Plays About Composers: More Popular Than You Might Think

Classical music in Phoenix has been dominated for the past two weeks, not by a simple concert artist, but by an actor-playwright-pianist. In one-man plays about Gershwin and Chopin, Hershey Felder has captured the imagination of audiences and taken them into the worlds of these composers. This is beyond "Amadeus," because the whole point of Felder's plays is to frame a musical performance of the composers' works in a dramatic context. It suggests an entirely new way to get this music to people who would just as soon see a play. This way, they get both.

Below is an excerpt from a column I wrote about Felder's shows for The Desert Advocate. For the entire piece, go to http://www.thedesertadvocate.com/103107/arts/foothills.htm

"At the close of 'George Gershwin Alone,' Felder comes out on stage as himself and leads a singalong. He explains that, before there was music everywhere–in elevators, on computers, on TV and radio and movies and even cell phones–it was necessary for people to make music for themselves. Everybody had a piano, and everybody took piano lessons. Because of this, there was a musical language in common between the composers and performers of classical music on the one hand, and their audiences on the other.

Of course, today that is not necessarily true. The person who takes piano lessons will surely get more out of hearing a Chopin polonaise than will one who doesn’t, but there aren’t as many of those folks as there used to be. So it’s realistic to expect that fewer people will go to recitals and concerts. That is, they won’t go, unless there is something they can relate to, something like a story or a theme that helps make the music more personal for them. And that, of course, is what theater does.

Theater may very well be the way to reach potential classical music fans without forcibly dragging them into concert halls. Felder’s plays, after all, are essentially piano recitals with stories wrapped around them. Instead of leaving this phenomenon to the theater world, the musical world might think about making its own moves in that direction.

- KLF