There’s something about the wide open spaces that naturally make a man’s thoughts turn to rape, pillage and murder.
Out there, surrounded by only the limitless horizon, it’s just so damned easy to shake off civilization. Huck Finn is the barefoot spiritual progenitor of Bugsy Siegel. Huck’s over-the-shoulder cry as he heads for the town outskirts—“Sivilize me ... I can’t stand it. I been there before”—is the motto on which Las Vegas is built. Endless possibilities, unchecked except by one’s imagination—no wonder so many people crash and burn here.
We’ve just about managed to flush all sense of history into the bright, eternal Now of consumerist culture and so-called reality TV. So we mistakenly assume that the open spaces began here. Actually, the pilgrims standing on the continent’s rocky shore for the first time, the Atlantic lapping around their buckled shoes, must have had the same realization that Bugsy did: I can do what I want here. No one to stop me now.
They don’t call it the New World for nothing.
Of course, most people don’t run wild when given the chance. They bring their fences with them and erect them higher than where they started from, more to keep themselves in than to keep the far less dangerous wolves out. On the spectrum of reaction to the freedom of an empty landscape, Bugsy Siegel is right about in the middle, since in his heart of hearts he was a businessman, albeit one who had a less than orthodox way of capitalizing his enterprises. The far end of the spectrum, the point where all the rules get jettisoned, is better represented by Charles Manson. He had a decent racket going for him, scamming off post-Summer of Love hippie detritus, both male and female, with money and without—until he let his grip on reality erode, a process pushed along not just by drugs but perhaps even more so by the vacant cardboard Frontierland of the Spahn Ranch. If he hadn’t gotten into pointlessly murdering people, he might well have scored the recording deal for which he longed.
But the other reaction, the other end of the spectrum—that’s American territory as well. The puritans have always been convenient cartoons of our own impulse to lock things down tight, bottling up raging ids until they reach explosive force. What scares us the most about a certain tiny minority nut-fringe sector of radical Islam is that we can see beyond the shroud-like burqhas and suicide-bomber harnesses to our own inner witch-hunters, twitching to set a Bic lighter to the bonfires.
The best high-culture expression of the schizoid yo-yo’ing of the American heart between license and law has reemerged from the vaults. Back in 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression, composer Howard Hanson’s opera Merry Mount was premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. The title was lifted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Maypole Lovers of Merry Mount,” though librettist Richard Stokes ditched the story’s plot. What Stokes kept was the setting and general sense of early New Englanders going off the deep end, always a favorite trope with Hawthorne. If anything, the opera’s finale, with a sex-obsessed main character ripping open his shirt to reveal something other than a tattoo of doves carrying a “Mom” banner, recycles the ending of Hawthorne’s rather better-known Scarlet Letter. From contemporary accounts, Hanson’s opera hit big with audiences but was sufficiently savaged by the critics to cause the Met to drop it from the repertoire after eight performances, never to revive it again. To read some of the reviews’ carping about Hanson’s “incessant drumbeat ostinati,” you’d think they were talking about some earlier incarnation of Trent Reznor dialing the percussion machine to overload.
Well, maybe; the truth is, Howard Hanson was a fine composer. He might not have had the knack for the “big tune” folky stuff that his counterpart Aaron Copland could work up, but his slightly grimmer tone was certainly more suited for an opera which ends in general slaughter.
That the plot of Merry Mount hinges on pole-dancing only goes to show the degree to which language can shift over time. What gets Hanson’s puritans worked up to a froth isn’t anything you’d be likely to view in one of the so-called gentlemen’s clubs on Industrial, with silicone-enhanced unwed mothers doing aerial splits in their customers’ faces, but the far more decorous pastime of completely clothed people prancing in opposite circles with ribbons in hand, tethered to a maypole at the center. Of course, the puritans were right in sniffing out something satanic in the practice, since anything that involves romping physical activity around a long, cylindrical object probably did have its roots in the priapic bacchanalia that predated Christianity. As though they were the ancestors of the scowling spoilsports in the 1984 Kevin Bacon film Footloose, Hanson’s puritans connect the dots between dancing, however sedate by modern standards, and the young folk getting in the mood for other physical pleasures.
