Huge team tackles unorthodox 1971 'Mass'

With Leonard Bernstein's wildly diverse, emotionally cathartic "Mass," creating order is paramount, and challenging.

"It's like a huge jigsaw puzzle," said Pam Berlin, the New York-based stage director for this Virginia Arts Festival program being performed today and Saturday at Chrysler Hall.

The work, which some consider his masterpiece, is based on a traditional Catholic Mass but breaks from the form with singers passionately expressing anger and frustration and questioning God.

"I don't know that there's anything that compares to this," said Robert Shoup, the piece's choral director. The 1971 work, which reflects the turmoil of the 1960s, involves dancers, choruses, an orchestra, rock band, 14 soloists representing the congregation, a boy soprano and a priest, called a celebrant.

Vocal styles include rock, jazz, blues, pop, operatic and Broadway.

For this production, everyone but the orchestra and the adult chorus is moving, which is why Todd Rosen-lieb, the Norfolk-based choreographer, took part in most of the rehearsals.

Last week, Rosenlieb spent two hours setting 2-1/2 minutes of choreography on all the soloists and dancers. That was the last bit of choreography that remained for the 105-minute show.

Halfway through the rehearsal, with much of the movement set, Rosenlieb asked for another run-through. Berlin watched and Shoup conducted the singing from a stool.

"I feel like there could be some draggin'," Rosenlieb said before they began. "A little wailing wall, some of you, just to keep it active."

Translation: Rosenlieb wanted some to drag benches, and others to weep and wail.

One singer, a rock-style tenor, stood on a bench and sang out to God, "Don't forget you were once our Creator." The others chimed in with a hard-pulsing "Dona nobis! Dona nobis!"

The singers prowled the stage like a threatening mob, their faces contorted, spitting out the lyrics. A few picked up benches and threw them down to the song's rock-musical beat.

The scene looked unruly, but was ordered chaos, just like the directors wanted it.

"Yes!" Rosenlieb said, grinning widely.

"Woo!" Berlin called out.

This was the pattern of the rehearsals, and much about Bernstein's "Mass": order-chaos-order.

"Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers" was commissioned for the 1971 opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Bernstein, who died in 1990, was famous for composing "West Side Story" and as the longtime music director for the New York Philharmonic.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis asked Bernstein to write it, but did not attend the premiere.

"Was that because the Catholic church had strongly criticized it?" said JoAnn Falletta, music director of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and conductor for this piece. "Because it was anti-government at the time?"

President Richard Nixon got wind of Bernstein's direction and did not go, either.

The lyrics question authorities regarding faith, war and other hot-button topics. "You can see how it came out of the 1960s," Falletta said.

Falletta worked with Bernstein while a student at Juilliard and recognized that "Mass" also reflected the composer's own turmoil. Biographies describe him as a man dogged by depression and inner conflict.

The classical music establishment did not embrace his compositions, Falletta said. In his day, the accepted approaches to new music were avant-garde, dissonant and cerebral.

His work, by contrast, was "deeply communicative, open-minded, eclectic. Emotionally sprawling. And he was not taken seriously because of that," she said.

As a result, the critics could crucify him, as some did after the premiere of "Mass."

One of the nastiest came from Harold Schonberg of The New York Times: "It is a pseudo-serious effort at rethinking the Mass that basically is, I think, cheap and vulgar."

Five months later, Peter Davis wrote more enthusiastically in High Fidelity Magazine that "Mass" is "a brilliant piece of theatrical entertainment.

"Bernstein has worked with many styles and he could have adopted any one of them for Mass; instead he chose the hard way, gathered everything together, and forged a pliant unity from what might have been chaotic diversity."

"Mass" is big. Anyone involved with its production cannot help but make that point in any discussion of it.

The directors routinely trot out the numbers - 60 Virginia Symphony Orchestra instrumentalists, the 75-member VSO Chorus, the 38-member Virginia Children's Chorus, eight dancers from Rosenlieb's company, a rock band and 16 soloists, the latter mostly from the top musical theater and opera worlds.

That's nearly 200 people onstage at one time.

"This is probably the largest cast that's ever been onstage at Chrysler Hall," said Rob Cross, executive and artistic director of the arts festival. "Mass" also is the fest's largest-ever production, aside from the yearly Scope performances of the Virginia International Tattoo.

"Mass" is costing nearly $350,000, which is a sizable chunk of the festival's $5.9 million budget.

The excitement of the project attracted donations and special grants, Cross said. Susan and David Goode of Norfolk, who were among the major supporters, attended the 1971 premiere and told Falletta they deemed it "one of the great moments of their lives."

John McVeigh, who plays the leading role of the celebrant, first saw "Mass" in 1988 at Tanglewood, where he had studied the previous year under Bernstein. "It was inspirational, to say the least," he said, during a rehearsal break.

"It was really one of those things that made me fall in love with music and performing."

In May 2009, he finally performed in "Mass," as the priest in a Utah Symphony production.

"This piece is not about finding an answer. It's about asking questions," said McVeigh, who was raised Catholic and attended Catholic school. "Vocally and emotionally and physically, it is incredibly challenging."

At the end of his Utah performances, he recalled that he was "completely wrung out. It really is a complete, emotional journey. And it leaves you raw."

As he will be at Chrysler Hall, he was on a stage that extended into the seating area. "The audience is right before me. I looked all around and saw people sobbing."

Falletta has never seen Bernstein's "Mass."

"I was approaching this a little warily a year and a half ago, not knowing if we could manage it, this combination of rock and folk and jazz," she said.

"People had told me that Bernstein considered it his masterpiece, but I wasn't sure. I knew I loved a lot of his music, but this is rarely done."

She wondered, "What is it about it? Just that it's big and sprawling and calls for 200 people? Is that it?

"Or is it because it's controversial?"

Two weeks ago, Falletta experienced her first rehearsal.

"The piece itself is overwhelmingly emotional. It's passionate, it's funny, it's irreverent. It's extremely profound."

And, she said, "it's very holy."

In the '60s, with the Vietnam War and Nixon's sins, young Americans were asking "Where is God? Can't he see what's happening?"

"Mass" is about finding your way back to God.

The idea, Falletta said, is that "God is not someone who stands on ceremony and needs ritual. God is the simplest of all," as one of Bern-stein's best-known songs from "Mass" attests.

"It is simply the love of a creator to his children. It's all about love."

To find that love within is to throw off chaos. At those moments in "Mass," the music grows calm, centered and heartfelt.

"To me, it's a story that everyone knows," Falletta said. "A story that everyone lives through.

"A story that everyone holds in their heart."

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com