They Told Me Not to Take that Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center (10 page)

In a whisper, I asked Jane whether she had a tissue handy.

T
HE SUSPENSION OF 2002
performances of the Mostly Mozart Orchestra was not the only instance of union friction at Lincoln Center with which I had to deal. Another occurred two years later.

I was told that James (Jimmy) Claffey, the notoriously brusque and tough-minded president of the New York Chapter of IATSE
(the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), otherwise known as the stagehands’ union, was intent on unilaterally asserting union jurisdiction for the first time over an event that Lincoln Center had mounted free to the public during each winter holiday season for years.

Lincoln Center organized a half hour of live outdoor entertainment that culminated in a holiday tree-lighting ceremony. It was held in December on Josie Robertson Plaza and on the surrounding balconies and porticos of the Metropolitan Opera, Avery Fisher Hall, and what was then known as the New York State Theater. Opera singers from the Met; dancers from the New York City Ballet; students from the School of American Ballet trained to perform in the
Nutcracker
; musicians from the New York Philharmonic and from Jazz at Lincoln Center; and jugglers, aerialists, and clowns from the Big Apple Circus all performed for no fee to an enchanted audience of children and their families that numbered as many as ten thousand. Organized by the Business Improvement District (BID), stores along Broadway, Columbus, and Amsterdam Avenues offered free refreshments and merchandise.

This event proved so enjoyable and visually arresting that the local ABC television station decided to broadcast it from 5:30 to 6:00 p.m. throughout New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It received very high viewership.

Sure enough, three hours before the television program was due to start, Claffey called to say, “We want that work on the plaza or we will picket and shut you down.”

I reminded him that Lincoln Center’s collectively bargained contract excluded IATSE jurisdiction over events offered free to the public in our outdoor spaces. I also mentioned that I would be present at this holiday event. At that time, I would be delighted to explain to the news media that the very best-paid union members in the world had taken it upon themselves to prevent a free event from being seen by tens of thousands live and on television as it had been for the last four years.

Lincoln Center simply could not afford to continue this joyful holiday celebration if union costs amounting to several hundreds of thousands of dollars were suddenly imposed, in violation of our existing contract.

This show would not be stopped by him, and I was not going to be threatened. There was heat under my collar.

Literally minutes after Claffey hung up, a member of the New York City Council, Christine Quinn, who was later elected speaker of that legislative body, called. She asked why the stagehands were being barred from Lincoln Center’s campus. I patiently told her that there was no more unionized cultural complex in the world than Lincoln Center, but that the jurisdiction of the stagehands did not extend to Josie Robertson Plaza or our other public spaces for events that are free to the public. I asked her whether she had read or been briefed about Lincoln Center’s contract with IATSE, or whether she was aware that the workers on whose behalf she was calling earned on average $250,000 annually. She dissembled.

Ignorant of these and other facts, Quinn was simply doing Claffey’s bidding. She seemed flummoxed by my questions.

Politicians who are handmaidens of special interests—be they unions, real estate developers, retailers, or Wall Street lobbyists—do a disservice to the general public and to the office they hold.

I thanked her for calling.

The show went on as planned, without a hitch. Claffey’s threat did not work. And Christine Quinn, hardly known as a supporter of the performing arts, was not heard from again.

CHAPTER 3

Curtain Up

                
Bit by bit, putting it together

                
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art

                
Every moment makes a contribution

                
Every little detail plays a part

                
Having just a vision’s no solution

                
Everything depends on execution

                
Putting it together, that’s what counts!

                    
—STEPHEN SONDHEIM, “Putting It Together,”
Sunday in the Park with George

T
he Mostly Mozart Festival is one of a number of productions and presentations Lincoln Center mounts every year, more than four hundred events in all. Preceding it is a beloved New York tradition, Midsummer Night Swing. Located in Damrosch Park, on the northwest side of Lincoln Center’s campus, it runs for a period of two weeks every July. Between six and ten o’clock each evening, thousands of people arrive. They come to dance. Some arrive as couples. Most singles find it very easy to “couple up.” The music breaks the ice. The rhythms introduce the shy to the outgoing.

Every age, size, shape, social class, color, and ethnicity is present. All are cordially invited. Dressed to the nines, or come as you are, be prepared to be surrounded by the sights and sounds of swing, reggae, the samba, the merengue, the cha-cha, the fox trot, the lindy hop, rock
and roll, soul, Motown, salsa, the tango, the polka, funk, zydeco, country, disco, the jig, Afro-soul, Afro-Latin, and garage house. Hundreds spring for a $17 ticket, which admits them to an attractive, elevated dance floor and to a lesson. Thousands of others just show up. They dance free of charge in the park itself, around the stage on three sides. They also enjoy the carefully chosen musical ensembles, playing from a fully renovated and stunningly lit outdoor band shell. Four hours of sheer unadulterated, uninterrupted bliss transpire under an open sky.

And only yards away, at the Koch Theater, the Mark Morris Dance Company, the Bolshoi, the Paris Opera Ballet, or the San Francisco Ballet may be performing. Or equidistant, on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, a celebration of the choreography of Frederick Ashton might be occurring, with the Royal Ballet of London and Birmingham sharing performance duties with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Or, diagonally across the plaza in Avery Fisher Hall, audiences might be seeing a spectacular rendition of Sondheim’s
Pacific Overtures
performed in Japanese, or Elvis Costello singing his catalog of hits, or Goren Bregovic crooning spirited and melancholy melodies from the Balkans.