It’s the politics that are flipped in Merry Mount, however. Ever since Wilhelm Reich diagnosed rigid authoritarian (read: “fascist”) mind-sets as being rooted in sexual repression, it’s been the usual assumption that whoever is against having fun must be working for the Man, making sure that everybody follows the official rule-book of correct behavior, all to the greater glory of the state. Cult director John Waters, among many others, wouldn’t have a career without that notion. Actually, Reich got this one wrong. If anything, the Nazis were hyper-sexualized, with a major part of their marketing appeal translating as, “Join the SS and get laid.” The fun crowd in Merry Mount, eager to set up their maypole and get this party started, are the royalist cavaliers; they look at the dour puritans as the rebels and troublemakers, disloyal to king and crown, defying the authority of not just the state but also the good ol’ Church of England. (Any institution that owes its founding to royal bad boy Henry VIII can be excused for having a, shall we say, relaxed attitude about having a good time.) The royalist “in crowd” comes off as a pretty decent bunch in Merry Mount, even getting along with the local Native Americans, right up until the puritans accuse the latter of being in league with the devil and spoiling the settlers’ crops with their damned rain dances. At which point the opera’s Indians decide, “Screw this; let’s get rid of all of ’em”—a not unwarranted reaction to the newcomers causing such a ruckus.
Merry Mount’s protagonist, the puritan leader Wrestling Bradford, would have been better off if he had signed on to the fun crowd’s platform. In Act 2, he goes to hell—no, really; or at least in his mind. Once there, maddened by lust for the cutely virginal and aptly named Plentiful Tewke, he’s the one who takes the smoldering fountain pen and signs on the dotted line, handing his soul over to a giant toad with a jewel in its forehead. (No wonder Depression-era audiences enjoyed this show; you didn’t get stuff like this even in the movies back then.) Those kinds of deals never work out. Soon the cavaliers and the puritans are at each other’s throats, and not in a good way. By the time the curtain rings down at the end of Act 3, everybody, including Bradford, is either dead or crazy. Except for the Native Americans, who are probably offstage talking about immigration control.
Here in Vegas, of course, an excess of puritans is not the problem. Indulgence is the only belief system we have, and anyone who doesn’t join in is likely to be considered not just a party pooper but a traitor to the cause and a menace to the general welfare. We serve the state by enjoying ourselves, and the state knows it, not just tolerating our good times but virtually mandating them.
For a while, you could buy a recording of the old 1934 performance of Merry Mount, brought out on CD by the enterprising Naxos budget label. Rumor had it that the old shellac discs had been stored in a barn belonging to the tenor Lawrence Tibbet, who had starred in the opera. The nearly unlistenable CDs sounded like something that had been stored in a barn, so it was no big loss when the Metropolitan Opera forced Naxos to withdraw them from the U.S. market.
A recording of a 1996 concert performance by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra has been circulating samizdat-like in the opera-collector underground. That’s what Naxos has finally brought out this month, and it’s worth picking up to hear the full wallop of Hanson’s music. Not willing to let good stuff go to waste, the composer had cobbled together a suite of excerpts that has remained a minor staple on records and in the concert hall; unfortunately, the bits are all lighter stuff, with nothing from the completely wacko third act, so they always gave listeners an unbalanced notion of the source, as if it really were about dancing around a maypole, like some Yankee Oklahoma! instead of the Apocalypse Then rave-up it actually is.
One of the few legitimate criticisms from the time of Merry Mount’s premiere is that Howard Hanson really couldn’t write for the human voice. He might have realized that, as well; he never wrote another opera. But the orchestral music is so dramatic, and the action so easy to follow without dialogue, the notion is raised that the whole thing would work better as a ballet. Especially given that the story is as much about sexual tension as Swan Lake and Giselle, and ballet dancers are in, ahem, better shape than the average opera singer.
It’s not too late. Our own Nevada Ballet Theatre’s dancers have shown lately that they’ve got the looks and the chops to pull off just about anything onstage, and the company’s artistic director, Bruce Steivel, has the choreographic range to go from sexy fun (last year’s big band-driven In the Mood) to heavy doom ’n’ gloom emoting (this season’s Dracula). All it would take is a local check-writing millionaire to seize the chance to be a culture hero, and Hanson’s epic vision of the war in the American soul would finally get the staging it deserves, right here where the battle is at its fiercest.