PILGRIM'S PROGRESS: 7/16/26
TANGIER and PROVINCETOWN
1.
The Dames at Sea one-night-only production here in Tangier on July 4th which starred Darren Criss had a nautically themed dress code for those of us who attended it. Here I am wearing the first sentences of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick at the afterparty with Darren and his wife, writer/producer/director Mia Swier. The production was staged on the Shangi-La-like grounds of Veere Grenney’s estate, Gazebo. The afterparty was thrown by William Holloway and Jean-Louis Deniot in the gardens of their own Valhalla-like home down the mountain lane from Veere. In other words, it was all rather heavenly - but gated. And as I’ve always sensed I might feel if I ever were to make it to whatever awaits in another realm - as we are told in mythically different religious narratives - as a real estate reward for living a worthy earthly life, I was feeling mighty grateful just to have gotten through the gates without too many questions being asked. Indeed, the local religious narrative here tells of a place called Jannatul Firdaus which is a paradisiacal garden of the highest order but I can’t imagine its being any more beautiful than Veere’s and William and Jean-Louis’s. I hope that doesn’t sound culturally offensive and constitutes a mark against my entering that final gate when I appear before it.
The production is the annual charity event produced by landscape designer Madison Cox, whose own way with a garden is world-renowned. I’m sure his late husband, Pierre Bergé, has even spread the word further afield where Pierre and his earlier partner, Yves Saint Laurent, now float about neither above nor below but rooted differently in this same realm so we don’t realise they, no longer garden-variety humans, are still hovering about, especially here in their beloved Morocco where the air itself feels spiced, a melange of jinns and cumin-coloured sunsets, a frolic of fragrances, saffron, cinnamon, sin, salting the air even more as it wafts in from its journey over water from Gibraltar then collecting themselves within it in the casbah before moving on down into the medina in whirls of instinct and entreaties and transactions that pass themselves off as trust and desire and something deeper than knowledge so that there is no need to attempt to comprehend anything, say, scientific, even, God knows (thus man), how atoms can be spliced, a frisson of otherness always present around here instead of a fission that obliterates us all into the sameness of nothing, the nothingness of the same. At least, that’s the narrative I breezily tell myself when confronted with priests and the Bible, mullahs and the Koran, rabbis and the Torah, monks and the Tripitaka, all those earthly guardians of theological gardens, the keepers of the gates.
But I’ve run on ahead of myself.
Back to lives lived worthily.
Madison is the President of the Fondation Jardin Majorelle in Marrakesh as well as President of the Fondation Pierre Bergé/Yves Saint Laurent which oversees the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. He also has a home in Tangier and the evening benefits the city’s American Legation and two important local organisations, an orphanage and HIV/AIDS clinic.
The night of the performance I was seated in the audience next to Mia and four-year-old Bluesy, the big sister to two-year-old László who Darren and Mia thought wasn’t quite ready to witness his daddy do what his daddy does from the vantage point of an audience member in addition to being a family one. Bluesy had already seen him, however, in his Tony-winning role as the retired obsolete helperbot, Oliver, in Maybe Happy Ending. Bluesy, Mia, and I were sitting ensconced in the middle of a bench in front of the wall in the back of the chairs that made up the “stalls.” The wall supported the promontory that became the “dress circle” for the evening. Our perch there was at the starting point for the centre aisle through which many entrances were staged by the evening’s director, Rob Ashford, who, with his husband Kevin Ryan, has a home here, Villa Léon l’Africain, which once belonged to antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs who then sold it to Bergé before Ashford and Ryan purchased it. When Darren made his first entrance through that centre aisle, he added a peck on Bluesy’s cheek as he glided by in his sailor costume ready to cut a rug and regale us with songs. “That’s my daddy,” she whispered to me, her lovely little face registering such … well, okay, there’s only one word for it ... glee.
