A Changing World

Simon Green brings his countryman Noel Coward to life in his new CD, A Changing World, which features the artist’s great songs as well as his words of wisdom on love, patriotism and other matters. The quotes, which are effective because they are not overdone, help paint such a full portrait that listening is like spending time with Coward, and enjoying every minute.

From the beginning with songs of “pride and grace” that celebrate England, to the finish with the tender “Come the Wild, Wild Weather,” Green and his superb accompanist, David Shrubsole, transport us to an era of sophistication and wit. And it’s a delightful journey!

Green comes to cabaret from a musical theatre background and that experience can be heard in how he conveys the story and sentiment of each song. He has chosen an interesting mix, from the romantic to the risqué to the oh, so humorous. The complete list is:

1.) There Have Been Songs in England/You Were There
2.) Couldn’t We Keep on Dancing?
3.) Where Are the Songs We Sung?/A Room With a View/I’ll Follow My Secret Heart
4.) What’s Going to Happen to the Tots?
5.) Time and Again/Wait a Bit Joe
6.) On Leaving England for the First Time/London Pride/I Travel Alone/Sail Away
7.) Three Theatrical Dames
8.) Why Must the Show Go On?
9.) Twentieth Century Blues
10.) I’m Old Fashioned/Let’s Do It
11.) Alice Is at It Again
12.) I’ll See You Again/This Is a Changing World
13.) Someday I’ll Find You
14.) Come the Wild, Wild Weather


The CD was inspired by Green’s popular Coward show last year at 59E59 Theaters. I’m hoping a similar recording will come out of the show he did there this past holiday season, Simon Green Traveling Light. That was a joy, as is “A Changing World.” I highly recommend it.

Mastering Ministry

    Michael W. DeLashmutt remembers the first time he was to lead evensong as the new vice president and dean of academic affairs at General Seminary.  Anxiety was getting the best of him until one of his colleagues told him not to worry.  If he dropped the liturgical ball, one of them would pick it up for him.

     “That’s what liturgy does for us,” he said. “It catches us when we stumble.”

     That story illustrates two key elements in DeLashmutt’s life, a respect for the tradition of a common liturgy and the power of community to sustain us on the Christian journey.  They are the strength of the Episcopal tradition for him and the foundation of the seminary’s education. To that core he has added what he saw as a missing ingredient in ministerial preparation — practical leadership training.  With that in mind, he create a new Master of Arts in Ministry degree for people interested in being leaders in the church but who don’t necessarily feel called to ordination.  It is the first new degree program in 20 years at the nearly 200-year-old seminary and it welcomed four students to its inaugural semester in September.

     “It responds to a real deficit in Christian education across the mainline churches,” DeLashmutt said. “It reflects a truer vision of what seminary education should be, to prepare people — all God’s people — for service.”

   DeLashmutt discussed this new master’s degree in the seminary’s dining hall where students and faculty share a daily meal. He had just finished teaching the last class for the semester of his Introduction to Christian Theology course during which students gave presentations on topics ranging from a feminist analysis of the doctrine of original sin to the study of the theology of trauma. For DeLashmutt, class and lunch go hand-in-hand.

     “We’re engaged in reconciling relationships,” he said.  “We’re reflecting the eucharistic table.  You can't talk about theology without engaging in practices of reconciliation.  That’s what this is.”

   So Christian education happens in the classroom and it continues over a meal of turkey and gravy, roasted potatoes, root vegetable and cream of broccoli soup.  What General has added to the mix with the new degree program is leadership training to take spiritual values into the workplace.

     “Spiritual habits transfer to people wherever they’re headed,” DeLashmutt says. “At an NGO or in nonprofit leadership, all of these for a Christian would require a different context. Your leadership would be different if you believe the gospel is true.  In youth work, it would be with an eye toward the spiritual formation of the individual.”

     With the seminary’s educational history as its base, the Master of Ministry program includes a Harvard Business School-type component to create a degree that offers the same quality of education as that of the training for the priesthood.

    “There’s wisdom out there to be evaluated in light of the gospel,” DeLashmutt says. “Augustine gave us permission to look at these and evaluate where truth might be useful.”

     DeLashmutt, who is a lay person with a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Glasgow, says the church is changing significantly and that fewer full-time positions are available for clergy in the Episcopal tradition, making it important to prepare lay people for ministry “in a structured, thought-out way.”

     The seminary has long been open to anyone seeking religious education, but the focus was on ordination. The Master of Ministry is the second “professional MA,” with the first being the Master of Arts in Spiritual Direction.

    "To respond to the church of the future, there will be  increasing and often parallel opportunities for lay people to do ministry alongside the ordained,” says the Very Rev. Kurt H. Dunkle, 13th dean and president. “Education and formation are essential whether one is ordained or not. For those who feel so called to lead the church without the anticipation of being ordained, it seems like the church should work to equally prepare these folks.

The MA in Ministry directly and practically affirms our commitment of educating and forming both lay leaders and ordained leaders for the church in a changing world."

   The seminary’s core remains the same.

    “We are profoundly Episcopal,” DeLashmutt said.  “We’re not changing that, but we feel we have something to share.  We’re a residential seminary in an urban context.  We want to make that available to as many people as possible.”

     While lay people have been studying theology together for decades in Education for Ministry (EFM), a four-year distant learning certificate program, General’s program is an accredited master’s degree.

     “Walking away with graduate credits is always a good thing,” DeLashmutt says.  “EFM can be theologically rich but it’s not engineered specifically for vocational training.”

     The seminary’s Master’s can “respond to trends in a very short time,” DeLashmutt says, adding that if several students wanted to pursue careers in youth ministry, “in six months we could spin up a curriculum.  We have the resources.  We have thousands of dollars worth of books and the faculty is up for it.”

     Similarly, if students are interested in Christian education, prison ministry or social work, “we could quickly develop a curriculum to meet the changing needs of the student.”

     In the case of David Gungor, who is a professional musician, this approach was applied to his summative project.  Rather than writing a paper for his final project, he composed and recorded several songs that responded to themes in Pannenberg systematic theology. In addition to the music, he wrote a small paper that described his process and spelled out the academic dimension of the creative work.

     “We are teaching with a ministry horizon in mind, so that the future vocational goals of our students inform everything that we do,” DeLashmutt says.   “As a small school, this allows us to work closely with students, to design everything from whole courses to individual assignments that help integrate theological studies and ministry development.”

     The Rev. Canon C.K. Robertson, canon to the Presiding Bishop for Ministry Beyond the Episcopal Church, said we are at a time when it is important for seminaries to “think outside the box” and that General’s new master’s, the only one of its kind in the Episcopal tradition, is a good example.

