Arts of War on the Web

VVA honored the internationally renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp in 2004 with our President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for her big Broadway show Movin’ Out, the Vietnam War-themed production done to the tune of 23 Billy Joel songs.

Another winner of the President’s Award, Nancy Sinatra, has had a hand in Tharp’s latest Broadway musical, Come Fly Away, which features the tunes of her father, Frank Sinatra, and which has just begun a North American tour. Several veteran dancers who have performed in Movin’ Out on Broadway and on the road—including Laurie Kanyok, Matthew Stockwell Dibble, Cody Green, John Selya and Ron Todorowski—are a part of the Come Fly Away road show ensemble.

Conceived, choreographed, and directed by Tharp, and by special arrangement with the Sinatra family and Frank Sinatra Enterprises, Come Fly Away tells the story of four couples falling in and out of love during one song-and-dance-filled evening at a bustling nightclub. It blends the recordings of Frank Sinatra with a live onstage big band and fourteen exceptional dancers.

The show opened on Broadway in March of last year. It just ended its initial tour run at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, and opens August 16 in Toronto. Other cities on the tour include Detroit,  Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

For complete details on those and the other road venues, go to www.comeflyaway.com.

The musical Hair—which deals squarely (if mostly zanily) with the Vietnam War on the home front—is back again on Broadway for a ten-week summer visit (through September 10) at the St. James Theater. Billed as “the American tribal love-rock musical,” Hair burst on the Broadway scene in 1968, and has had a bunch of revivals in the intervening years.

This latest one is a Tony-Award-winning (Best Musical Revival)  production that ran on Broadway in 2009, directed by Diane Paulus and choreographed by Karole Armitage. As it did two years ago, the 2011 version Broadway version is getting rave reviews.

“It’s a refreshingly low-tech matter of the bestowing of flowers, the laying on of friendly hands and urgent invocations to feel the love and agitate for peace,” Christopher Isherwood wrote in the July 13 New York Times. “There is also, of course, the culminating dance party onstage allowing everyone [including audience members] to join in the ecstatic finale of Diane Paulus’s production of this beloved portrait of youth culture in the late 1960s.”

President Richard M. Nixon, who practically based his long political career on being staunchly anti-communist, began the long process of Chinese-American rapprochement with his historic visit to what was then known in this country as “Red China” in February of 1972.  The United States still was fighting communism in Vietnam when Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger alit in Beijing, then referred to on these shores as “Peking.”

That landmark visit is the subject of the opera, Nixon in China, which had its debut in Houston in 1987, and has been put on in many venues since then. The latest production of the landmark opera, composed by John Adams with a libretto by Alice Goodman and produced by Peter Sellars, opened on February 2 at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and continues through February 19.

The Met is planning a broadcast of the three hour and forty minute opera to some 600 movie theaters across the country on Saturday, February 12. A PBS broadcast is slated for later this year.

The Vietnam War is only touched on in Nixon in China. At one point, Nixon, performed at the Met by James Maddalena, muses on the long, strange trip that resulted in him dining with Chairman Mao. For that to take place, Nixon says, he had to vault over “the bodies of our lost” from the Vietnam War.

Back in 2001 newspaper columnist Tom Philpott wrote a compelling book called Glory Denied: The Saga of Jim Thompson, America’s Longest-Held Prisoner of War, the amazing, true story of Col. Floyd James “Jim” Thompson. The former Special Forces officer was captured by the Viet Cong in March 1964 and not released until 1973, giving him the dubious honor of being held longer than any other Prisoner of War in U.S. history.

Thompson suffered greatly during his nine years of captivity, physically and emotionally.  To add to his troubles, while he was being held by the Viet Cong, Thompson’s wife moved with their four young children into the home of an Army sergeant.

The Thompsons reunited after his release, but their marriage soon dissolved. Thompson later suffered a stroke that diminished his mental capabilities. In his book, Tom Philpott told Jim Thompson’s story mainly through the verbatim testimony of his family, friends and colleagues. Much of Thompson’s own contributions came from interviews he gave for another book prior to his stroke.

The Jim Thompson story intrigued the composer Tom Cipullo, who sat down a few years ago and wrote a contemporary opera based on the tale. The Chelsea Opera in New York City put on several performances of Cipullo’s Glory Denied in November. The Boston Metro Opera will present a fully staged production with piano accompaniment in Jamaica Plain, Mass., on February 25 and 26. UrbanArias will offer six performances in Arlington, Virginia, beginning April 1.

New York Times critic Allan Kozinn called the Chelsea Opera Veterans Day performance, produced by Lynne Hayden-Findlay,  “a spare, affecting production.”

Instead of presenting the Thompsons’ “wrenching history as a straight narrative,” Kozinn said, “Mr. Cipullo tells it as a dialogue between past and present, with actions and their implications shown almost simultaneously.” Although the musical has only two characters, Cipullo has four singers play the two roles, as the younger and older Thompsons.

