Review: ON THE WATERFRONT Returns at Avery Fisher Hall

The glowing fountains at Josie Robertson Plaza, plumed with a dazzling vibrancy, welcoming a throng of silvery faces. Among them sauntered an impressionable following, the young and economically diverse New Yorkers who only know the now-infamous House Un-American Activities Committee by rote.

In 1952, filmmaker Elia Kazan named names. As a high-profile artist, suddenly in an impossible position, he could at least continue making pictures. Yet, a conundrum followed. Who would work with him?

Marlon Brando, then at the top of his game, first dissented to work with a rat. In his, and many other eyes, Kazan had ignominiously succumbed to the Red Scare hysteria to the point of incapacitating friends and colleagues in the arts, notably Arthur Miller.

Celebrity composer Leonard Bernstein was among fifty eminent American artists who publicly condemned the flagrant injustices of Senator Joseph McCarthy. As with Brando, the celluloid visions of Kazan proved irresistible for Bernstein.

Bernstein could not help hearing absolutely inspiring, unwritten music in his head after agreeing to view a rough-cut screening of On the Waterfront. The soundtrack would become his one and only film score for which he was later snubbed an Oscar.

Special guest and artistic advisor Alec Baldwin opened the evening with an amusing anecdote of his sitting with Keith Richards at a book party, hearing from the classic rock guru of his admiration for alternative cinema. Truly, a modern version of On the Waterfront befitting the original would teem with cultural radicalism.

Preceded by such socially conscious hits as Gentlemen's Agreement, starring Gregory Peck as a muckraking journalist out to expose anti-Semitism in America, On the Waterfront was a knockout in the struggle to recognize the plight of the worker as pit against mobster unions.

Brando poured soul into the seething, frustrated indigence of the average American workingman, iconized in the story of a New Jersey longshoreman. The celebrated lines, "I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am" still hold water as the agonized voice of the domestic working poor.

Wealth disparity has never been more blaring than today. Occupy Wall Street revealed New York City as a symbol for the nightmare of American capitalism. Ultimately, the narrative scope so masterfully focused by screenwriter Budd Schulberg is about the reconciliation of honest work in what is a murderously corrupted labor market.

In short, human lives have ever been dispensable to the interests of American capitalism, beginning in the slave era, through the height of economic immigration from early 20th century Europe to the current era of neoliberal globalization.

New York Philharmonic conductor David Newman captivated a full house under the classy Lincoln Center ambiance, indulging with daring intensity in the essence of the forty-five minutes of music that Bernstein composed as he mused on the themes illustrated by Kazan. For the world premiere event, The New York Philharmonic were challenged to start almost from scratch, as no orchestral score previously existed of what was basically a short score in sketches.

At times, spoken dialogue drowned in the immense sonic pulse of virtuosic strings and brazen horns. The urban New York sound gyrates with dramatic effect enough to cause the multitudes to swoon simultaneously at the sights of homicide, to abhor the blood-curdling enigmas of organized crime, to witness the exploitations of the worker, and to respect the fight for what is right on the traumatic frontlines of American poverty.

The late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who often conducted the twenty-minute Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront that Bernstein premiered with the New York Philharmonic in 1960, said, "This music smells of the United States."

Photo Courtesy of New York Philharmonic

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