     “There’s a great need in the church to be more serious about leadership,” he said, citing St. Paul as someone whose ministry was successful because he combined the theological with the practical.  “We’re at a time when we need to remember or imagine what ministry was like in the past.”

     Robertson teaches a course each semester at General in the Master of Divinity program, alternating between traditional subjects such as the New Testament and courses in congregational development and conflict resolution.

     “Always the goal is how to join the theological with the practical,” he said.  “That’s crucial.”      

     Accreditation for the new master’s was completed in April, leaving the school little time to advertise before fall admissions needed to be decided.  DeLashmutt says this is good because with only four students the seminary can readily meet their vocational needs as it builds the new program.  Two students heard of it through word of mouth and two were already students who transferred into the new master’s.

    Gungor is one of the word-of-mouth newbies. An assistant pastor at Trinity Grace, a nondenominational church in lower Manhattan, he is also a songwriter, singer and musician and has found what he’s learned in just one semester to be of great benefit to his work.

     “I’m an artist and I work at a church that’s not Episcopal,” he said.  “It’s a beautiful stepping stone to a more sacramental view of artistry.  It’s good for my church and it’s good for my art.  It’s practical to what I do.”

     Gungor, 31, spoke from the living room of the apartment he shares with his wife, Kate, a student in the Master of Spiritual Direction program, and their four children.  Windows look onto the lawn of the Close and the surrounding 19th century buildings. It is into that picturesque world that he allows his children out to play, knowing they will be safe, with the kind of freedom he enjoyed growing up in the mid-west.

     “We fell in love with the campus,” he said.  “It’s such a family-friendly place. We feel like we have our own lawn.”

  The son of an evangelical pastor, Gungor is not an Episcopalian.  The new Master’s is open to all Christians.

     “The Episcopal Church really is a beautiful expression of faith for where I am,” he said, adding that the Master’s could be a track to see if he wants to be ordained. “The program seemed welcoming to me as an outsider. The Episcopal Church is welcoming to diverse thought.  It’s not afraid to question and to wrangle.  I feel like I’m able to learn from and contribute ideas that are different in class.”

     This is exactly what the program’s creator had in mind.  DeLashmutt says models of traditional seminary education were inherited from the Berlin school, with students being trained to be “the intellectual leaders of the community.” It was highly philosophical and “practical ministry education of any sort was marginalized.” 

     That DeLashmutt has found a home in the Episcopal church is a reflection of the same welcoming nature that Gungor found.  His background is eclectic — Methodist then Baptist then Pentecostal, until an incident when he was 19 turned him off from that tradition and he more or less abandoned going to church.  He did, though, continue to respond to a call he first felt at 16, a desire for a career in some kind of ministry.  Wanting a theological education led him to Fuller Theological Seminary Northwest and to what turned out to be a life-changing experience when a friend invited him to a Presbyterian service in Seattle. For the first time he experienced clergy wearing vestments and an order of service that began with a deacon offering a confession and absolution.

     “I just felt something in me break.  I had a profound sense of gratitude and acceptance.”

     That was the beginning of his transition to mainline churches.  He found his way to the Anglican communion while living in the United Kingdom and was confirmed at Easter Vigil in 2011.

     “Liturgy is that thing that carries you,” he says.  “It’s almost like a net of grace that holds you when you can’t stand on your own.  The prayers are from scripture, to pray back to God.  God gives us the words when we don’t have the words. Liturgical spirit, to me, is one way of providing deep meaning in the midst of life.”

     DeLashmutt sees the seminary’s education as providing that net of grace. He thinks of the disorientation he felt before his first evensong at General because it helps him relate to how new students can feel.  

     “We set a culture of forgiveness,” he says.  “Students can feel free to make mistakes because they have a structure in place.”

Nancy LaMott DVD

I don’t usually like music DVDs because to me they’re like watching a play or musical on TV; they feel too distant. I had just the opposite reaction, though, to I’ll Be Here With You, a collection of live performances of my favorite cabaret singer, Nancy LaMott. It spans two decades, starting in 1978 and going until her death, at 43, of uterine cancer in 1995.

I am so grateful to David Friedman for compiling and producing this chance to be with Nancy again. She had sung many of his wonderful songs through the years, works I love so much like “Listen to My Heart,” “We Can Be Kind” and “I’ll Be Here With You.” He promised her she would not be forgotten and that he would get her music out there to a large audience. Her beautiful voice has been blessing my life all these years through four recordings she made and one of unheard performances assembled and brought out by her friends after her death. Now with this DVD of 24 live performances, I can appreciate her extraordinary voice as well as her lovely spirit and playful personality.

I knew a great deal about Nancy’s fascinating, and often painful, life, but the DVD made me feel I knew her personally, and I enjoyed watching her grow and change. It was delightful to see her in the early days as a San Francisco club singer, looking a bit like the young Princess Di with her short bowl haircut and chubby face, and then to see her transform into a bubbly New York cabaret star and finally a slimmed-down, poised, mature singer. At every stage, what is so appreciated is that rich, sensitive voice, captured now forever thanks to footage from appearances at the Algonquin's Oak Room and on "Live! With Regis & Kathie Lee." Songs include "The Waters of March," "The Best Is Yet to Come" and "Moon River." The latter was performed on the "Charles Grodin Show" just nine days before Nancy's death. The DVD also includes a photo montage and a "Broadway Beat" interview conducted with LaMott in 1994.

A TV movie about Nancy’s life is being made, and it was certainly a life that will make a compelling movie. Raised in Midland, Michigan, Nancy began singing as a teenager in her father’s band. Around this time she also developed Crohn's disease, a bowel disorder for which she would endure many surgeries over the years, causing her much financial hardship, and leaving her in pain a great deal of the time. I heard an interview with her brother after her death and he said she was often in so much pain she could barely made it to the stage, but she did, and always walked out with a big smile. He said she often sang her best when she was in the most pain.

Despite the illness, she knew she had to get out of Midland to pursue her dream, so at the age of 19 she and her brother, Brett, who was her drummer, headed out to San Francisco where she became one of the most sought-after cabaret singers in the area. Then, when she felt she was ready to try the big time of New York, she went thanks to a friend who bought her a plane ticket because he believed in her talent so strongly; she was too broke from her medical bills to fund the move. She arrived in NYC with $1,000, borrowed two lawn chairs for furniture and began looking for work as a singer while working as an office clerk during the day.

