feared that Lincoln would seek to abolish slavery, although he had often promised to let it continue.

Best-selling popular historian Erik Larson's "The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War" examines in crucial day-by-day detail the country's plunge toward the war that killed 750,000 Americans.

South Carolina, its slave-owning planters known as "the chivalry," seethed with outrage following Lincoln's election. Unfurling a long list of grievances against the North's anti-slavery actions, the state declared its independence in December 1860.

The dithering of President James Buchanan and his administration's allegiance to the South led to Buchanan's failure to strengthen the defenses of the federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

As Buchanan delayed taking action to stop the Palmetto State's revolt, Charleston's slave-owning elite grew increasingly arrogant about attacking the fort.

South Carolina's belligerence spread, leading to the founding of the Confederacy in February 1861. In a decisive act, the new nation escalated its campaign against Fort Sumter, cutting off the small federal garrison's food supply, bolstering Charleston artillery batteries under the recently appointed Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard and raising a force of volunteer troops eager for battle.

After taking office, Lincoln persuaded his cabinet to resupply Fort Sumter, but the effort failed because of an astounding blunder by the overwhelmed president. Tensions rose in the South Carolina city known for its brutal slave markets.

The arrival of Union ships at the entrance of Charleston's harbor provoked Southern forces to shell the fort on April 12, 1861. The increasingly destitute federal forces returned the fire, but lacking food and running out of ammunition, Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered the next day, receiving safe passage to the North.The northern supply ships had sailed away, without ever entering the harbor.

During the crisis, Lincoln hoped that the prominent slave state of Virginia would stay in the union. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson' native state remained loyal until Lincoln issued a call for states to raise troops to put down the Southern rebellion.

Reacting to Lincoln's action, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina seceded, while Maryland, Missouri, Delaware and Kentucky remained in the union.

Virginia's Robert E. Lee, offered command of the Union army, resigned and joined the rebellion, eventually accelerating the war's intensity as the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. With Virginia in the fold, the Confederacy quickly moved its capital to Richmond.

While the Fort Sumter attack has received extensive attention as the event that began the Civil War, Larson brings to light little known incidents such as as a company of Citadel cadets firing shots at the federal ship Star of the West in Charleston Harbor several months before.

Larson presents a colorful gallery of well-known and obscure characters. Lincoln at first appears unsteady and overmatched, but slowly gains mastery.

The heroic Anderson, the rabid Southern secessionist Edmund Ruffin, who fired the first shot at the fort, the acclaimed Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut, Union Gen. Winfield Scott, the manipulative and influential Lincoln Cabinet member William H. Seward, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and several now obscure Southern slave-owners play significant roles in Larson's story.

Before Lincoln took office, rumors swirled about an invasion of Washington by Southern forces, plots to assassinate the new president, and the U.S. Senate not certifying his electoral college victory in a scenario similar to that of Jan. 6, 2020.

Scott's calling out of troops to protect the capital and the somewhat comic ruses carried out by detective agency founder Allan Pinkerton allowed Lincoln to take charge.

Larson's unveiling of the nation's plummet into civil war raises alarms for our politically volatile era.