Maestro: Hershey Felder as Leonard Bernstein

Reviewed by Neal Weaver
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
Through August 22

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In the last few years, musician Hershey Felder has used his multiple talents — as writer, actor, singer, virtuoso pianist and general raconteur — to create a memorable series of portraits of major figures in the music world, including George Gershwin, Fredric Chopin, Ludwig Beethoven, Franz Liszt and Irving Berlin. Now he has turned his attention to composer, conductor, author and educator Leonard Bernstein. And Bernstein must have provided Felder his greatest challenge because of his rich and extraordinary career, which left Felder with a huge amount of material to cover in less than two hours. (A simple list of Bernstein’s original works would be longer than the space allotted for this review.)

Felder goes in roughly chronological order in presenting Bernstein’s life. He draws considerable comedy from Bernstein’s Jewish parents: his erratic and unpredictable father, who had wanted his son to become a rabbi, and his much-loved mother. He then introduces us to a starry list of the musicians, mentors and conductors who taught or influenced Bernstein: conductors Dimitri Mitropoulos, Fritz Reiner, Bruno Walter, Serge Koussevitzky and Gustav Mahler, and composers like Aaron Copeland and Marc Blitzstein.

Felder also amply covers Bernstein’s contributions to musical theatre, performing excerpts from Wonderful Town (“A Little Bit in Love”), On the Town (“I Get Carried Away!”), West Side Story (“Tonight” “Maria” and “There’s a Place for Us,” one of the evening’s strongest numbers) and Candide (the rueful anthem “Make Our Garden Grow”). There’s nothing, however, from Bernstein’s score for Peter Pan (This was my first Broadway show, which I was lucky enough to see during its national tour, with Veronica Lake as Peter.) Classical excerpts include Wagner’s Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde, Beethoven’s 5^th and 7^th symphonies, some Mahler, and Bernstein’s own Jeremiah Symphony.

Bernstein’s life was marked by many strong, insoluble and intertwined conflicts: between his yearning to be recognized as a serious composer and his ambition to revolutionize musical theatre; between his longing to be an educator and his equal desire to be a pop star; and perhaps, most of all, between his apparently real love for his wife Felicia Montealegre and his extremely active homosexual sex life.

Felder acknowledges Bernstein’s homosexuality, but soft-peddles it in order to focus on his marriage to Felicia. As he recounts it: Late in life, Bernstein had a serious love affair with another man that led to a separation from her — but after a year the affair fizzled out, and he learned that Felicia had terminal cancer. She moved back in with him, and he nursed her till her death, leaving him saddled with guilt over having badly hurt her.

With so much terrain to cover, Felder’s piece is sometimes a bit sketchy, but he manages to touch on all the major events and issues, and the musical interludes give substance to the narrative. Felder also seems to personally identify with much in Bernstein’s life, and this makes for a performance that is as passionate as it is skillful.

The biggest compliment I can pay to Joel Zwick’s direction is that it is so smooth and seamless that I never once thought about it during the duration of the show. The handsome set is by Francois-Pierre Couture, and Christopher Ash created the lighting and visual projections.

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m., Sat., 2 & 8 p.m., Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; (310) 746-4000 or TheWallis.org. Running time: One hour and 45 minutes with no intermission.