The success she had found in San Francisco reoccurred in New York. According to nancylamott.com, from which much of this biographical information comes, “Nancy quickly became known in the small circle of the cabaret world as one of the great singers of her time, but her momentum toward success was always interrupted by illness, surgery and the resulting lack of funds. People were captivated not only by Nancy’s talent, but by her simple goodness and beauty of spirit, and she made many good friends, including David Zippel, Mark Sendroff, Bill McGrath and Bob Baker, who were there for her triumphs and helped her through the bad times.”

Up until now, she was a well-kept secret of the cabaret world, but in 1989 she met composer/conductor David Friedman who thought she should be making records and offered to produce them himself. Through her records, Nancy’s popularity spread to a wider circle and she began breaking attendance records at some the most prestigious clubs in New York, including the Chestnut Room at Tavern on the Green and the world famous Oak Room at the Algonquin.

With all this good fortune, Nancy still had to deal with her medical problems and surgeries. Finally, her disease became too serious, and she was forced to have an ileostomy, a life-changing operation. For the first time she felt well and could eat whatever she wanted. With her newfound energy and health, her career really took off.

She began touring extensively and was discovered by WQEW disc jockey Jonathan Schwartz, which led to her being played on 1,000 radio stations all over the country. Kathie Lee Gifford became a huge fan and played an enormous part in promoting Nancy nationally and also in personally supporting her toward the end of her life. During this time Nancy sang twice at the Clinton White House.

It was in March of 1995 that she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She chose to do hormone therapy as opposed to surgery so she could complete the greatest album of her career, Listen To My Heart, with a full orchestra led by the legendary Peter Matz.

Just after her diagnosis, Nancy was in San Francisco doing an AIDS benefit when she was introduced to actor Pete Zapp. They quickly fell in love and began a bicoastal romance.

In July, Nancy was told that the hormone therapy had not worked and that she needed to have a hysterectomy. She postponed it one month so she could play the Algonquin one more time. As soon as that engagement was over, Nancy had the surgery and was told the cancer had spread slightly and she would need chemotherapy. During this period, she kept performing, doing a sold-out week at Tavern on the Green, and even fulfilling concert dates around the country. Then she would have a chemo treatment and spend a week recovering at Kathie and Frank Gifford’s Connecticut estate.

The chemo and the disease began to take their toll, and just a few days after her last performance, on "Charles Grodin," Nancy was taken to the hospital and her friends and family were told that she had just a couple days to live.

Peter Zapp and her family and friends rushed to her side. On Dec. 13, President and Mrs. Clinton phoned her in the hospital to wish her well. David Friedman promised her that the whole world would hear her sing. And that night, in the last hour of her life, Father Stephen Harris performed a bedside wedding ceremony for Nancy and Peter.

Nancy LaMott had it all, if only for 45 minutes. She died with friends and family around her, married for the first time in her life, and knowing she was on her way to far wider recognition.

A public memorial service was held for her on Feb. 11, 1996, at St. Paul the Apostle Church in New York City, with 1,500 people in attendance, including Margaret Whiting, Tony Bennett, Peter Matz, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman.

I hope you will order this blessing of a DVD, and please do what I’ve been doing all these years when I listen to that ever-so-special voice, say a prayer for Nancy.

DIANE SAWYER

As of January, Diane Sawyer will be ABC's new anchor for the evening news. I'm thrilled that two of the three network anchors will be women -- even if I can't watch because I don't have television (and have no desire for it).

Daring to Dream Big!
How Diane Sawyer learned to accomplish even her biggest dreams

Many of us, I think, can look back and recall certain specific moments in our lives that take on greater importance the longer we live. "The past has a different pattern," T.S. Eliot wrote, when viewed from each of our changing perspectives.

For me, one of those moments occurred when I was 17 years old. I was a high school senior in Louisville, Kentucky, representing my state in the 1963 America's Junior Miss competition in Mobile, Alabama. Along with the other young contestants, I was doing my best to hold up under the grueling week-long schedule of interviews, agonies over hair that curled or wouldn't, photo sessions, nervous jitters and rehearsals. In the midst of it all, there was one person who stood at the center—at least my psychological center—someone I viewed as an island in an ocean of anxiety.

She was one of the judges. A well- known writer. A woman whose sea-gray eyes fixed on you with laser penetration, whose words were always deliberate. She felt the right words could make all the difference. Her name was Catherine Marshall.

From the first moment I met Catherine Marshall, I was aware that she was holding me—indeed all of us—to a more exacting standard. While other pageant judges asked questions about favorite hobbies and social pitfalls, she sought to challenge. She felt even 17-year-old girls—perhaps especially 17-year-old girls—should be made to examine their ambitions and relate them to their values.

During the rehearsal on the last day of the pageant, the afternoon before it would all end, several of us were waiting backstage when a pageant official said Catherine Marshall wanted to speak with us. We gathered around. Most of us were expecting a last-minute pep talk or the ritual good luck wish. or at most an exhortation to be good citizens, but we were surprised.

She fixed her eyes upon us. "You have set goals for yourselves. I have heard some of them. But I don't think you have set them high enough. You have talent and intelligence and a chance. I think you should take those goals and expand them. Think of the most you could do with your lives. Make what you do matter. Above all, dream big."


It was not so much an instruction as a dare. I felt stunned, like a small animal fixed on bright lights. This woman I admired so much was disappointed in us—not by what we were but by how little we aspired to be.

I won the America's Junior Miss contest that year. In the fall I entered Wellesley College, where my sister. Linda, was beginning her junior year. I graduated in 1967 with a B.A. degree in English and a complete lack of inspiration about what I should do with it.

I went to my father, a lawyer and later a judge in Louisville's Jefferson County Court. "But what is it that you enjoy doing most?" he asked.

"Writing," I replied slowly. "I like the power of the word. And working with people. And being in touch with what's happening in the world."

He thought for a moment. "Did you ever consider television?"

I hadn't.

At that time there were few if any women journalists on television in our part of the country. The idea of being a pioneer in the field sounded like dreaming big. So that's how I came to get up my nerve, put on my very best Mary Tyler Moore girl journalist outfit, and go out to convince the news director at Louisville's WLKY-TV to let me have a chance.

He gave it to me—and for the next two and a half years, I worked as a combination weather and news reporter.
Eventually, though, I began to feel restless. I'd lie awake at night feeling that something wasn't right. I'd wait for the revelation, the sign pointing in the direction of the Big Dream. What I didn't realize is what Catherine Marshall undoubtedly knew all along—that the dream is not the destination but the journey.

I was still working at WLKY when, in 1969, my father was killed in an auto crash. His death—coupled with my urge to make a change—spurred me in the search for a different job and also seemed to kindle my interest in the world of government, law and politics. I racked my brain. I put out feelers. And then one of my father's associates said, "What about Washington?"