I fell completely for Bluesy in that moment. I can also vouch that she inherited her daddy’s innate sense of rhythm because her little right foot next to me as she sat on her mama’s lap kept time with all the singing and music as she gently poked my leg with it. It were as if she also knew innately to turn what could have been an annoyance into the loveliest tap-tap-tap that kept time with all the tap-tap-tap dancing going on there before us. In intermittent moments when she stopped, I missed those little jabs of joy I was getting from her. She somehow knew I missed them - more inherited innateness there in the knowing innocence that actors keep, yep, on tap in order to play in the way they creatively do - so she’d begin her tap-tap-tapping again against my leg and look over at me and give me a smile infused with that infectious innocence she was just beginning to know how to wield without quite yet slipping into slyness because it still had its sense of wonder intact.
As Bluesy was tapping out her Morse Code of my-daddy-my-daddy-my-daddy there on my leg, I was not only getting that message but also the one reminding me that Criss had made his Broadway debut as Daniel Radcliffe’s replacement as J. Pierrepont Finch in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, a role that Robert Morse originated. Ashford had even directed and choreographed that revival with his trademark panache. The man sure knows how to shake a tail feather and shower an audience with showmanship. Criss went into How to Succeed back in 2012 with only two weeks rehearsal and Rob somehow whipped him and the rest of his cast for Dames into showtime-shape in a matter of five or six days. The male chorus members in the ensemble were in another kind of showtime shape as the number below attests. The stage was erected over Veere’s pool and Rob utilised that for this stripped-down number below.
Dames is a loving parody of a Busby Berkeley musical about how theatre can prove to be a kind of saving grace and resilience can be a kind of redemption all its own when a tincture of talent is added to it. Ashford even took the parody a meta step further and reimagined “Singapore Sue,” the show’s production number inside a production number, as “Tangerine Tess.” The plot revolves around a sailor/songwriter named Dick and Ruby, the little gal with a lot of gumption he falls for from Utah who arrives in New York “with nothing but tap shoes in her suitcase and a prayer in her heart.” Criss comes equipped with Gene Kelly’s disciplined jauntiness in his performing genes and it was on full dashing display that night in his performance as Dick. Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunster played his sidekick, Lucky, like a bulgier Ray Bolger. I also loved Summer Strallen as Joan , the blonde Blondell-like character. and Paula Leggett Chase as Mona Kent, the deadpan diva to whom she gave a kicky Kay Thompson flair.
Criss’s leading lady was Julianne Hough who played Ruby, a role which made Bernadette Peters a star off-Broadway back in the 1960s. Peters got branded with her singular perky Kewpie doll allure in that role and heralded her own arrival on the scene with the adenoidal way she could deliver her high notes with a catch in her throat that then caught audiences off-guard in a very good way. Hough though - who, like Ruby, is actually from Utah - is all sinew, her voice a bit reedier; she reads more as a ballerina toeing the leading-lady line. But she also has her own singular appeal, a likability that longs to be more than liked and it is in that longing where we begin to fall for her in the way audiences discover they love a performer and sometimes a performance. She’s Liza with less vibrato and better legs - or maybe Ann-Margret, who played the role in a 1971 television production of Dames, mimicking Gwen Verdon. But that’s all too droll, too glib - and it’s Hough’s utter lack of glibness that is finally her charm as a performer. More than any other person on the makeshift stage that night she possessed that knowing innocence with which Bluesy was already genetically blessed. I adored her.
It is the knowingness and innocence at the heart of the musical itself that makes it so appealing, each of which Ashford and his cast and creative team found within themselves to conjure such a lovely evening. Kudos to musical director David Chase. musicians Tom Hutch and Paul Mutzabaugh, stage manager Ruby Isaacs, costume and set and graphics designer Jamal Odedra, lighting designer Fabiana Piccioli, associate director Kate Tydman, and associate choreographer Michaeljon Slinger. Kevin Ryan, who oversees Madison Cox’s office and served as associate producer, was instrumental in making everything run smoothly.
