Happy Easter, everybody.
My family was schizophrenic about Easter, since the church we regularly attended in Arlington, Mass, the Arlington Congregational Church, had its Easter service on the regular day while the Greek Orthodox Church, in which my parents were married, celebrates on a different day entirely (well, most years—this year, Greek Easter falls on May 5). The Greeks dye all Easter eggs red, which is a bit boring, but play a game where everyone in the family picks an egg and takes turns smashing its end against another family member’s egg (hitting an egg in the side is cheating). The Marshalls had this competition on regular Easter with multi-colored eggs; my mother often secretly dyed an unboiled egg and gave this one to my father, so his egg would shatter into a gooey mess when they had their egg duel. Today my sister is making me a traditional Greek specialty, avagolemono soup. My grandmother made it: Mom didn’t have the patience. If you’ve never tried it, you should.
That Easter hymn above was always sung at our church (which was riddled with scandals: a deacon leaving his wife and two daughters to run off with a gay lover; a beloved, charismatic young minister being revealed as a serial adulterer with female members of the congregation; the young woman who ran the Sunday school program hanging herself in the church bell tower). It’s by my pal Sir Arthur Sullivan, who was one of those freaks like Richard Rodgers, Edvard Grieg, Irving Berlin, Carol King and Paul McCartney who could create catchy melodies without breaking a sweat (unlike, say, Stephen Sondheim).
My Easter celebration, as always, began this year with my umpteenth viewing of the guilty pleasure champion film of all time, Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” which I first saw as a child and which planted the seed that made me aspire to being a director. The production’s ethics lesson is “If you are going to do something, do it right.” The grand, incomparable epic also stands for the principle that important stories in our culture should be told to rising generations in a manner that will cement them in their brains forever.
Every director, especially opera directors, can learn from the astounding Exodus scene, which thrills me every time I see it. CB spares no expense or imaginative detail: everything is going on: an old man praying is stampeded by geese; a small boy is nosed by a water buffalo (no mere oxen for CB!) ; the Nubians have a huge vulture flapping away on their cart. Brilliant colors, wild sounds, such organized chaos—and all those people are real, not CGI fakes. The fantastic boffo sequences are all so good you can forgive (if not forget) DeMille’s vulgarity and cornball instincts, as with the giggling daughters of the Sheik of Midion basically drooling over Charlton Heston, and various characters, but especially Nefertiri (played by Ann Baxter, who could be an effective actress, like she’s in a John Waters movie), saying, “Moses, Moses!” repeatedly. My favorites, other than Moses leading the thousands out of Egypt: the raising of the new obelisk…the burning hail—the plague of the first born moving down alleys and streets in a sickly green mist right out of a horror movie—God writing out the Ten Commandments with animated flaming lightning that does loop-de-loops and other stunts on the way to the tablets—-the parting of the Red Sea (of course), and CB’s insanely over-the-top orgy around the Golden Calf: Where did all those flower garlands come from in a desert?
Ethics Alarms 