Word: macdermot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...HUMAN COMEDY Music by Gait MacDermot Libretto by William Dumaresq
...latest composer to blur the line is Gait MacDermot, 55, whose The Human Comedy is currently playing at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in Manhattan. Based on William Saroyan's 1943 novel, Comedy is a sprawling, episodic work that contains 84 separate musical numbers and lasts 2½ hours. MacDermot's plain, open-faced style, a melange of jazz, rock and gospel singing, is ideally suited to the sturdy values of familial love, courage and patriotism that Saroyan so sentimentally celebrated. Just as MacDermot's 1967 Hair resonated in the era of tribal-love rock...
This poses a problem that MacDermot and his librettist, WilliamDumaresq, never quite overcome. Indomitability is all very well, but a concept cannot sing...
...music is a different matter. MacDermot's stylistic profligacy is welded by an underlying bluesy harmony. This is established early in Hi Ya Kid, a wistful exchange between young Ulysses Macauley (Josh Blake) and a passing black trainman (David Johnson), and consolidated later in a gentle gospel anthem for the whole town, Beautiful Music. The pop-music style of the '40s is nostalgically evoked in The Birds, a soft-shoe love song for the assistant telegraph operator, Spangler (Rex Smith), and Diana (Leata Galloway). Most effective of all is a bittersweet canonic letter duet for Marcus (Don Kehr...
...composer needs to be more careful about prosody: misplaced accents make some lines sound as if they were translated from Czech. He also overuses the device of building scenes from a solo or duet into a chorus. But MacDermot's invention, which puts unexpected topspin on his melodies, his deft handling of a small pit orchestra and, at bottom, his appealing portrayal of homey virtues all add up to an evening that stubbornly sticks in the memory's ear. Which, of course, is what real operas are supposed to do. -By Michael Walsh