Seeing the production upon my arrival here in Tangier, and acknowledging the causes it benefited as well as the love and care that went into making it all happen from so many dedicated people also deeply reminded me of why the communal ritual which theatre relies upon can feel so spiritual to me. I often say that theatres are my temples, even when - especially when - I am sitting under a Moroccan sky in a heavenly garden. That night might not have had the mythic dimensions demanded of all sorts of religions that both serve to sort us and sort us out. It was honestly more welcoming than that, more accepting, more wondrous in its worldly reach because it is an outstretched hand that theatre offers to so many of us who grow up feeling like outcasts instead of the judgmental back of one that religionists so impulsively raise in our presence. To paraphrase some other characters from another musical - Sheila and Maggie and Bebe from A Chorus Line - Dames at Sea that night wasn’t finally, okay, paradise but it was home.
2.
A tale of two lunches. Above: Hamish Bowles, Veere Grenney, David Kuhn, Johnny Rozsa and I above at Veere’s. Below: Lily Isaacs, Saf (sorry, Saf, I can’t recall your last name so you’ll have to be just Saf - like just Cher or just Madonna), Jane Stubbs, Jason Isaacs, Emma Hewitt, and I at San Remo restaurant.
3.
One afternoon when I was in Provincetown last month, my sister and her wife and their friends and I were roaming store to store on Commercial Street. When we went into Womencrafts, the feminist bookstore and gift shop, the lovely owner Michelle Axelson remembered me from my time over a decade ago now when I was living in Ptown during my first winter of trying to get sober. I was so scared and felt so alone. I had no money. I was both broke and broken.
Michelle and I were volunteers together at the soup kitchen at the Methodist Church. I actually volunteered there to cook those meals in the church’s kitchen so I could then eat them with all the other folks who needed to eat our meals at a soup kitchen. It’s hard to describe what it meant to me to run into Michelle that afternoon and be reminded of the pilgrimage that began back in that soup kitchen that winter and not just a few years ago when I set out to live this life I now am living.
Michelle does so much service in the community.
She is an inspiration.
That soup kitchen saves many lives.
It saved mine.
4.
I loved this video that Ken Fulk put up on his Instagram page of another kind of kitchen, this one at the Mary Heaton Vorse House where I stayed for three weeks in June as an artist-in-residence under the auspices of the Provincetown Arts Society and its director Gene Tartaglia. I cooked my dinner of sautéed salmon in olive oil with garlic and broccolini and asparagus and spinach on this stove in this kitchen every night but two while living there. When I copied the video to post here, Ken’s voice was muted as was the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra which was accompanying it as he explained and described the design of the kitchen. But the captions are still informative.
5.
A couple of triptychs. Above: photographer and artist Johnny Rozsa, filmmaker Quentin McCarron, and I at Johnny’s July 1st opening at Gallery Kent here in Tangier. Photo by Assaoud. Below: One of my oldest friends, film costume designer Michael Kaplan, one of my newest friends, actor Jason Isaacs, and I at a cocktail party at the American Legation on July 3rd to celebrate the production of Dames at Sea the next night.
6.
Jane Stubbs, above, was my first dinner guest on my terrace at my new place here in Tangier. She, like me, is from Mississippi by way of New York City, so I thought it only appropriate we christen the table here with some shared southern sensibilities. Jane now lives here most of the year and oversees the American Legation’s library.
The sky reminded me of a later chapter in Moby-Dick, the 37th, which Melville titled “Sunset." In it, he wrote: “Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. … Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!”
Old one-footed Ahab and his polished-jawbone blues.
I’ll stick with Bluesy and her one little foot filled with joy.
And Starbuck, too, Ahab’s First Mate. I’ll stick with him. His Quakerism and its Inward Light has a lesser need for the heightened halting of another day, the horizon and the metaphors it heaves forth for us to fathom. There is Starbuck’s anchoring stillness in the midst of the churn of Melville’s sentences, and now right here as he winds up in the churn of mine as I’m finally winding down.
I find my paradise in the paradox of the silence in which I sit as these words sail forth from me. That’s my nautical attire, I guess. They are. Another paradox: I anchor myself in the setting sail of words.
7.
I conjured this gazpacho the other night for Jane and me. Once I put it on the table, I realised it sort of matched the sunset. So I called it “Sort of Sunset Soup.” It’s quite chill. Like a dinner on a Tangier terrace with a lovely lady from Natchez, natch.
Everything connects.
Onward …
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