The creme de la creme stages a smooth bash

By JOHN FLEMING Times Performing Arts Critic

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 17, 1999

My millennium bash owes a lot to Jay Gatsby, that elegant impostor from F. Scott Fitzgerald's great American novel. Gatsby cut a glamorous figure on the veranda of his Long Island mansion, presiding over some of the wildest parties ever thrown.

As Nick Carraway observed, people weren't invited to Gatsby's parties -- they just came, hundreds of the best and brightest and most beautiful for a summer weekend of swimming and boating and tennis, eating and drinking, dancing and discussing and flirting, making fools of themselves and sleeping it all off in time for a sumptuous brunch the next day.

For my party, I'd want George Gershwin at the Steinway grand, playing the "yellow cocktail music" of the Jazz Age, with Dawn Upshaw and Fred Astaire trading vocals. Also on hand would be George's brother, Ira, whose erudite wordplay would enliven a circle of fellow wits. There would be the other great songwriting teams, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe and Blake and Sissle, as well as those who wrote lyrics and music singlehandedly: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim.

Speaking of Sondheim, send in Bernadette Peters and the rest of the cast of Into the Woods, the show that revived my fondness for musical theater after years in the rock 'n' roll wilderness. But I still like rock, too, and my old fave, Pete Townshend, has got to be there. Anyone who played windmill guitar for the Who, toiled as a book editor (briefly) and had a hit on Broadway is my idea of a Renaissance man.

Another all-around guy was Leonard Bernstein, not just an important composer and conductor, but also the greatest musical educator of the century via his televised concerts for young people. I'd want to get Bernstein together with his idol, Gustav Mahler, as well as take in the legendary allure of Mahler's mate, Alma.

In the library -- can you believe all those books lining the shelves are real and not props? -- you would find a heated discussion of politics and art going on among Arthur Miller and his wife, Marilyn Monroe; Lillian Hellman and her companion, Dashiell Hammet; Julie Andrews and hubby Blake Edwards; Lotte Lenya and her husband, Kurt Weill; and my all-time favorite stage couple, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn.

Another meeting I'd like to witness would not be of the minds, but of the voices -- Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, the alpha and omega of divas in our time.

Money often talks louder than arias, and any party worth its salt has some dealmakers around the brass-railed bar. Cameron Mackintosh is not only a producer with the Midas touch, but he is also a spirited schmoozer. I'd love to eavesdrop on his conversation with Hal Prince, David Merrick and Flo Ziegfeld.

Every memorable party has an ugly scene for people to gossip about, and the confrontation out by the swimming pool between Tony Kushner and Roy Cohn -- the red-baiting villain of Kushner's "gay fantasia," Angels in America -- would be a doozy. For commentary, I would rely on Mart Crowley, whose Boys in the Band brought gay culture to a mass audience; and for comic relief, gay theatrical satirist Charles Ludlam.

Off in a corner, August Wilson, whose Fences is one of the most powerful black plays I've ever seen, and Robert Brustein, the first critic to open my eyes to ideas in the theater, would hash out their widely chronicled disagreements on race and art. My two favorite critics -- Virgil Thomson and Kenneth Tynan, both from a time before political correctness -- would listen to the talk of affirmative action and diversity with amusement.

Thomson was also a composer (only composers are qualified to be music critics, he used to say), and he would eventually drift off to talk shop with a trio of musical giants, each of whom can lay claim to being the great American composer: Charles Ives, Aaron Copland and Duke Ellington. (If forced to choose, I might go with Ellington.)

Another composer whose music makes me listen carefully, Arnold Schoenberg, wasn't born in the United States. The godfather of serialism emigrated from Nazi Germany to settle in Hollywood, where he was known for his enthusiastic tennis game. At the turn of the millennium, I like to think of Schoenberg playing mixed doubles, partnered with Chris Evert (my token jock at the party -- and an artist in her own right), against a powerhouse pair from the Broadway tennis club circuit, Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr.

There would, of course, be dancing to an orchestra that knows how to swing as well as symphonize, say, the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa in his Nehru-jacket-and-love-beads phase. But let the Viennese have their waltzes. This grand ball would be choreographed by the eclectic likes of George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Bob Fosse, Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera, Ann Reinking, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Twyla Tharp.

The Great Gatsby ends up as a tragedy, with Gatsby floating dead in his pool, but I'd prefer to usher in the new millennium on an optimistic note, with Quartetto Italiano playing the greatest music ever written, Beethoven's string quartets.