There must be nothing quite so daunting as standing in the wings, alone and ready to face high expectations.
All of us have experienced what it’s like to be the main event. The stakes can be small, as in a presentation to a class. Or they can get quite large, if hundreds or potentially thousands are interested in what you have to say or sing.
We should reserve special appreciation to performers who are essentially solo acts, carrying the weight of an anticipated event on the strength of their singular effort. Among other challenges, there must be nothing quite so daunting as being a singer, standing in the wings, ready to perform songs that everyone thinks they already know. Pyrotechnics and backup singers can help bale out a weak pop performer. But most audiences are sophisticated enough to detect the difference between the real deal and a performance that seems less than authentically live.
Producer John McClure had clearly not counted on the slow humiliation of Carreras
The opening of West Side Story a few days ago in New York reminded me of a lonely moment for a performer singing the same show in 1984. The Spanish opera star Jose Carreras was in RCA’s New York studios with other singers and an orchestra recording Leonard Bernstein’s score of the musical for the prestigious Deutsche Gramophone label. Of course no one less than the composer himself was on hand to conduct. Bernstein had never had the chance to lead a cast through the music of his show.
The label apparently thought that it would be a nice touch to make a video of some of the studio work as the tracks were carefully laid down. But producer John McClure had clearly not counted on the slow humiliation of Carreras trying to sing Something’s Coming as the teenage Tony. Carreras simply couldn’t get the tricky rhythm woven throughout the score, one that was second nature to Bernstein. Sitting in the control room, McClure takes his own lumps from the maestro.
Take after take is botched and increasingly registered on the face of a frustrated Bernstein. Not only was Carreras’ diction alien and too formal for the Hell’s Kitchen character, but his execution of the dotted-note rhythms was blocky rather than the “hip.” Classical orchestras and singers generally have a hard time performing the looser and more improvisational style of American pop and jazz. And this was surely Bernstein’s version of jazz.
People looking at the clip on YouTube at the bottom of this piece will find a singer from a different cultural and musical heritage whose ear was apparently never trained to hear generic syncopation that dominated American music when Bernstein wrote his score. It wasn’t that the music was supposed to swing. But it needed a kind of breathless spontaneity that was nonetheless in perfect time. Had Carreras grown up listening to Mel Torme or Sammy Davis Jr., he probably would have been fine.
The program that aired on PBS raised the ire of many who thought Bernstein was being purposefully difficult. I don’t see that. But we do see what happens when a label and conductor miscast a piece in order to have a big name to splash on their album cover.
Carreras has gone on to have an impressive career in the operatic realm he has so easily mastered.
[Though many Americans have turned coffee into a bizarre kind of fountain drink, coffee retains its hold on us. This piece from 2015 is a reminder of its efficiency at helping reluctant neurons fire.]
New Yorker Cartoonist Tom Cheney obviously loved coffee. A lot of his cartoons featured the stuff front and center. My favorite was entitled the “Writer’s Food Pyramid,” with a food-group triangle of “essentials” for scribes that would give most dietitians severe heartburn. His pyramid was a play on those dietary charts that usually adorned classroom walls in the 80s. At the wide base of Cheney’s list were “The Caffeines” of cola, coffee and tea. They anchored the rest of a pyramid of necessities which included “The Nicotines,” “The Alcohols” and “Pizza” at the very top. Tough nicotine from tobacco has lost of most of its charms, the rest still make the perfect fuel cell for a cultural worker.
Many of us owe the completion of at least a few big projects to the caffeine that the brain needs more than the stomach.
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Cheney obviously knew a lot about writers with their old typewriters, which movie mogul Jack Warner once hilariously dismissed as “Schmucks with Underwoods.” But there’s actually some method in all of this madness. Communication—at least the process of generating ideas—is clearly helped the spur of this addictive substance. We have more than a few studies to suggest that writers and others who create things can indeed benefit from the stimulant. Notwithstanding a recent New Yorker article suggesting just the opposite, caffeine is likely to enhance a person’s creative powers if it is used in moderation. I’m sure I’m not alone in owing the completion of at least a few books to the sludge that now makes my stomach rebel. As for decaf: it seems like the food equivalent of a non-sequitur.
It turns out the stimulant has a complex effect on human chemistry. As James Hamblin explains in a June, 2013 Atlantic article, caffeine is weaker than a lot of stimulants such as Adderall, which can actually paralyze a person into focusing for too long on just thing. It’s moderate amounts that do the most good. Even the New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova conceded the point. She noted that it “boosts energy and decreases fatigue; enhances physical, cognitive, and motor performance; and aids short-term memory, problem solving, decision making, and concentration … Caffeine prevents our focus from becoming too diffuse; it instead hones our attention in a hyper-vigilant fashion.”
To put it simply, the synapses happen more easily when that triple latte finally kicks in. A morning cup dutifully carried to work even ranks over keeping a phone in one hand.
But there is an exception. A person facing a live audience in a more or less formal situation probably should avoid what amounts to a double dose of stimulation, given the natural increase of adrenaline that comes when we face a public audience. For most of us a modest adrenaline rush is actually functional in helping us gain oral fluency. It works to our benefit because it makes us more alert and maybe just a little smarter. But combining what is functionally two stimulants can be counter-productive. They can make a presenter wired tighter than the high “C” of a piano keyboard. We all know the effects. Instead of the eloquence of a heightened conversation, we get a jumble of ideas that are delivered fast and with too little explanation. In addition, tightened vocal folds mean that the pitch of our voice will usually rise as well, making even a baritone sound like a Disney character.
All of us are different. But to play the odds to your advantage, it is probably better to reserve the use of caffeine for acts of creation more than performance.
[Though many Americans have turned coffee into a bizarre kind of fountain drink, coffee retains its hold on us. This piece from 2015 is a reminder of its efficiency at helping reluctant neurons fire.]
