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keeps everything fresh,” Alan Cum-
ming says in a phone call with
Ravinia
Magazine. Cumming, who will perform
his one-man show
Legal Immigrant
in
the Pavilion on July , is a Tony Award–
winning actor and prolific character actor in
films and on television, a writer of TV sketch
comedy, a novelist, a memoirist, a children’s
book co-author, a singer, and musician. Try
saying all that in one breath.
Cumming even owns his own bar,
Club Cumming in New York, and he is
the executive producer of his new
CBS TV series,
Instinct
. “That’s a
really healthy thing, to not be
so focused on oneself,” he says
of this new addition to his
formidable résumé. “It makes
me aware and helps me to
understand the significance
of other people’s roles in the
[creative] process. I’m much
less likely to be jaded.”
Steve Martin, returning
to Ravinia on August with
festival first-timer Martin Short in
An
Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of
Your Life
, is another exemplar of the
multi-faceted artist. He’s an iconic co-
median, actor, novelist, playwright, and
musician, as well as a noted art collector.
In the late s, Martin was selling
out ,-plus-seat venues and was the
most successful stand-up comedian of
his time. “I was astonished that popular
culture had fixed its attention so intensely
on my little act,” Martin wrote in his
memoir,
Born Standing Up
. But in , in
what he called an artistic crisis, and feeling
that his phenomenally successful act had
“reached the top of the roller coaster,” Martin
abruptly quit stand-up.
He has made a career out of defying audience
expectations. In his first film,
The Jerk
, Martin
was the crowd-pleasing “wild and crazy guy.” In
his second,
Pennies from Heaven
, based on the grimly
comic Dennis Potter teleplay, he was anything but.
As a writer, Martin first published comic piec-
es (
Cruel Shoes
), but in due course branched out
into plays that deftly juggled the intellectual and
the absurd (
Picasso at the Lapin Agile
; Tony
nominee
Meteor Shower
) and novels (
Shopgirl
;
An
Object of Beauty
). In recent years, he has returned
to the stage, not as a stand-up, but as a musician,
playing banjo with the Steep Canyon Rangers. “A
lot of people ask me, ‘Steve, why a music career?
Why now?’ ” he joked during his last
Ravinia appearance. “And I say, ‘Guys,
you’re my band.’ ”
This summer, Ravinia is celebrating
the centennial of Leonard Bernstein, a
true Renaissance man whom the
New York Times
hailed
as “one of the most prodigally talented and successful
musicians in American history.” Ravinia President
and CEO Welz Kauffman—a multi-hyphenate in
his own right, a classically trained pianist who is re-
sponsible for the festival’s financial as well as artistic
integrity—worked for five years with conductor
Marin Alsop to program the present multiyear
Bernstein tribute.
Alsop, who was Bernstein’s
last (and only female) protégé,
wanted concerts that not
only shared the composer’s
own work, but also recog-
nized the music and causes
he championed to create a
representative portrait of arguably
America’s most celebrated musician. “In
the history of multi-hyphenates, no one stands
taller than Leonard Bernstein,” Kauffman says.
“Composing
West Side Story
would be career
enough for anyone; the same with being music
director of the New York Philharmonic. But
those are just two achievements in a life that’s
been examined in more than books and
counting. Here was an artist at the top of his
game as a composer of film scores, Broadway
musicals, symphonies, ballets, and songs; a
charismatic conductor of international repute;
a pianist whose recordings still generate excite-
ment; and a resurrector of forgotten geniuses
like Mahler. He was a mentor, father, social
activist, television personality, and America’s
music teacher with his televised ‘Young People’s
Concerts’—created at a time when television
was young and would dare to broadcast classical
music as a public service—and books [
The Joy of
Music
,
The Infinite Variety of Music
,
Findings
].
“All this success had a downside, though, as
some critics in his own lifetime attempted to dimin-
ish his accomplishments in jack-of-all-trades fashion
because of his enormous popularity. But his life was
so well documented across so much media that today
people with any musical background revere the
man and his music. The name alone is a symbol of
achievement.”
Another revered name on the Ravinia schedule
is Audra McDonald, a returning Ravinia favorite,
who on July will headline the festival’s gala
concert benefiting its Reach*Teach*Play music
education programs. She perhaps speaks for
Alan Cumming (left) and Audra McDonald (below)
both return to Ravinia in mid-July, but audiences
have almost certainly also seen them previously on
the theater stage or television screen.
PHILLIP TOLEDANO (ALAN CUMMING); ALLISON MICHAEL ORENSTEIN (AUDRA MCDONALD)
JULY 9 – JULY 22, 2018 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE
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