When you think of entertainment for the troops in Vietnam during the war, you naturally think of the Bob Hope USO extravaganzas. But the U.S. military also provided lots of stage entertainment–including rock music by Philippine bands, comedians from the states, and folk, soul, country and rock bands and even musical comedies performed by Special Service GI’s under a unit called the Command Military Touring Shows.

That includes 1969-70 run of the famed Off Off Broadway sensation, The Fantasticks, put together by a group of eleven soldiers and one female civilian employee. There’s a great article about that not very well known production in the current issue of Esopus, the eccentric, eclectic, glossy black and white nonprofit arts magazine.

The article, “OFF-OFF-OFF BROADWAY,” is an oral history by four of the GI’s who were in the show: Rick Holen, Joe Mauro, John Nutt, and Bob Sevra.

“The GIs seemed to be transported to another plane of existence during the performances,” Holen says. “The play lasted only about an hour and a half, but for that short period of time, we felt that we could put at least a temporary stop to the death and devastation, the boredom and total terror of war. The audiences would sometimes give us a standing ovation for five minutes. That is the magic of theater.”

VVA life member Ira Cooperman once again this year will be teaching the “Remembering the Vietnam War” course at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Cooperman, who served as a USAF intelligence officer in Vietnam and Thailand in 1965-66, developed the course last year with Bob Hopper, a former Foreign Service Officer.

The course is part of Chautauqua’s Special Studies program of weekly classes, and will be held from July 27-31 from 9:00–10:15 a.m. Cooperman and Hopper will examine the history, impact and consequences of America’s involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia from 1955-75 through personal experiences, literature and films.

During once class last summer the instructors and students discussed Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. This summer they will be discussing one of Philip Caputo’s works. You can read the entire course description at the Special Studies page.

“If any VVA member is interested in registering for this summer’s course, I’d be pleased to help them through the process,” Cooperman told us. Email him at ibcooperman@aol.com

The good old rock musical Hair opened on Broadway once again on March 31 at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre and the reviews were uniformly positive.

The latest revival of the more than 40-year-old sixties “American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” played in Central Park this summer, and the reaction was so positive that Hair once again is back on the Great White Way.

The story is the same: A tribe of urban hippies deals with political and social issues of the day, mainly the fact that one of their brethren is about to be drafted into the Army to fight in the Vietnam War. Director Diane Paulus and choreographer Karole Armitage are getting raves for putting together an exceptionally energetic ajd talented cast, including Gavin Creel as Claude, the draftee.

The Al Hirschfeld Theatre is located at 302 W. 45th St. Tickets go for from $37-$122. For more info, go to the show’s website.

It’s 41 years old and headed back to Broadway, where it all began. Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock-Musical, will be back on the Great White Way sometime after the first of the year. Hair had a very successful run this summer in a production staged by New York’s Public Theatre at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. A few days before it closed on September 14, the announcement was made about the move back to Broadway.

“The success of Hair has been thrilling, proving that this show speaks as powerfully today as it did 40 years ago,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said last week. “We are moving the show indoors, but the celebratory joy of this production will remain intact.”

Hair‘s world premiere at the Public Theatre came in 1967 during the height of the Vietnam War. The upbeat musical, which centers on a tribe of hippies dealing with one of them being drafted into the Army, moved to Broadway in 1968, where it ran for more than 1,800 performances.

It’s easy to forget that the main plot of the pioneering, iconic rock musical Hair–which New York City’s Public Theater is staging free of charge at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park this month–has to do with the Vienam War and the draft.

The Public Theater’s free shows–tickets are required; two per person, beginning at 1:00 p.m. the day of the performance at the theater, or at noon at http://www.publictheater.org – celebrates the 40th anniversary of the internationally acclaimed ensemble production that features 26 actors and singers. The new production includes some past Hair alumni.

Hair has many claims to fame, including being the first off-Broadway musical to transfer to Broadway. It officially opened at the Public Theater on Lafayette Street on October 17, 1967. After a six-week run, the show moved ton Broadway on April 29, 1968, where it ran for 1,873 performances. Road versions played all over the country and throughout the world, and Hair was made into a film in 1979 directed by Milos (Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, et al.) Foreman.

The show is set in 1967, and follows the antics of a group of hippies. One of the men, Claude, is drafted, and part of the free-flowing plot deals with what comes after he’s received his greetings from Uncle Sam.

I saw Hair on Broadway in 1969, and thought it was a hoot. I loved the music and the over-the-top anti-establishment humor. The production felt vibrantly alive, terrifically irreverant, and a slap in the face at our parents’ generation.

Does it stand up four decades later? “Sure, some of its act is a bit tired, especially the conjuring of an acid trip stretching over four numbers,” Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks wrote in his review. “Still in the score by Galt MacDermot, James Rado and Gerome Ragni, there remain the electric tunes of a Broadway classic, of a style that has been emulated in productions down the years, from Godspell to Rent.”

Marks went on to call the show “a potent mix of exhilaration and nostalgia,” and “something you’ll want to [see], even if it can never again be the type of seismic event it was back in the days of rage.”

The Central Park Public Theater Hair cast