Several months later, in the autumn of 1970, I said goodbye to my mother and Linda and to the good folks at WLKY, and boarded a plane for Washington, D.C.

Now, I know this may sound incredibly naive, but when the plane landed at National Airport, I got off with a very firm idea of where I wanted to work. At the White House. True, in the eyes of official Washington I might be right off the equivalent of the turnip truck, but working in the White House was exactly what I had in mind!

Thanks to a few kind words of recommendation from a friend of my father's, I was able to obtain an interview with Ron Ziegler, the White House press secretary, and I was hired.

Those were heady days. The Press Office, located in the West Wing of the White House, was the hub for information flowing between the White House and the media. I worked hard and I worked long and loved every part of it.
Then came Watergate.

In the summer of 1974 the President resigned. Immediately I was appointed to his transition team in San Clemente, California.

My assignment on the West Coast was supposed to last only six months. But a few days after my arrival the President made a request that I was totally unprepared for. He asked me to consider staying on in San Clemente—along with several other writers and aides—to assist him in researching and writing his memoirs. I had to make a choice, and a choice that I knew would have consequences.

"Career suicide." mumbled some of my friends.

But I had worked for this man and he had been good to me. Now he was asking me for something that I was in a position to give. I have never regretted the decision. I stayed.

One day in the long exile, Catherine Marshall and her husband, Leonard LeSourd, called to say they were nearby. They came for a visit, and once again I felt the searching gaze and, implicit in it, the words. "What is next?" Again I came to appreciate the immense power of someone who is unafraid to hold other people to a standard. And again I realized the way a single uncompromising question can force reexamination of a life.

Today, after three years as co-anchor on the CBS Morning News, I'm co-editor of CBS's 60 Minutes television newsmagazine. We work at a breakneck pace with long hours and constant travel thrown in. I keep a suitcase packed at all times so that I can be ready to fly out on assignment at a moment's notice.

My New York apartment, which I see far too little of these days, has become my refuge, the place where I'm free to pad about in jeans and a sweatshirt—no makeup, no contact lenses, no hairspray. Sometimes I unwind by playing the piano. Or I relax by doing something simple but satisfying—baking a pan of muffins or cleaning out an old junk drawer.

These are the times of silent reassessment.

When I go out into the world again—and who knows where I'll be flying next?—I can almost hear a wonderful woman prodding me with her fiery challenge to stretch further and, no matter how big the dream, to dream a little bigger still.

God, she seems to be saying, can forgive failure, but not failing to try.


This essay by Diane Sawyer appeared in Guideposts Magazine.

Could it happen again?

     When Jeanne Sakata saw a documentary about a Japanese-American college student in World War II who fought against the mass incarceration of his people all the way to the Supreme Court, she wanted to know more about this civil rights champion.  Much more.

     “It was shocking to me that I had never heard about Gordon’s story,” she said, referring to Gordon Hirabayashi.  “I come from a Japanese-American family in northern California.  There was a lot of pride in our community at being Japanese-American.”

   Hirabayashi’s story also had personal resonance for her.  Sakata’s father, Tommy, and her aunts and uncles, all born in America to Japanese immigrant parents, had been imprisoned when he was in high school as part of the United States government’s forced removal and mass incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast.

  “I was enthralled,” she said. “I felt like I had discovered a treasure, a great American saga.”

     As an actress, she envisioned this American story being told on an American stage. Saying she became “obsessed” with it in 1997 as she thought about the documentary, she researched all she could find about Hirabayashi’s gradual awakening as a University of Washington student to the racial injustice, leading to  his bold defiance of curfew and exclusion orders, which landed him in jail before he took his cause to the Supreme Court in 1943, where the court ruled against him. Forty years later Hirabayashi v. United States was reopened and he was victorious.

     “The story took over my life,” she said.  “I went to bed thinking about it and I woke up thinking about it.  I have a deep personal, psychic connection to it.  Writing the play was very redemptive for me.”

    Just as this ugly chapter in American history had shaped Hirabayashi’s life — and Sakata’s father’s family’s — it also began to transform Sakata’s. Over the course of a decade, her obsession led her from actress to playwright.  The work that was born, Hold These Truths, has played around the country since its world premiere in 2007 at East West Players in Los Angeles, under its original title, Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi. 

     The one-man play will have its first post-presidential election production at New York’s Sheen Center for Thought & Culture from Dec. 3 to 20 under the direction of Lisa Rothe. Different productions will play at Lyric Stage Company of Boston from Dec. 1 through 31 and at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in the spring.

     Sakata spoke about her journey with this work from her car while parked in a shady residential block of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. She had been helping her husband, a psychotherapist, move his office.  Worried that one piece of wall art would be damaged in the moving truck, she took it in her car and stopped for a 90-minute phone interview.

     Hold These Truths’s Off-Broadway run is a revival of the show that had its New York premiere in 2012 starring Joel de la Fuente, who won a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance and who will reprise the role at the Sheen Center.  Even though it was seen in the city just five years ago, Sakata  and de la Fuente think the play has a message that should be heard again.

     “We really do need to see an American story about what it is to be an American and what the Constitution is,” de la Fuente said during a telephone interview from his home in the New York suburbs.  “It’s a profound and living document but only if we fight for it.  If we don’t, it’s only a piece of paper.  So many people like Gordon show it can be more than that, but there’s a price.  You have to not only have faith, but stand up for that faith.”

  De la Fuente, whose parents emigrated from the Philippines, has performed the show more than a half dozen times and is encouraged by responses the show receives during audience talkbacks.

     “Gordon was the kind of person Americans revere,” he said.  “He has strong faith and a code of beliefs and he stands by those beliefs in a climate of tremendous unrest and fear.  When people become afraid and feel threatened, all kinds of crazy things happen. There’s a rush to surrender human rights.  After 9/11 people were even volunteering to surrender those hard fought for and hard won rights we have that make our country what it is.”

     Rothe has been with the project since being asked to direct a reading of it in 2009.  

     “I’m not changing anything at all,” she said during a telephone interview from a diner in midtown Manhattan. “It speaks even louder to what is happening now.  In the cycle of life, we think, ‘Oh, this could happen again.’”

     As she has in the past, Rothe is keeping the staging simple.

     “In a one-person show, portraying 36 different characters, the focus is on the actor less than on the set.  It’s three chairs, one suitcase, some books and Joel and that’s it.”

     De la Fuente transforms the chairs into a courtroom, a car, or whatever the scene calls for. 

     The play opens and closes with Hirabayashi as a retired professor in his mid-60s and goes back in time for him to tell his story.  The political and social forces operating in the 1940s are brought out through Hirabayashi’s conversations with the other characters in his life.  Sakata drew heavily from Hirabayashi’s letters to a friend, which are on file at the University of Washington.  The friend had saved all of them.