In Damrosch Park, if you listen carefully, you will hear Albanian, Russian, Italian, Gaelic, Polish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese, among other languages, being spoken. Be alert as you walk around not to trip over a stroller carrying a three-year-old, brought by her parents coming off the Number 1 subway line from the Bronx or the F train from Queens to enjoy a beautiful night under the stars at no charge. A fellow dancer offers to look after that little child, as her parents take a few minutes on their own to trip the light fantastic. The elderly prove that despite wheelchairs, walkers, and caretakers, they also can sway their hips, move their arms, shake a leg, and snap their fingers to the sounds of their adolescence. Mixed in with amateurs just having fun, aspiring professionals work on their routines for the competitions yet to come, surrounded by impromptu audiences of admirers, who applaud their virtuosity.

It is not for nothing that the
Wall Street Journal
called Midsummer Night Swing “democracy in action.”
¹
Nor is it a surprise that legendary
New York Times
photographer Bill Cunningham always elaborately displays decked out dancers in fine acrobatic form throughout his pages.

In this dense, crowded, and stressful city, on these July evenings, people seem free of worldly care.

That same feeling of joyful engagement suffuses Lincoln Center Out of Doors. It is a mélange of presentations that seems to pop up everywhere on and around (and sometimes underneath) Lincoln Center’s public spaces. Music and dance of all kinds permeate Lincoln Center throughout August, every one of dozens of shows free of charge. The artists arrive at Lincoln Center from the far corners of our city and country and, occasionally, from abroad. Bill Bragin was the impresario of both Midsummer Night Swing and Lincoln Center Out of Doors. His encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary artists, whatever their genre, whatever their place of origin, made possible an exciting variety of performances.

You might even have been among the fifty thousand people lucky enough to see Dave Brubeck perform in one of his very last major concerts, or Chubby Checker twist again like he did last summer, or Roberta Flack, or Ruben Blades, one of salsa’s most beloved icons, or the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma or Eiko & Koma performing a site-specific water work in the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace. They have all appeared on separate nights in seasons during the last decade of Out of Doors. As have the Asphalt Orchestra and
The Tangle
, The Polyglot Theatre’s colorful and beautifully chaotic art installation that lovingly entangled kids throughout Josie Robertson Plaza.

Several years after the fresh breezes of reform swept over the Mostly Mozart Festival and after Bill Bragin began to reinvigorate Midsummer Night Swing and Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Jane Moss and I felt that something similar was needed for Lincoln Center’s fall programming. She took a sabbatical. I encouraged her: “Take off four months or so. Read. Travel. Reflect. Come back with an organizing principle for a truly exciting festival. I can’t wait to see what you develop.”

Refreshed and reinvigorated, she reappeared with an artistic gift for Lincoln Center: the White Light Festival. The notion behind it came from two sources: the need to slow down and fend off the extraneous noise in our lives, on the one hand, and a yearning for a sense of spirituality, on the other. Are you too busy to think? Too preoccupied to relax? Too enslaved by the very appliances that are intended to liberate you? Then allow music to penetrate your consciousness.

Not everyone in a given audience or every critic agreed with Jane’s premise, or even believed that it set forth a coherent theme on the basis of which a festival could be organized. But all seemed to acknowledge that the works selected to illustrate her point of view were of high quality. Many were arresting. And given the proclivity for programming in most places around the country to be ad hoc, a grab bag of unrelated performances, what everyone respected was the presence of a well-articulated theme.

Here is a sample of what audiences encountered in the first three White Light Festivals: the Manganiyar Seduction from India; the Whirling Dervishes from Turkey; the Schola Cantorum from Venezuela; the London Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis”; Paul Lewis performing Schubert; the “Immortal Bach” rendered by Cameron Carpenter on Alice Tully Hall’s refurbished Kuhn Organ; and the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, playing Mahler’s Symphony no. 9. To these offerings add early music, Sephardic music, and Sufi mysticism.

The sources of humanity’s spirituality and the art that moves us to transcendence are not confined by national boundaries or by centuries. Moss took audiences on her own carefully curated journey across the world and across time.

This high standard characterizes the excellent programs of Jane Moss and her team throughout the year. Orchestras have included the London Symphony, the Vienna Symphony, the Dresden Philharmonic, the Bamberg Symphony, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the Kirov Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Recitalists have included Tetzlaff and Bell on the violin and Perahia, Aimard, and Ohlsson on the piano. The baritones Quasthoff and Keenlyside have appeared. Among the chamber orchestras that have performed are the Collegium Vocale Gent Choir and Orchestra, the Freiburg Baroque, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

The routine of many so-called curators and presenters in the performing arts is to dial up agents, choose artists, and negotiate a fee. What those musicians play or artists perform is usually their own decision. Rarely is there a meaningful exchange of ideas with the resident “impresario.” There is little debate over whether each selection fits the context of a given season and does justice to the audience. No attention
is paid to how much rehearsal time is really needed. “Roll them in and roll them out” is often the operating guideline. It’s just a gig, after all. All around America, such “booking houses” order in touring productions and groups. Agents offer them up; you can take ’em or leave ’em.