Small World at 59E59: Cosmic Ideas

Tina and just got back from seeing Small World on stage on East 59th Street, a profound and memorable series of conversations between Walt Disney and Igor Stravinsky pitting popular culture vs. high culture, the king of animation vs. the 20th-century successor to Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky.   I don't know if Herbert Gans, author of Popular Culture and High Culture, has ever seen it, but if he did, I'd bet he'd love it.   Tina and I did.

Disney and Stravinsky did meet at least once in 1939, but no one knows what they talked about. Presumably about Disney's slowly-recognized masterpiece Fantasia, which put Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" music to animation.  Small World imagines these two describing competing visions of art, debating commercialism and artistic sincerity, with wit and passion and, against all odds, not only anger at times but mutual integrity.

Mark Shanahan plays Disney with his customary style and depth.  Shanahan, whom I've seen at least a dozen times in various roles, has a talent for inhabiting those roles, and in the case of historical characters, bringing them to life in front of your eyes.  I never met Disney, but I left the theater thinking I'd had the rare privilege of meeting this extraordinary film pioneer, and hearing what he had to say.  The same for Stephen D’Ambrose's Stravinsky - this is the first time I've seen D'Ambrose on stage, but I'd welcome the chance to see him again.

Small World (written by  Frederick Stroppel, directed by Joe Brancato) doesn't pull its punches.  Disney's take on the Nazis - he condemns them, but thinks there would be some good in getting Hitler to laugh - is unflinchingly portrayed.  (Most of us would prefer him just erased from existence.) Stravinsky comes across as all too quick to be converted to commercialism as the years in ensue.  These are flawed men, far more than just the best of their opinions, as we all are.

They also lived in a time very different from ours, in which avenues to fame and success were far fewer.  But if the pursuit of stardom has gotten has more routes in the 21st century, it hasn't gotten any easier, which makes Small World as relevant today as it was all those decades, almost a century, ago.

Here's a disclaimer.  Shanahan is an old friend.  He was my Masters student years ago at Fordham University, where he now teaches some great courses.  He did audiobooks for two of my novels, The Consciousness Plague and The Plot to Save Socrates, and wrote an Edgar-nominated radio play for my novelette, The Chronology Protection Case.

Should you therefore take what I say about Small World with a grain of salt?  Hey, maybe someone should write a play about this issue, too, and I could play the part of I. A Richards, who says all acts of creation, including reviews, should be judged only on their words, and not on the bios of their authors.

So see the play - Small World, that is - you'll love it.