1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the lost Bernstein musical of the mid-1970s. Conceptually flawed and burdened with frequently embarrassing lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, it barely squeaked onto Broadway, despite the no doubt ardent advocacy of Patricia Routledge as First Lady. The debacle was so complete that Bernstein immediately began recycling its strongest passages for use in other works. Only a couple of key numbers have enjoyed an independent half-life on the fringes of the record catalogues: Frederica von Stade’s ‘Take care of this house’, as sung at President Carter’s Inauguration Gala in 1977, and Bruce Hubbard’s ‘Seena’, are probably the best known.
The present 80-minute cantata is a posthumous revivification prepared at the behest of the Bernstein Estate. As at the London premiere of July 1997, also entrusted to Kent Nagano and the LSO (though deploying a less starry cast), no one is credited with the arranging or the selecting. I cannot pretend that the results are entirely satisfactory. The problem of tone is more than usually acute when the score, though motivically integrated, is painfully uneven.
Nagano directs with straitlaced efficiency; he doesn’t warm to Bernstein’s earthier vulgarities in the manner of a Tilson Thomas or a Marin Alsop. June Anderson, Cunegonde no longer, sounds mature enough to portray her succession of First Ladies, and, as she does a mean Southern accent, her ‘Duet for One’ comes off very well, though at nine minutes it feels too long. Barbara Hendricks is an attractive Seena, despite the tonal discolouration that can blight her vowels. Without finding his best form, Thomas Hampson is predictably at home in the White House; only in the final number does he sound as if he is pushing to make himself heard above the orchestra (the voices do tend to be rather discreetly balanced for what is after all ‘crossover’ repertoire). Best of all is newcomer Kenneth Tarver as Lud: his account of ‘Seena’ rivals Hubbard’s and has you forgetting the limitations of the text.
Elsewhere these deficiencies are too great to be ignored and I simply cannot see the point of reviving tendentious passages of patronising pidgin English and sub-Gilbertian gobbledegook. Yes, these are meant to be ironic. By contrasting the privileged Presidents and First Ladies with three generations of fictional black servants, Bernstein and Lerner set out to illustrate the exclusion of minorities from the American dream. The vaguely Brechtian device of the play within a play provided a further set of inverted commas. But if it didn’t work in 1976, it sure as hell won’t wash now. If Camelot’s ‘How to handle a woman’ is dated sexual politics, Lerner’s clumsy racial satire in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is worse, quite without the deftness of a Sondheim. Copland in his Old American Songs had the sensitivity and good taste to expunge the ‘Then why cain’t a darkie/Hide out in de dark?’ school of word setting. Bernstein and Lerner embrace it with a will, every ‘an’, ‘de’ and ‘dere’ registering with excruciating clarity, the more so when Victor Acquah as Little Lud takes a choirboy’s pains over diction and word projection.
Not that the blacks are the only victims: the British don’t fare much better. Anticipating the Pocahontas school of childish revisionism, all the Brits are bad, and you know they’re bad by their unrelieved silly-arse ‘Egad … ’Tis a spiffy looking spread!’ style of delivery. This is a pity, as it ruins a pithily neo-classical Sonatina, the musical wit of which is almost wholly obscured. The very opening of the show is extraordinarily beautiful, Nagano expertly balancing the wind sonorities to bring a touch of asperity to the wide-open-spaces Americana. Which partly compensates for his inability to do justice to the jazzier elements. ‘Lud’s Wedding’ – one of the stronger songs, with a vigorous swing straight out of West Side Story – is surely too staid. And expertly though the LSO play, at times like this it’s all too well scrubbed. That said, I doubt anything could have saved ‘Bright and Black’: the jollity is forced, the lyrics again jaw-droppingly naff. Perhaps the best of the ‘new’ numbers, ‘This Time’ is a pseudo-operatic scene for Hendricks and Tarver that revisits the coiled melodic angst of ‘A Boy Like That’, complete with quasi-Mahlerian catharsis. Hampson can’t quite bring off the grand finale, ‘To Make Us Proud’. Developed from the opening ‘Prelude’, this is another of the would-be visionary conclusions to which Bernstein was so attached (q.v. Candide or the Second Symphony). It follows hard on the heels of the wretched ‘Money-Lovin’ Minstrel Show’ (praise de Lawd dat de words ain’t mo’ clearly audible). The rollicking tune from its third segment found a home in the overture, Slava.
Why Bernstein persisted with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the teeth of virtually unanimous opposition remains something of a mystery (though Coca-Cola, having put up the dollars, clearly expected a Broadway opening for the show). Yet even in the wake of a professional disaster and a personal crisis (Bernstein and his wife temporarily separated in the summer of 1976), he was still more than capable of delivering the goods as a conductor. In July 1976, he set down his electrically intense Boston version of Liszt’s Faust Symphony for DG, itself the thematic source for the Prelude to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and its reworking as Songfest’s sublime Whitman setting, ‘To what you said’, a Hampson speciality. Patricia Routledge described 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as ‘a diamond-studded dinosaur’, so let’s be grateful that through the medium of CD we can at last pick out some gems. Recommended – with reservations!'