Charles Mingus: “Jelly Roll Soul” (1959)
After Todd, I did a comedy, Larry Gelbart’s Sly Fox, an adaptation of Ben Jonson’s cynical Volpone. I played Truckle, a mealy mouthed “respectable” man who was willing to sell his wife’s honor to the falsely ill Foxwell Sly, in exchange for being named his sole inheritor.
Here I am, third from the right, my long suffering and virtuous wife on my right and the falsely ill Foxwell Sly lying in his bed, supposedly dying.
***
I did another play, Anna Ascends, in the Players pub space, in three-quarter round. Staged in 1921, it was the first play on Broadway to feature Arab-American characters. The play was made into a silent movie in 1922. Then both play and movie disappeared from sight, never to surface again. By the ’80s, the only script for it was an Arabic translation that had appeared at the time in a New York Syrian newspaper. A retired Utica school administrator who was Lebanese took it on himself to translate it back into English. His son, who acted and directed at Syracuse Stage, agreed to stage it at Players with grants from State historical and arts councils. I played Saeed, the Syrian restaurant owner who was godfather to the heroine Anna. It was a melodrama, thin in substance but if you got inside your character and skated fast, no ice cracks appeared beneath your feet.
Esther landed a plum role in a children’s play, a wild surreal thing called Old Kieg of Malfi. She played the kind witch Mrs. Seuss. Her first entry was on roller skates, a trombone case in one hand.
This play has disappeared from the repertoire and I can find no current reference to it on Google. But it was premiered at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.-St Paul, which is a big deal, and it was lovely, with parts for young children and lots and lots of songs to be sung and music played. Mrs. Seuss was the kind of part you throw yourself into and Esther did it up royally.
The oldest daughter of our good friends Jim and Linnie Phifer was in that play too. We drove to rehearsals together and when the play came off, sat in the audience together cheering for Esther and Trystan. Tamezind, their younger daughter, was intrigued by the rehearsals — I couldn’t help thinking she was waiting for her day in the sun too.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Pierre-Laurent Aimard: Ligeti: “L’Escalier du Diable”
MUSIC & ME 