     “I don’t know if I could have written the play without them,” Sakata says.  “They gave me the voice of the younger Gordon.  When I met him he was a retired professor in his 70s, of a different time and voice.  In the letters he’s just a young idealistic college student dealing with this travesty. I saw the force of his personality shining through.”

     And she got to experience that force in her two interviews with Hirabayashi, first at his brother’s house in the Bay area of San Francisco and later at his home in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada where he was a retired sociology professor from the University of Alberta.

     “Gordon was a natural storyteller,” she said.  “He loved people. One of the things that was essential to Gordon was his curiosity.  He never stopped learning.”

   In writing about the World War II racism, Sakata purposefully avoided using the term internment camp, substituting instead mass incarceration or imprisoned. 

     “It’s not really descriptive of what the experience was really like, American citizens incarcerated behind barbed wire.  I use the term mass incarceration because it was a mass incarceration of a whole population of people.”

     Sakata’s father died 20 years ago and so never saw her play.  He rarely spoke about his time of imprisonment, and then only in hushed tones, but she believes the play would have touched him. 

     Hirabayashi, who died in 2012 at 93, also never got to see it.   Sakata had lost touch with him for a couple of years when she was particularly busy with acting. When she got back to working on the play she called Hirabayashi and learned from his wife, Susan, that he had Alzheimer’s Disease. 

     “I think it would have meant a lot to Gordon,” she said.  “He saw his battle as representing all Americans at any point who might have their Constitutional rights threatened.”

     Hirabayashi’s awakening to those rights is a turning point in the play.  One night when he is running across the University of Washington campus to get to his room before the curfew imposed by the government on people of Japanese ancestry, he notices an American flag and stops.

     “Why am I running,” he asks himself.  “I was born here.  Raised here.  I am an American citizen.”  He returns to the library and his civil rights stand begins.

    President Barack Obama awarded Hirabayashi the Presidential Medal of Freedom three months after his death.

     “It’s really a cautionary tale,” Sakata said.  “It seems like daily there are assaults on our freedom.  Gordon’s story is more timely than ever.  I used to be optimist and think that it could never happen again but now I’m not so sure.  It all depends on whether the white supremacists can be stopped.  For some of us, the election of Trump was a shock.  If that could happen, what else could happen?  I’m very uncertain about the future of our country.”     

     Hold These Truths offers hope.  In all the writings of and about Hirabayashi, it was words of his own that Sakata knew should end the play, and so they do:

    “I am somewhat aware of what was, and is.

     I have a glimpse of what ought to be.

     I seek to live as though the ought to be, is.”

I Want to Hear the Invisible: The Collegiate Chorale Sings Glass and Golijov

 

By Mary Sheeran            

Melody that begins, soars, and resolves has become hard to find. Relentless, driving rhythms pound at us in restaurants and gyms. And in the world of (so-called) contemporary classical music, melody has given way to explorations of tonality and rhythm, of non-western music, and other journeys where, if the word “melodic” should appear, it is usually preceded by the word “unabashedly,” as if one should be abashed.

Minimalism emerged in music (notably by Steve Reich, John Adams, and Philip Glass) almost by necessity, as if composers were trying to find out where they were in all this, a search within a search. Although many feel that minimalist music merely adds to the noise and the driving rhythm, or think it is a boring reduction, it is rather a quest for the essential, or rather, the removal of anything that is not essential. Like moving from a three-story house to a New York apartment and figuring what to keep and what to toss.  Such tossing can hurt and unsettle.

In terms of spirituality (and music belongs in that realm), the process is a much more potent journey – an attempt to eliminate all but the very basics of flesh and spirit to discover a spiritual wholeness and a new way to see. This is one aim of chant, which one might call minimalist, or rather, minimalizing. Philip Glass’s work relies on chant, even if on the surface it seems that he only contributes to the noise of the world. Actually, he is working to get beyond it, and like chant, that can provide a spiritual experience. It means work, though.            

That was evident during a concert at Carnegie Hall last week with the Collegiate Chorale, which, under the capable direction of James Bagwell, presented Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 7 – A Toltec Symphony and Osvaldo Golijov’s Oceana. Both pieces are strong, dramatic, and feature interesting combinations of instruments and voices. Both were inspired by Latin American themes.            

The National Symphony Orchestra commissioned the piece to honor conductor Leonard Slatkin on his 60th birthday. In fact, Slatkin did the inviting, noting mischievously that he was happy to offer the commission to “someone who, at one time, I really hated.” He had earlier found Glass’s music boring.             Glass was inspired early on by the late Indian musician Ravi Shankar’s use of rhythm as structure, and his music is, well, unabashedly rhythmic. It often requires another human layer beyond instrumentality to deepen its dimensions and bring its richness to the forefront. This is best exemplified by Jerome Robbins’ brilliant ballet, Glass Pieces, where Robbins not only brings the music’s rhythm and phrasing to an exciting level, but deepens it with dancers’ soaring arcs and then, when the music becomes profoundly intimate, expands it by bringing in a haunting rhythm with dancers in shadow. Robbins’ choreography brings out the spiritual qualities of Glass’s music that, superficially heard, could irritate the listener (as it obviously had irritated Slatkin at first).            

Glass claims that, for his seventh symphony, he drew on Mesoamerican themes from the Toltec culture, which reached its height between the years 700 and 1100, but is still in some ways alive today. The work is divided into three movements: The Corn, The Sacred Earth, and The Blue Deer (outlining a progression from the gifts of Mother Earth to the doorway to the Spirit and then to the human visions of the spiritual world).

His first movement is richly textured, starts slowly and haltingly, then builds in intensity and texture until the signature Glass rhythm appears. The movement ends quietly, but it has taken us to an expectant place.

As if the orchestra were no longer enough, the second movement brings in another dimension: Glass incorporates a wordless chant (rather words that have no sense) and uses the chorus to add to the urgency of the musical pulse that intensifies it even more. Program notes tell us this was a chant Glass had transcribed from “a 90-year-old Mexican man chanting in the desert, singing to a plant or something.” Glass’s second movement is mesmerizing, but it is the words that are not words, combined with the music, combined with the singers, and combined with whatever level of spiritual maturity listeners can bring to it that make this a beautiful piece and not irritating noise. (You can listen to the second movement here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRK3QS9zoEY)

The third movement begins quietly with more stopping and starting over than one would want to feel after the first two. We westerners, after we’ve explored something, we expect to get somewhere! In fact, we arrive at another place of tension. Glass signals that clearly. If the third movement sounds like movie music in spots, that’s because it is. It’s a reworking of Glass’ music for "Powaggatsi," a Hopi word meaning a life in transition. That film focused on the conflict in underdeveloped countries between tradition and industrialization. The peace of the movement contains an underlying tension, and the journey ends like most: Did you find what you wanted to find or do we have to start out again?

