Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany
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breach and appear on panels with each other and are probably, today, a bit more friendly than M. and I (I have even seen them dance together at an SF convention party!), you can still see the traces of the alignments in the attitudes of the older writers, even today.
The day Judy left for the Caribbean, Barbara Wise’s 25-year-old daughter, Julie, got married in a truly sumptuous home wedding. For the affair, I actually bought my first pair of dress shoes in about ten years. Then, a trip to the thrift store on 98th Street netted me a Pierre Cardin suit that almost fits, for a mere thirty dollars. It’s really quite handsome. Iva picked up her best party clothes from her mother’s, then she and I went down to attend on Sunday evening. I wept through the whole service, while Iva giggled at me.
The one real sadness there was that Barbara’s close friend Michael had been supposed to help out tending bar. I think I mentioned to you that he had AIDS, when we all had Christmas dinner together at Barbara’s in ’87. Well, the day of the wedding, he had to go into the hospital; he’s been falling a lot, sleeping even more; and a cat scan shows it’s gone to the brain—which is how it took Ralph, the year before. This may well be it. But the ceremony was lovely.
The bride looked beautiful. A harpist and flautist played throughout. All of Howard’s electronic art was a-glitter, a-flash, and a-blink about their sepulchrally large living room—including the great, John Ray wall light-sculpture (which had been on the fritz for the last half dozen years, but which Barbara had gotten Ray in to fix for the occasion—he lives here in Amherst, too! Barbara and I spent a lovely evening with him in December). The food Barbara managed to get together (down in the well that drops through the midst of the living room floor stood an immense ice sculpture of a dragon, set about with spring tropic flowers—because the newlyweds were to be honeymooning in the tropics) was beyond belief:
Shrimp. Ham. Vegetarian crepes. New potatoes stuffed with caviar (Sevruga!), salads and wonderfully fresh vegetables, and three kinds of champagne for the various courses—Deutch with the canapés, Taittinger with the entree—and (a daring move that worked, just taking people’s heads off!) peach champagne with the sumptuous wedding cake.
I had a long talk with one of the groom’s 17-year-old sons, and decided that—though going through a rough adolescence—he is a profoundly good kid.
There were about a hundred guests.
This Christmas my sister had given us tickets to Andrew Lloyd (Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express) Webber’s and Charles Hart’s The Phantom of the Opera.
The Monday after the wedding, on January 23rd, wearing much what we’d worn the night before, Iva and I went to see it.
It’s customary to say that the show is dreadful—but it’s just musically rather complicated. The production is lavish (and the season’s hugest Broadway success) on an order that the Broadway term “lavish” doesn’t usually cover. As spectacle, it makes it almost impossible to pay attention to the music—which is a decent modern-middlebrow leitmotif opera. But the spectacle is, I’m sure, why it’s successful.
The opening twin scenes are breathtaking. You enter a theater in ruins, with scenery fallen over the stage and gray hangings covering the proscenium, dust cloths on all the scenic statuary, some of which shows, broken and tarnished, from beneath it.
The lights go down, and, on stage, an auction starts. Objects from the old theater are being sold off. An old man in a wheelchair buys a little music box, on which a figure of a monkey plays cymbals. Lying askew on the stage, a huge, old theatrical chandelier is uncovered. The auctioneer explains that this is, indeed, the chandelier that figured in the disaster involved with “the strange affair of the Phantom of the Opera, never fully explained.” An attempt to illuminate the old object produces a sudden shower of sparks and short circuits, but suddenly the cables begin to haul the clinking, glittering object up from the boards, out over the audience, and toward the actual theater ceiling—at which point the entire house (not just the stage), over some twenty-eight bars of thunderous triple-fff organ, mostly in darkness, but with shafts of light darting now here, now there, to spotlight some instant of the transformation, returns to its 1890’s gilt and gaslit splendor!
It all settles down on a moment when a sort of clunky but colorful Meyerbeer-style opera (Hannibal?) is in progress on the stage.
It’s so impressive visually (as is, indeed, the rest of the show, with its underground lakes of dry ice, its disappearing mirror walls, its tilting subterranean stairways), you can’t possibly concentrate on the fairly intricate—and modestly intelligent—musical development.
I’ve been listening to the tapes, though, and I’ve ascertained that there really is something (if not that much) going on.
I read Gaston Leroux’s novel a couple of months back, before I saw the show. John Del Gaizo was a loader and workman at the Beacon Theater, which they revamped for the opening-night cast party. John’s stories from that evening are a tale in themselves! The novel is a hopelessly clunky mess. Leroux probably wrote it for three-part serialization in some French monthly pulp—likely without reading the earlier installments when working on the latter ones.
In the book, there’re really three phantoms (one of which, the mysterious rat-catcher in the theater cellar, was clearly going to get some sort of story to himself, before he got abandoned as Leroux came closer to the end), and heaven alone knows what Leroux thought the ending was going to be when he began—clearly he didn’t want to close off any possibilities! I’m sure when he started out, the mysterious Turk who is always wandering around back stage (and who turns out, quite unexpectedly, to be a detective, who takes the callow young hero, Raoul, under his wing and proceeds to solve the mystery) was going to turn into the first Phantom. But G.L. probably decided that was too obvious. Eric (the Phantom we all know and love) must have more professions (engineer, architect, composer, singing teacher, magician, sideshow manager, assassin, oriental torturer, horse trainer …) than any other character ever to make it through a penny-dreadful. All of which professions he’s superb at—of course.
What is fascinating however: the book symbolizes beautifully the uncomfortable psychological underside of the transformation of the early 19th century, perpetually lit-up romantic theater of light into the late romantic, Wagnerian theater of darkness. The whole creaky melodrama is a black and reactionary allegory of the transformation that accompanies it, not only in the performing arts, but in all the rest as well, between early “performer-as-craftsman,” socially only a little higher than a prostitute, and “performer-as-artist” (truly concerned about the work, obsessive over study and the spiritual center of the music, possessed by the artist and his mission) that accompanied the theatrical transformation Bayreuth brought about in the general art world between 1876 and the death of Edward VII in 1910 (the year of The Phantom’s first book publication). For most of the original story, the Phantom is not real. He is only in Christine’s mind. But at the same time he is her singing teacher and the composer of the new and supremely difficult opera that all the traditional singers find nearly impossible to learn their parts in …
It really is a straight portrayal of the Wagner mythos.
The chandelier the Phantom brings crashing down mid-story on the audience, murdering one unfortunate woman in the stalls, is doubtless an old-fashioned gas or candle-lit affair, which burned under the ceiling of the theater throughout the performance. The new one that goes up to replace it (and which the new theater managers are so proud of) is certainly an electric one, which is extinguished during performances—rendering the theater dark (and modern!), à la Bayreuth, but which—problematically and allegorically—allows the Phantom an even easier time in wreaking his murderous mischief on all and sundry.
Note that more than half the Phantom’s actual energy is directed toward the two new Paris Opera managers on “how his theater is to be run” and securing his 20-thousand-francs-per-quarter salary! I mean, how Wagnerian could you get? The Webber show, incidentally, takes it out of the Paris Opera and replaces it in an imaginary theater called The Opéra Populaire.
And—with its “music