“Duet for One”
(Nov. 7, 2010) You lucky New Yorkers. This weekend, City Opera produced a Leonard Bernstein tribute concert, coinciding with their New York premier of his late-career opera A Quiet Place. In addition to Christine Ebersole’s “Come Up To My Place” and Donna Murphy’s always-dependable “One Hundred Easy Ways,” the reports I’ve read also point out Victoria Clark’s “Duet For One” as a highlight. Two reasons I’m regretting missing this. First, Victoria Clark. Everything I’ve seen (or, in some cases, “seen”) her do since Light in the Piazza, has been wonderful, particularly her Follies and Juno at Encores. She’s probably one of the more right actresses for this song at the moment. And then there’s the song. From Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner’s 1976 musical history of the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, the nine-minute tour de force features an actress alternating between the parts of Julia Grant and Lucy Hayes during the 1877 inauguration, the former raging about The Corrupt Bargain while the latter revels in her new position. It’s surprisingly melodic for later Bernstein and a terrific acting challenge, the actress alternating as the two First Ladies sometimes within the span of a few bars. Unfortunately, the show as a whole didn’t work nearly as well as this one number: it flopped in New York and was later reconfigured into A White House Cantata, the original version suppressed by the Bernstein estate. So it’s also rarer these days to have the opportunity to hear a musical theatre performer tackle this song. One of Bernstein’s tricks for differentiating the two women, musically and with regards to class, as the singer flips back and forth, was to place Julia Grant in a chesty register and Lucy Hayes higher and headier. It requires a well-trained voice, but the musical theatre actresses I’ve heard tackle the song typically are able to navigate this division with more success than those with a strictly classical background like, say, June Anderson on the recording of the Cantata version. My favorite performance is this one: Patricia Routledge in the original 1976 production. The show went unrecorded at the time, but is preserved here on a sound system recording, possibly opening night if I remember correctly. This, I believe, is what we would call balls-out singing.