I don’t know exactly how the Toltecs figure into this. One could probably make a case for each of the movements in the Toltec terms outlined in the program notes, but the whole idea could be an affectation, or perhaps it’s a hook Glass uses to illustrate the journey his music must inevitably generate for the listener. Glass’s music cannot exist with just Glass alone. It needs you.

The opening of Golijov’s Oceana led to a place that will not come back, at least, that’s what I wrote in my notes. The harp took center stage, and the work also featured guitars, rainsticks, a small chorus of women, the larger choir, the full orchestra – and oh, yes, a jazz singer. 

Golijov, who draws on a background that combines Argentina, Israel, and the United States, wrote this sprawling piece for the Oregon Bach Festival in 1996.  For it, he selected a poem from Cantos Ceremonial by the Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda of Chile. Golijov called Neruda the Latin American Bach – and the argument goes that both Golijov and Neruda transform passion into geometry. I’m not sure that’s right, about Bach anyway, but it’s an idea. Golijov took a deconstructing poetic text and deconstructed it further, passing sentence fragments, words, syllables, and sounds from chorus, chamber choir, and soloist. This could have led to a dizzying experience, but what holds it together and keeps us from getting lost, is the commanding authority of the jazz soloist, in this case, Bella da Costa. She took all those partials and threaded them together, transforming the geometry back into passion and accomplishing what Neruda (translated here) wrote: “I want to hear the invisible…Give me the secret wine contained in each syllable." Another spiritual search, brought intensively and beautifully, home.

“I want to hear the invisible.” That probably sums up the intent of this concert and these pieces. James Bagwell kept all these disparate elements under control, and the chorus even in its wordless chanting, performed precisely and accurately, not that easy with the ever-changing time signatures. One could have wished for one more short piece to have linked these two, letting the audience sit back a bit, but even without that, it was a most successful evening for the Collegiate Chorale.

The Collegiate Chorale, James Bagwell, Music Director, presenting Symphony No. 7 – A Toltec Symphony by Philip Glass and Oceana by Osvaldo Golijov. With Bella da Costa, Vocalist; Manhattan Girls Chorus; The Collegiate Chorale; and the American Symphony Orchestra. James Bagwell, Conductor. At Carnegie Hall, Feb. 27.

Mary Sheeran is a singer, editor, and the author of the novels Quest of the Sleeping Princess and Who Have the Power. Her CD, Through the Years, is available on CD Baby.

Joy comes to town

 

 Joy: A New True Musical is a rags to riches story about a divorced, recently fired Long Island woman who makes a fortune inventing a different kind of mop.  A mop?  Yep, it’s unfathomable why millions of people would fall in love with a mop but that’s what happened to Joy Mangano whose unlikely story is being told at the Laura Pels Theatre with Betsy Wolfe starring. It is based on Mangano’s memoir,  Inventing: Dare to Build a Brave and Creative Life.  A 2015 film starred Jennifer Lawrence.

The show, with a book by Ken Davenport, begins with young Joy (Nora Mae Dixon) sitting alone in front of a box of her inventions. She pulls out her favorite, a glow-in-the-dark dog collar.  In “The Shape of Things” (music and lyrics by AnnMarie Milazzo), she describes its usefulness: I see a dog collar glimmer/ brightly lit up/ made out of cardboard and glow tape/ like a bike reflector for a pup. It shines like a star/ so my neighbor’s dog won’t be hit by a car.

It’s a great idea, one that makes somebody else lots of money years later because she didn’t pursue her idea.

It takes the grown-up Joy getting fired from her airport job to spur her to action. With a house full of people she is more or less supporting -- her teenage daughter, Christie (Honor Blue Savage), her mother, Toots (Jill Abromovitz), who hasn’t gone out in years and spends her days on the living room sofa watching TV in her robe, her father, Rudy (Adam Grupper), and her ex-husband, Tony (Brandon Espinoza), who lives in the basement with her father – she energetically begins trying to sell the product she invents by accident, a mop with an super absorbing cotton top that can be tossed in the washing machine for use again and again, and that can be wrung out without someone bending over.  While this might sound as if it were happening in the 1950s, she invented the mop in1990 when she was 35.  Why anyone at any time, much less the 90s when the whole world was on the verge of changing with the creation of the Internet, would get excited about a housecleaning tool, with the unlikely title of Miracle Mop, is beyond me but as the musical’s title indicates, it’s a true story.

The first act is a frenzy of the core cast and the 11-member ensemble coming on to say why they feel frazzled, especially the women. Director Lorin Latarro does a great job of controlling the swirling action. 

All of this makes for a fun first act but in the second act the novelty starts wearing out. Joy achieves phenomenal success on QVC convincing all those frazzled people that her mop will save them time for other things.  This in spite of a disastrous start when she freezes in front of the camera on live TV.  Because of her father’s carelessness in managing her business affairs, she ends up in court on the brink of bankruptcy and fighting for her patent. 

Choreographer Joshua Bergasse, who nicely handles the chaos of the show, has a cute number with the five QVC judges, the SUITS dancing to “We Sell Stories.” As a giant QVC sing descends they sing: We’re a heritage of the same old boys. It’s a department store/ Laid out on your living room floor/ Reinventing how to make a sale/ We are blazing a trail/ Place and order and it’s in the mail. 

 

While all of this seems like a lot of fuss over a mop the show clearly is about far more.  It’s about honoring your creativity, fighting for what you believe in and never giving up. Wolfe portrays it all well. 

After a 17-year journey, Amazing Grace begins previews in Chicago

“I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I hope to be. But by the grace of God, I am certainly not what I was.”  — John Newton     

     Christopher Smith had never heard of John Newton when, with a little time to spare and in search of some air conditioning, he casually browsed through the children’s section of a library in Fort Washington, PA, looking for inspiration for his church youth groups.

   The police officer and religious education director had no idea that chance experience of “literally just killing time” would be his life-changing moment, one that would lead him from small town life in Bucks County, PA, to The Great While Way.  As it turned out, he was the one who was inspired.  

     Reading through a book about Newton, Smith was fascinated by the story of the British slave trader, the shipwreck, his enslavement, then his religious conversion and new life as an Anglican cleric and outspoken abolitionist.  Smith was so captivated by the story that he had skipped the Forward and hadn’t realized the man he was reading about had penned one of the world’s most beloved hymns, “Amazing Grace.” It was then that Smith felt the beginning of his own conversion experience.

