"The Happiest Man on Earth," a one-man show based on Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku's 2021 memoir, includes a scene in which Jaku by chance runs into a fellow survivor soon after the war. His friend proposes coffee and cake to fatten Jaku up, and conversation to bolster his spirits.
"The Happiest Man on Earth" at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts was one of four performances across the city I saw over a long weekend. Each in its own way got me thinking about the possibility of making human connections over a little something sweet and a cup of something bitter and warm. It's easier if we are willing to be as honest as Jaku, and as capable of empathy as actor Kenneth Tigar, who originated the role of Jaku in 2021 in Massachusetts and took "The Happiest Man on Earth" to London before bringing the production to Denver.
Playwright Mark St. Germain worked into his script a line about our responsibility to one another that Jaku attributes to his father: "Family first. Family second. Family last. And we are all family." St. Germain and the other artists who created the four performances returned me again and again to this theme of shared humanity.
After "The Happiest Man on Earth" brought me to tears on Friday, a Saturday concert at the Newman Center brought me to my feet. In fact, everyone in the audience gave a standing ovation to a big band from New York that composer and conductor Darcy James Argue calls Secret Society. Coffee came up again, this time with another sweet accompaniment, ice cream, as part of a story told about Zev Bezdomni, the fictional main character of Argue's “Brooklyn Babylon” jazz song cycle.
Bezdomni -- the character's name translates from the Russian as homeless -- is an Eastern-European immigrant and carpenter who finds home and community in a Brooklyn of the near future, only to be asked to contribute art in the form of a carousel to top a megalomaniac's giant tower that will destroy his neighborhood.
The song cycle was originally performed in 2011 as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, with Argue's music accompanied by animation by graphic novelist Danijel Zezelj, who also contributed live painting to the BAM show.
Even without the animation and live painting, the excerpts from “Brooklyn Babylon” and other Argue work performed at the Newman Center were electric, both because the music swung and the ideas it explored were powerful.
During the section that included Bezdomni pausing for coffee and ice cream, the pianist plinked out a carousel melody as five trumpeters evoked the beauty of ocean tides. It was a moment of optimism in an evening that also explored difficult themes -- from the death of a friend to the excesses of the French Revolution. Argue, who alternated between conducting his musicians and speaking to the audience about his work that evening, said we all need optimism to get us through life's bitter passages.
Clara Brown exemplifies that necessary optimism.
Brown is among prominent African American Coloradans depicted in "Jedidiah Blackstone: Traveling Poet & Storyteller," a show I saw on Sunday on a temporary stage set up in what had been the dining hall of the Clayton campus.
Brown was born in slavery in Virginia in 1800 and managed to buy her freedom in 1859, after which she headed to Colorado as a wagon train cook in hopes of reuniting with family who had been torn from her by enslavers. She had heard that one of her children, a daughter, had escaped to the West.
Once in Colorado, Brown settled in the gold rush mountain town of Central City and worked as a laundress. She saved enough money to invest in land and mines, and prospered. After the Civil War, she used her wealth to help newly freed slaves establish themselves in Colorado. She also founded a church.
After the Civil War ended she learned that her husband and a daughter had died in slavery, and her son had been sold so many times that he was no longer traceable. In 1882 she reunited with her surviving daughter, Eliza Jane, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. That same year, Brown returned to Colorado with her granddaughter. Brown died in Denver in 1885.
Jeff Campbell, creator and star of "Jedidiah Blackstone," collaborated with musicians and dancers to extraordinary effect to tell his own, Brown’s and other stories of the Black experience of community building despite racism. He presented the show at Clayton Early Learning, home to educational programs for children of all races, which has taken over a campus founded after businessman George Clayton left his estate in the early 20th century to build a home caring only for "poor white male orphan children."
I felt Campbell worked in the spirit of British novelist and essayist Zadie Smith, who has called on all of us "to be willing to create and enter spaces in which solidarity is one of the possibilities."
Campbell is a hometown theater hero. The long weekend extended to Monday evening at Dazzle jazz club with out-of-town visitors: the New York-based trio of Larry Goldings on the Hammond organ, Peter Bernstein on guitar and Bill Stewart on drums. The combination of organ, acoustic guitar and percussion was new to me – a trio without a base? But Goldings, Bernstein Stewart have been together for over 30 years, so what do I know? Three accomplished musicians in comfortable conversation, exploring the possibilities of original compositions as well as classics by the likes of Wayne Shorter and John Lewis. I ordered a coffee during the set. No need for cake. The music was sweet enough.