Six Feet Under Again

Re-discovering Alan Ball's life-and-death melodrama Six Feet Under during a deadly pandemic might seem macabre to some. I think this is a perfect time to consider its weighty existential themes.

To me, Ball's addictively provocative series, which ran for five seasons on HBO (2001-2005), had a bristling approach to our most worrisome fixations -- family, sexuality, sanity, aging, parenthood, careers, relationships, and, yes, death. Though each episode opened with a death, some of which were spectacular, and pondered the afterlife, judgment, recompense, etc., the show was about the lives of the Fishers and the characters who were, for good and ill, in orbits around them.

As with most of HBO's longer-running series, the episodes were not all strong. Ball was especially challenged in writing for his Black characters, relying on easy tropes and shallow characterizations -- but he certainly wasn't alone in that regard.

Viewers will have their favorites of the continuing players -- Nate, David, Claire, Ruth, Keith, Rico -- but I would argue that Brenda Chenowith was the series' most compelling character because of the depth of the emotional and psychological wounds that rendered her nearly sociopathic in Season 1 but led her back to the Fishers, to Nate, time after time for healing (which is ironic considering what a holy mess the Fishers were) until by the end of the series she was the character whose development had been the most dramatic and, frankly, inspiring.

Rights and Wrongs

I once asked a newspaper co-worker, a well-intentioned guy with conventional liberal ideals, what white folks got out of the Civil Rights Movement, hoping to challenge the assumption that Blacks were the only beneficiaries. I said a nation that opposes discrimination serves everyone better because no one's talents or contributions are stifled.

"I don't think I would have ever heard The Temptations or Four Tops, " he said.

If I had it to do over, I would not have challenged his response as naive. Rather I would have asked him to explain what he meant. Maybe he had a story about how music helped him lower boundaries between him and black classmates or how his father's music collection laid the groundwork for a conversation about race in his home. Sure, his thinking might have been as simplistic as it seemed but I would have given him space to speak his truth rather than assume I knew his truth.

I can't live that moment over but often I wish I could.

Ramy Season 2

Now in its second season and renewed for a third, comedian Ramy Youseff's superb self-titled sitcom on Hulu combines familiar American millennial disaffection with Muslim identity codes and conflicts to create a bracingly provocative and funny series about Ramy's search for happiness and God, praying they won't be mutually exclusive. He seems perplexed by humanity and devotion, qualities he seems to possess in abundance, and wonders, often aloud, why actual goodness seems so elusive. He's a guileless hero whom we're rooting for even when he falls short of perfection, as he often does.

Purlie

Fifty years ago, a small but spunky musical about "race relations" in the South ran on Broadway for about 700 performances. The musical was based on a play by the celebrated actor and dean of black theater and motion picture performers Ossie Davis -- Purlie Victorious. The play had earlier been adapted into a motion picture starring Davis and his wife, Ruby Dee, Godfrey Cambridge, a young Alan Alda and Sorrel Booke, whom many would come to know as Boss Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard. (A link to the full motion picture is below.) The play has long been included in published anthologies of outstanding theatrical work as an example of satirical social commentary.

The 1970 musical, whose title was shortened to Purlie, told the same story as the stage play -- a con-man preacher returns to the Georgia plantation of his birth to try to pull one over on the Ol' Cap'n, win ownership of a cherished old church and "free" the plantation workers from their lives of picking cotton. The show starred new faces Melba Moore (Cousin Lutiebelle) and Cleavon Little (the title character), both of whom won Tonys for their performances. Five years later, Little would go on to international fame as the sheriff in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles. Troubled with chronic stomach and intestinal problems, Little died in 1992, at 54. Moore will be 80 in October.

