There’s a wistful ache that wafts over the new musical February House, even as its characters celebrate life, art and each other in high bohemian style.
It’s a feeling one might get if it were possible to step back in time and be seduced, then disappointed, by a golden era lost. Woody Allen taps into that intoxicating mix of fame and regret in his film Midnight in Paris, when the audience—used to keeping up with the Kardashians—gets to hang out instead with such scintillating company as Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí and Gertrude Stein. The urge to pull up a seat at the table and be in their iconic presence is irresistible. Allen gives us grand pontificating, heady stimulants, bon mots—and the chance to be in the presence of greatness, where one can eavesdrop on artists who are passionately (and un-ironically) talking about art as if it was all that mattered in the world.
February House fills the stage with a different set of glittering literati from decades past. The musical premiered at Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theatre in February and opens May 8 at New York City’s Public Theater (which commissioned the work). Based on true events that Sherill Tippins chronicled in her 2005 book of the same name, it centers on an experiment in communal artistic living in a four-story Victorian fixer-upper brownstone (long since demolished for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) on Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights where W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Jane and Paul Bowles, Erika Mann, Gypsy Rose Lee and others lived at various times during the year 1940. Why the name “February House”? Because many of its inhabitants were born in that month. As Auden says in the show, “Dilapidation on the one hand, camaraderie on the other.”
The man who conceived this utopian “empire of artists, a writer’s menagerie,” was George Davis, a promising writer who became an editor at Harper’s Bazaar. Newly separated from his position at the magazine—not to mention his expense account at the Four Seasons—Davis convinced his fellow aesthetes to pool their puny resources and try living la vie bohème on the other side of the East River.
The least known today of the group, Davis was the charismatic host of what turned out to be a year-long endeavor. He was the kimono-wearing mother hen who tended to the flock of high-maintenance boarders, the person who kept the inspiration high even when the dough was low. He embodies the paradox of a singular artist in need of a sense of belonging, a surrogate family and a safe haven where one can live freely (and that means sexually, too) among like-minded souls outside the strictures of society. As McCullers tells him when he’s moping about, having squandered a writing career: “Georgey, don’t you see? 7 Middagh Street is your magnum opus.”
Julian Fleisher plays Davis with delicacy, offbeat charm and a touch of heartbreak, so we understand how those around him could be beguiled by his concept of an artistic enclave, at least for a while, even when the plumbing is on the fritz, the heater breaks down and bed lice pay a visit. But the more problematic aspect of Davis’s grand plan—beyond self-interest that trumps the common good—was what was happening in the world beyond the enclave’s walls. With war raging in Europe and America wary of entering the fight, the February House residents—several of them exiles from Europe—confront anguished questions about the role of art in a world aflame. Romantic notions are ultimately abandoned, along with old friends.
Until that happens, there are plenty of conflicts both international and domestic to keep the conversations—and songs—alive with meaning and poetry. These artists are at various stages of their careers: Auden is already a living legend; McCullers has just burst onto the scene with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; Britten is on the verge of musical greatness; Mann has just turned political activist. In McCullers’s husband Reeves, there’s talent but intolerance; and in Auden’s young lover, Chester Kallman, there’s a newbie poet destined to remain forever in the shadow of his formidable mentor.
Gypsy Rose Lee is the odd duck in this nest. Her aspirations are not well delineated in the musical, but she seems to represent the yearning to succeed (or at least to get on the best-seller lists) simply by hard work and perseverance. (In fact, the potboiler mystery The G-String Murders that Lee wrote during her February House stay was the most commercially viable of any of the projects that originated there.) In a way, Gypsy represents the audience, those who revere the arts and so want to sit at the head table along with the masters.
Composer Gabriel Kahane, book writer Seth Bockley (Kahane’s friend from Brown University) and director Davis McCallum center their show on Davis, from the opening song “Light Upon a Hill,” which conjures up the initial gathering of the tribe, to the story’s bittersweet end, when art and the real world collide. As the piece developed, the three collaborators would often gather at Kahane’s Brooklyn abode (with Bockley flying in from Chicago and sleeping under the piano, as the composer tells it), creating what Kahane calls their own “meta–February House experience.”
The show’s surprisingly eclectic sensibility is a reflection of 30-year-old Kahane’s wide-ranging background and polymusical tastes. The son of renowned pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane, the composer has already created classical pieces for the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Orinoco Sketches) and the Kronos Quartet (The Red Book), as well as an acclaimed song cycle called Craigslistlieder, based on personal ads on Craigslist. Williamstown Theater Festival staged a 2007 workshop of his first musical, Caravan Man, about the Prophet Muhammad. In October Kahane makes his debut at Carnegie Hall.
A range of musical styles lends individuality to the work’s characters: For McCullers, there’s a plaintive banjo behind the ballad “Coney Island” (“Please don’t let a single person know / My crazy feeling at the circus show / The truth of the matter’s that it’s here / I feel at home”); for Britten and his partner, baritone Peter Pears, there’s the operetta patter of “Shall We Live Here”; for Auden, there’s the hymn-like “Awkward Angel,” in which he sings, as if in prayer, about his young lover. A playful strip by Lee to “A Little Brain” is a surefire delight, as is a bit of sweet escapism when uptight Brits Britten and Pears sing the bouncy “California” (“We just need someplace that’s well behaved”).
All the characters’ voices are their own, but they also belong to their creators and, especially in this piece, to the audience. After all, that’s what art does: It reaches out into the real world. Much as Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine explored the creative process via a painting by Georges Seurat, Kahane, Bockley and McCallum have composed a kind of Sunday in the Parlor with George (Davis). This is a chamber musical in every sense of the word—one in which the phrase “artistic home” has an everlasting glow.
Frank Rizzo is a theatre writer for the Hartford Courant. He also writes for Variety and is theatre critic for FOX/CT.
