Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Rather than write full essays about some shows, I’m posting paragraphs about things that have occurred to me lately. In no particular order.

I mostly loved The Buena Vista Social Club (which I wrote about in response to its earlier version at the Atlantic), but some of the story confuses me. The show is based on the idea that these master musicians have been out of work for a long time, some scraping by with menial jobs. Did the Cuban revolution suppress their music? Did it close clubs like the Buena Vista? Why? You’d think that the revolution would have found value in the indigenous culture of the people and supported its artists. Nothing in the script addresses why these people lapsed into obscurity. Nor is there anything to explain why a private entrepreneur would be allowed to organize a recording in a supposedly communist country. (In fictionalizing the story, Ry Cooder, who was the primary producer of the real album, has been removed. I wonder if this was done with his approval?)

While I mostly admired Good Night and Good Luck, there’s a problem with the script: Edward R. Murrow really doesn’t change. He starts off as a guy radiating integrity, suffers few real doubts about his course of action, and at the end is still the guy radiating integrity. This is not much of a journey for a central character. (It is also, from my reading about Murrow, pretty accurate.) So, what do you do when the real-life figure in a story doesn’t evolve much? One strategy is to do what the writers behind two Tom Hanks movies did – make the larger-than-life figure a secondary character. In Saving Mr. Banks, Hanks plays Walt Disney. In A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Hanks plays Fred Rogers. In both films, he is a wise figure with quiet authority. In both films, the central character is someone with a troubled relationship with a parent. Both Walt Disney and Fred Rogers act as de facto shrinks helping the leading characters find peace. The story of both is how a leading character’s life is affected by coming in contact with the iconic, real-life character. My hunch is that Goodnight and Good Luck might have benefitted from a similar approach – creating a character in the foreground who is transformed by his contact with Murrow while Murrow confronts McCarthy. (A similar tactic was used with the film, My Week with Marilyn.) Anyway, a thought.

Interesting that we have two Broadway musicals that feature making unconventional use of corpses. Operation Mincemeat is about UK spies who turn a Welsh suicide into a British lieutenant carrying misleading papers about an invasion of Europe during WWII. The spies plant the corpse where German operatives can get their hands on the plans and hope that Hitler and his friends will redeploy their troops in response. The stratagem works. Thinking the invasion will come elsewhere, the Germans move their troops and the Allies are able to invade Sicily with reduced casualties. Dead Outlaw is about a not very bright outlaw who gets himself killed. His corpse is mummified and, for the larger second part of the show, it is employed in various commercial displays. (If someone had revived Flaherty and Ahrens’s Lucky Stiff, we’d have a third variation.) Mincemeat is about a corpse winning posthumous dignity. Dead Outlaw is about a corpse who is treated in death with the same carelessness with which the outlaw carried himself in life. Both shows work, though Mincemeat has the benefit of a story which builds to an accomplishment one applauds. Outlaw is built on the irony that a guy who in life pursued money through crime ultimately found more value as a prop in other people’s schemes. The end of his journey, finally being buried with some degree of respect, comes as a relief.