     Although he didn’t have a theatrical background, unless you count the one semester in college when he was a theatre major before switching to history, and despite the fact that he can’t read a single note of music — he had taught himself to play guitar — he felt called to dramatize Newton’s life.

     “‘I thought, ‘This is epic.  Why haven’t I heard of this guy?’” 

     He sought help from his uncle, an attorney specializing in copyright law, to see if anything had been done. This was before the 2006 movie “Amazing Grace.”  Smith learned that in the 230 years since Newton’s death, no one had dramatized his life.

     “I thought, ‘I’ll give it a try.’ I’m always telling the kids ‘don’t limit yourself.  Don’t put yourself in a box and say, ‘this is what I am.’ You’ve got to transcend.’  I’ve got this in my lap.  I thought, ‘I’ve got to take my own medicine.’”  

     That was in 1997.  Next month Amazing Grace will open in a world-premiere run at the 1,800-seat Bank of America Theatre in Chicago before heading to Broadway next year.  Although the 17 years between that first sense of calling to the actual opening night scheduled for Oct. 19 have been hard at times — writing, rewriting, and rewriting some more, putting together readings, auditioning actors and raising the nearly $15 million needed to mount a show on Broadway — Smith, who admits he is not a patient man, sees now that the timing might be just right.

     “The world seems to be taking a turn to the dark end,” he said, adding that the 1700s of Newton’s day were also filled with violence and cruelty.  “There’s bad news all over the world, not just in one place.  Things seem to be spinning out of control. I’m hoping that all the delays that brought Amazing Grace to this point make it shine brighter at a time when people need to be challenged and empowered and uplifted.”

     Smith, who is married and the father of three, is 45 but could pass for 20 years younger.  He shares his story during a lunch break at the New 42nd Street Studios where Amazing Grace is in rehearsal before heading to Chicago.  This is a rarefied world where those making their living through the Broadway stage spend their days.  Rehearsal rooms with floor to ceiling windows overlook 42nd Street, freight-sized elevators ferry loads of chorus girls and boys up and down, and stars roam the halls freely. This week Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, two of Broadway’s hottest headliners, are rehearsing for their next musical.  Bucks County seems far away.

     But Smith is quick to say that without the support he received from Bucks County, he wouldn’t be sitting here.  Back when a musicalization of Newton’s life was still just an idea Smith was toying with, he mentioned it to Rich Timmons, a member of his church to whom he was giving guitar lessons. Timmons, who owned a marketing firm in town, immediately saw potential in telling a story that had gone untold, at least dramatically, for more than 200 years.  “Amazing Grace” also happened to be his favorite song.

     “He said, ‘If you put it in a form I can use, I will take it to every business owner in town’ and he did,” Smith said.

     Timmons raised a half million dollars in three months, and went on to raise another half.  With that money Smith was able to quit his job and devote full time to writing and fundraising.

     By October 2007 he was ready to gage audience reaction.  For the first public concert/reading, he put together a cast headed by Adam Jacobs as Newton and Ali Ewoldt as his love interest, Mary Catlett. Jacobs and Ewoldt were on Broadway at the time playing Marius and Cosette in the revival of Les Misérables.  They spent Monday, Oct. 15, when their show was dark, at Hilltown Baptist Church in Bucks County rehearsing for that evening’s concert, backed by a 60-member choir of area high school students.

     Smith had hung only two posters, each in an area church, announcing the free concert and “word of mouth just exploded around Bucks County.”  On the night of the event more than 1,200 people showed up, requiring Smith to set up two overflow rooms with speakers and screens.

     At the end of the concert, the actors asked the audience to stand and led them in singing “Amazing Grace.”  It was a powerful experience that left many in tears, but for one woman her tears continued even as she greeted cast members in the receiving line. She told Jacobs she hadn’t known about the concert but had been driving by, saw all the excitement at the church and decided to go in.  She had been told by her doctor that morning that she had cancer and had only three weeks to two months to live.

     “What you have said and done here tonight showed me the things I have to get right in my life and the people I need to get right with,” she told Jacobs, who then began to cry as well.

     Hearing that, Smith realized his play could have an impact in a way he hadn’t considered.

     “People were coming and bringing all their pain and struggles,” he said.  “I thought, ‘I have two and a half hours when our paths will cross.’  I wanted to honor that.  My purpose shifted from just wanting to write a good show to wanting to live up to what we can do in people’s lives.”

     Following the Hilltown success, Smith set his eyes on a commercial run, envisioning his show making the rounds on the Christian circuit in cities like Lancaster, PA, and Branson, MO. But then he hired veteran New York producer Carolyn Rossi Copeland and she determined the show should go to the top.  She raised the rest of the money to fully capitalize the venture.  Now all that stands between opening night on Broadway is having the right size theatre become available.

     Copeland put together an experienced team that includes Gabriel Barre as director and Tony Award-winning choreographer Christopher Gattelli, and brought on Arthur Giron to help shape the show’s book with Smith, who in addition to the book wrote the music and lyrics for the 17 songs, as well as the incidental music.  Three-time Tony winner Eugene Lee creates the sets, which in many cases, such as for the ship and its sinking, will be conceptionalized.  Josh Young plays Newton and Erin Mackey is Catlett, heading a cast of 34.

     Smith developed his script largely from library research because the internet was fairly limited when he started.  While some characters have been consolidated and others invented, the story runs close to Newton’s life and times, he says. Three period consultants have given advice on the manners and gestures of the 1700s, on dialects and provided translation for the African scenes.

     The show “doesn’t pull any punches,” Smith says.  “We’re not afraid to show the depths of the struggle.  We wanted to make sure we never gloss over what slavery was as much as we can onstage.  We couldn’t really portray it because they’d (the audience) be vomiting.”

     But it’s not an “issue musical,” Smith emphasizes.

  “It’s an action/adventure/romance with deep character struggle.  We don’t want to tell the audience what we think they should get out of it.  We want to present the story with honesty and in a forthright way and let the chips fall where they may.”

     The chips have fallen pretty far for Smith.  As the lunch break ends and he heads back into rehearsal, he laughs as he considers the unexpected   — and long — adventure that brought him to that studio.

     “It’s like being on the moon.  I was driving a beat and directing traffic and now I’m walking into the 42nd Street Studios and people know who I am.  It’s surreal.”

(In photo: Fight director David Leong, Christopher Smith, director Gabriel Barre)

Grace Kelly's glamorous, yet regret-filled life portrayed in "Longing for Grace"

Actress Grace Kiley took the stage Sunday and brought to life another actress whose name is similar to hers, Grace Kelly, in her thoroughly engrossing one-woman biographical play, Longing for Grace, an offering of 59E59 Theaters’ annual East to Edinburgh Festival.