Purlie is a small show but has several rousing musical numbers -- "I Got Love," "Newfangled Preacher Man," "Walk Him Up the Stairs," among them -- and has seen a few revivals and restagings over the years, with the most familiar likely being the television special in 1981 that starred Moore, Robert Guillaume (Benson) and Sherman Helmsley (George Jefferson of The Jeffersons), who like Moore was an original cast member.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj6dH82LXQE

Les Miz

Thirty years before Hamilton took Broadway by storm and rewrote the modern musical, another epic production with historical roots was taking over the world. Les Miserables ran on Broadway from 1987 to 2003, for nearly 7,000 performances. It has been staged in London and Toronto, touring companies have traversed the globe numerous times and we all know the award-winning 2012 film adaptation with Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway.

Though not as richly layered and constructed as Hamilton, Les Miz is a bigger and more conventionally musical show. It is a sung-through production, that is, it contains no actual spoken dialogue. On that score, Hamilton contains very little, and most of its dialogue is in verse.

Les Miz brims with classical melodrama and sumptuous songs for solo artists, small ensembles and large choruses. In this way, it is more like opera than musical theater. And like the best of French or Italian opera, Les Miz has great songs for the tenor hero.

This song -- Bring Him Home -- comes mid-way through Act II. Jean Valjean prays for the safety of the young liberator Marius, whom Valjean has grown fond of. The opening of the song is pitched quite high and the piece has a wide dynamic range so it's a true vocal workout. Nick Cartell starred in the show's recent national tour and he pours it on in this cabaret performance of the showstopper.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzKUNASAeSM&fbclid=IwAR0ui1SpKMV0YlR3J76-xn7Y3MqPDYGft8QNhtLVxjUynmtXR81KNzuYWgs

Darlie toothpaste

This Chinese toothpaste was the unequivocally blackface Darkie for more than 50 years. Half of the company was bought by Colgate-Palmolive in 1983 and in '89 changed the name and image to "Darlie," which is inoffensively nonsensical. Let's hear it for not being racist!

Hamilton (streaming)

I've been familiar with Hamilton's score for some time but watching it brings home how much of a stunner it is; it bridges worlds, combining traditional and contemporary musical performance and expression to serve a story that is both conventional (boy overcomes odds to attain what he wants and nearly loses what he needs) and strikingly modern, while also being both historical and revisionist. The machinery of the production -- all of that wordplay and bodies in motion -- is nearly overwhelming. It is a singularly brilliant vision, a fully realized social and political statement with towering musicality AND street cred.

The Hamilton original Broadway cast recording has been out for nearly five years. It has sold more than 6 million copies and is the best-selling cast recording ever. Those five years have given aspirers plenty of time to load their covers of favorite numbers onto YouTube. I've watched my share. Some are valiant attempts. Others are just plain awful. Some are those inexplicably popular Reacts videos (people taping themselves responding to performances) and then there are the occasional legitimate renditions by someone with skills.

I would wager no number from the show is more popular than "You'll Be Back," King George's mincing scolding of the ungrateful colonists as performed by Pennsylvania native Jonathan Groff (Mindhunter). Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose net worth is estimated at between $40 and $50 million thanks to Hamilton, has said the addition of King George's character was fairly late in the musical's creation. And his winning line? That was offered by actor Hugh Laurie (House), who when Miranda described the scene he was imagining sneered in King George's voice "You'll be back." Score!

The show's theatrical complexity becomes clearer on repeated viewings. And, for me, that means gathering more evidence of Lin-Manuel Miranda's generosity as the composer. He has written so many wonderful songs for the large cast. Several of them are true, Broadway-caliber vocal workouts no doubt written to silence those tempted to set the show aside as a lightweight, hip-hop experiment. Miranda really lets these talented players shine. Two of the best examples from Act 1 run nearly back-to-back -- Angelica Schuyler's "Satisfied"(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InupuylYdcY) and Aaron Burr's "Wait For It" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulsLI029rH0). Both are masterful, challenging numbers, melodic lines overflowing with narrative content and character revelation. Renée Elise Goldsberry (Angelica) and Leslie Odom Jr. (Burr) won Tonys for their work, as did Daveed Diggs for the dual roles of Lafayette and Jefferson.