A letter from the Artistic Director
Dear friend of the Next,
It’s already 2008, and you know what that means… eleven more months listening to candidates dodge questions and spout platitudes in their quest for the White House… Happy New Year!
Politics have gotten so sour to me because politicians reiterate the same bland ideas without addressing the most important question any of them could answer: what does it mean to be an American? Do we share collective national values? The roles we play globally, nationally and locally on the political, cultural and social levels define us. The governments we support, the cultural products we ship around the world, and the way we treat our fellow countrymen define us.
So what does it mean to be an American? I suppose artists can answer that question better than politicians, and I’d certainly rather spend the next eleven months listening to them. That’s why we’ve chosen to mount our hybrid world premiere music-theater event, The American Dream Songbook.
The idea began with my great love and admiration for Leonard Bernstein’s rarely-heard one-act opera, Trouble in Tahiti, which tells the story of a marriage on the rocks in suburbia. Bernstein’s simple libretto interlaces Sam and Dinah’s story with poignant and incisive commentary about what it meant to be an American when he wrote it in 1953: “Happily married, sweet little son… up-to-date kitchen, washing machine, colorful bathrooms and Life Magazine, and a little white house in Brookline... Suburbia!” Bernstein sketches an image of success that many Americans shared in the 1950s. But the piece is only 45 minutes. So how do we make a full evening out of it? And what makes Bernstein’s story relevant to us today?
After all, do we share a single American Dream anymore? Do people still aspire to a little white house in the suburbs? Or are there now other, similarly-alluring ideas? A great way to answer these questions was to commission a handful of great musical-theater composers to tell us, and make a second-act musical revue out of it.
The result is a hybrid evening of musical theater. The first half is a straight-ahead musical theater piece; the second half is a musical revue about the American Dream today. Each song from Act II is completely different from the other. One takes the form of a ballad; another is a cabaret showpiece. We’ve got Dixieland jazz and the Pop-music vernacular, and even a bit of opera. The Dream today might be celebrity, a powerful career, or a beautiful new body… all very different from the 1950s world Bernstein envisioned.
Taken together, I hope these pieces make you wonder what the American Dream is to you and the folks that make up our community… and therefore, what it means to be an American. The diverse nature of the second act tells me that it’s almost impossible to talk about shared American values and a shared American Dream. Today we live in a world of many different dreams, and no one piece of art – and certainly, no one politician – can capture them all.
All the best,
Jason Loewith
P.S. You can always let me know what you think at Jason@nexttheatre.org, or on our blog.