Under the direction of Austin Pendleton, Kiley paints such a full and fascinating portrait of the late actress turned princess of Monaco that it’s hard to believe the show, written by Kiley, is only an hour in length. In her Kelly persona, Kiley addresses various family members and friends, transitioning fluidly from reminiscences of her youth through to her death at 52 in 1982, presenting a cautionary tale about a woman with a dream, which she pursued, excelled in, then gave up, only to spend the rest of her life in regret and loneliness.

“My life wasn’t my own anymore, for years, after the icon faded, my friends dispersed, my prince remote, my body changing, my face, my hands, all the things I struggled to make sense of, didn’t make sense . . . lost because I left behind what I loved,” she tells her youngest child, Stephanie. “I loved acting. The passion, something of my own.”

Finding that something of her own was important to the young girl in a family of athletic, trophy-winning children when she was not good at sports. She felt inferior. Later, when she had brought her acting teacher turned lover home for a visit to Philadelphia, he commented on the medals and awards filling the living room. “Everyone in your family has something displayed except you, Gracie, as if you don’t even exist.” She replied that it’s because she hadn’t accomplished anything.

But she felt called to pursue an acting career, much to her father’s horror. She was a debutante from a proper family and he considered actors to be “streetwalkers.” She moved to New York anyway, studied acting and followed that dream into success on stage and screen, winning an Academy Award for “The Country Girl” in 1954.

She says all she wanted was recognition from her father, and she thought she had finally achieved it through her career. Her family was in the front row for her Broadway debut in Strindberg’s The Father, for which she received good reviews. Her father, though, squashed her joy by remarking to one of the critics, “I’ve always thought it would be Grace’s sister Peggy whose name would be in lights. Anything Gracie can do, Peggy can do better.”

But she had found her passion and pursued it so fiercely that director Alfred Hitchcock described her as a "volcano covered with snow."

Yet she gave it all up to marry Prince Ranier III, a man she met once while in the South of France for the Cannes Film Festival and with whom she corresponded for a year before he proposed during a visit to her family home. She had been fourth on a list of blonde actresses put together by the prince’s priest.

The marriage contract alone should have warned her she was not entering a happlily-ever-after princess life. It’s “volumes long and right out of ‘The Napoleonic Code,’” she tells her friends. In the event of a divorce, the prince would get sole custody of the children and she must leave the country. And the prince just happened to want a dowry of two million dollars.

“It seems that the palace is a little cash poor and needs some sprucing up before the wedding,“ she says, trying to make a joke of it.

Then the prince announced, much to Grace’s surprise, at a press conference that she would be giving up acting, and banned the showing of her films in Monaco. Still, she remained in denial.

“I’m sure it’s just for the papers until the wedding,” she tells friends. “He truly loves me, the movie star and as soon as we’re married Monaco will see what a devoted princess I am. And then” (pausing) “I’ll pick up my acting career. Just like that! I’ll never stop acting.”

From the start, her new life was hell. The servants ridiculed her because she was an American and they considered her an impostor. She knew no one in Monaco and was prevented from seeing most of her Hollywood friends and even from going out alone.

The birth of Caroline, “born exactly nine months and one day after our wedding,” brought her joy and a temporary closeness with the Prince, although her father’s comment was, ”Ah shucks, I wanted a boy.”

Even maternal happiness didn’t last., though, as she was not allowed to show affection for her second child, and only son, Albert (“Albie”), because Ranier feared it would soften him and make him unprepared to take over the throne as an adult. Her relationship with Stephanie was troubled; it was in an attempt to try to work things out with her that Kelly dismissed the chauffeur for the afternoon and went out for a drive alone with Stephanie. Kelly lost control of the car and crashed. Both were injured, but Grace sustained the greatest harm. She died the next day, Sept. 14, 1982, having never regained consciousness.

Kiley portrays Kelly’s anguish at how her life turned out so well I could feel that world stifling her. Although petite, unlike Kelly, Kiley possesses the same good looking regal blonde quality that Kelly was known for. (Actually, Kiley looks a great deal like another actress in this category, the late Lee Remick.) Katalin Varga’s costumes, Elle Murphy’s make-up and Giovanni Villari’s lighting complete the transformation.

Brian Tubbs has created an effective set consisting of a stately chair on a red runner that divides the stage into two playing areas -- a guest room with a red velvet chaise, small table with scripts, martini glass and a wooden letterbox on the floor. On the other side are a writing table and chair, telephone and appointment books and an ornate mirror. With this and her powerful script, Kiley creates the international life of a very famous woman.

After the show as I was waiting in the lobby for a friend who was joining me for dinner, the elevator opened and Kiley emerged carrying a large portion of this set, now collapsed and ready to be packed off to Edinburgh for 25 performances. From the glamor of the spotlight to striking the set, such is the life of a fringe festival performer.

I wished her well in Scotland. She opened up for me a life I knew little about, although I remember the day Grace Kelly died quite well. I was the government and politics reporter for the Carroll County Times in Westminster, MD, and Sept. 14, 1982 happened to be a primary election day. I was walking by the AP photo wire machine and was the first to discover the news and announced it to the newsroom. Our editor slammed down his long metal ruler and shouted, “Damn.” Mr. Sensitive was not reacting in sadness to Kelly’s death; he was angry because he had already configured the front page for the next day, something that in those days was done on paper with a pencil to map out the space and placing. He had planned on all election stories and now had to fit in coverage of a famous person’s death.

Later that day we learned a Middle Eastern president had died and, later still, that novelist John Gardner had also passed away, but Mike had decided with Kelly’s death that rather than readjust his layout he would just tease to the inside obit from the area above the banner. The president and writer didn’t even get that courtesy, just small obits inside.  The moral of the story back then was that if you wanted good press coverage, don’t die on a busy news day.  Now, with news a 24-hour venture, one can get plenty of attention.

The East to Edinburgh Festival continues through Sunday, July 28 at 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues). Tickets to each show range from $10 - $20 and may be purchased by calling Ticket Central at 212-279-4200 or online at www.59e59.org. Check the web site for the offerings. Unfortunately Longing for Grace played the final of its three performances on Sunday.

I look forward to these shows each summer as 59E59 hosts United States productions en route to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world. Created as a way to help shows get on their feet before flying off to Scotland, East to Edinburgh simulates the same production constraints that all shows experience at the Festival During this whirlwind three weeks, 16 productions will have been featured, reflecting some of the most adventurous theater from New York and across the country.