Conversations 1965; 105; Theodore Bikel with Elliot Norton

The The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. The National Educational Television presents Thiel Bekel with Elliott Norton. During a recent appearance in Boston, Thiel Bekel talked with Elliott Norton, who was drama

critic for the Boston Record American and Sunday advertiser. Greening. Thiel Bekel, who is here this evening, is a unique figure in the show business. And I use the word unique in its literal sense, meaning there is nobody quite like him. He's a folk singer, also an actor of renowned, who originated the role of Baron von Trapp, opposite Mary Martin in the musical The Sound of Music. He has a strong clear voice, strong clear convictions, and a strong clear way of expressing himself on and off the stage. As a folk singer, he has a repertoire of two, three, four hundred songs, which he sings in at least eight or nine different languages. He is or has been an iterator member of the Council, the governing body of the Actors Equity Association, the closed shop union to which all professional actors belong.

At the Boston Arts Festival, I saw Mr. Bekel entertain a crowd of at least ten thousand people, some set up to thirty thousand. Many of these people stood up for two hours to watch him. Without any evidence of strain, he held them, he delighted them, he moved them, I might almost say he manipulated them. I think I was most impressed by his ability to establish at once a close union with these ten twenty thousand people and to hold them all the way through that particular evening. I'd like to ask him to begin with Mr. Bekel, how do you manage this communion with this audience? How do you establish that rapport with it? Well, I really think of the whole thing as a sort of a living room affair, no matter how big it is.

I know that the Boston Gardens couldn't, by any stretch of imagination, be called a living room. But that's exactly what we draw on as you very well know in the theatre is imagination. So if you think intimacy, then you can exude intimacy too. And it really means that you try to establish a direct line of communication with every person that's there, not in a cow-towing, condescending way, but in a direct human way. After all, what is communication? We're trying to reach out. I'm trying to, as I'm talking to you now, I'm trying to convey a thought. You can convey a thought to one person and you can do it to ten thousand or thirty thousand. It really makes no difference in that sense. As long as you're aware of the fact that you've got to be heard in the last row, but through the medium of electronics, that's no longer a problem either. Yes, but when you do it with one person as you're doing it now, you know something about that one particular person, whereas you get ten, fifteen thousand people, you don't know

anything about that background. Now some of those people I would think might be hostile, not to you as a person, but they might be difficult to please. They might say, well, we'll sit out here because it's a hot night, and if this fellow up on the stage can entertain us fine, but he'd better not think, we're easy, how do you overcome that? Well, that's quite true of what you're saying. However, you don't change what you are about to say if you're expressing an opinion from person to person that you address on that subject. I mean, the mere fact that I, Theodore Bekal, I'm facing you here, and you are trying to reach me with a thought, makes you no less of an alien of northern than if you were addressing Dick Rogers as he once did in my presence. You don't change your views simply because you are facing another human being. Usually one said, there's two kinds of presence that you can give people. You either give them what you think they like, or you give them what you yourself like. Now, obviously, the former is impossible with an audience of that very kaleidoscopic character.

So what you do is you please your own sense of dignity. You don't even attempt to please theirs because you have no way of knowing what their various moods and desires are. You create your own mood and your own framework, and within that you remain true. At least that's what you attempt to do. And as you have seen when I performed at the Boston Commons, it comes off. It can come off. I'm not saying that it's full proof. Nothing is full proof. But it can come off. Well, I still have the feeling that it's a remarkable thing that it can come off, that it did come off the way it did there. And instantaneously, because I had the sense when you came on the stage, and I'll check me if I'm wrong, I had the sense that you came on and said, I will now sing them a song in English. I'll sing them this song because I like this song. And if they don't like this song, I'll go on to the next one, and that'll be too bad.

Did you have something of that attitude? Somehow, yes. Whereas most entertainers working on a big audience, I think, try to work on and try to have to try to find a sense of what they like, what they will respond to, and then begin to give it to them. You know something, I really do that too. But this is such an intricate mechanism. I talk, as you know, between songs. I explain what it is, since I sing in so many languages. Incidentally, it's 19. 19. 19. I explain what it is that the song is about. And apropos of the explanation which I try to make as vivid as I can. I can hear one feels what the reaction of the audience is. I feel what the scope of their knowledge is, too. You know, at one point I played in Oklahoma in a very remote hamlet, which is a sort of a little high school, mainly American Indian kids go there. The scope of knowledge, quite wide, was also parochial, because it didn't go beyond Oklahoma.

But even there, you find a common denominator. But there's a little green man in the back of one's head that tells that whisper's one little words. Well, that's interesting, because this is what I would think the process would have to be. In other words, even though you seem to be totally independent out there, even though you convey the first impression I'm going to sing this, then I'll sing that, and I'll sing the other. If they like it, that's fine. You are listening all the time, aren't you? And as you talk, you listen to what jokes they laugh at. That too. This is a strange thing. Applaws the average applause after a song, let's say, is about 30, 40 seconds. Twenty of those 40 seconds are spent in a post-mortem, analyzing what it was that just happened during the song. And at the next 20 seconds, they're still applauding the number, our preparation of what you're going to do next.

And then you can do all this with complete ease. Inwardly you're not at it. Inwardly you're alert. All the time was alert. At the end of a concert, my body has not known that I sat down all evening. Why? Because your tense still? I had the feeling with some of the songs that you were listening to the audience, but most of the time it seemed to be totally a matter of doing what you had set out to do, and being a little bit surprised at their response. Surprised and pleased? Yeah. Well, that's genuine, I mean, all of it that a performer does really is genuine, but you know as well as I do that there is a craft. There is a craft to that too. Well, it's quite an extraordinary craft, as I told you before, the program. The only person I've ever seen do this before is Danny K. I have seen him hold an audience of 4,300 people in a theater and manipulate, seem to manipulate their moods and their responses, but I've never before seen anybody do it with

10 or 15,000 people. And I would have the feeling in advance that some of those people might be difficult, certainly it's a very gated audience. Oh, yes. Very much. Many of them know what you are going to sing. I know the songs, didn't they? Oh, yes, quite a few of them. But then there was audience there, as I could clearly discern from some of the requests at the end, who really only knew me as an actor and probably only knew me from the sound of music, who normally, not in a hundred years, will they ever go to a folk music concert. But since it's on the common Boston Gardens and it's free, et cetera, and it's the festival, they went. Well, what did they have to lose except two and a half hours of their life? And yet I don't think they give up two and a half hours of their lives with such close attention, unless it's something that moves them very much. They could have left halfway through, if they didn't. They could have left, they began to fan themselves with programs.

Do you have any feeling about any special quality in these concerts that has this broad appeal? It's the material itself. I really do. The element in the material, you suppose it is, that holds ten thousand people for two hours. Well, that's really what divides folk music from the body of so-called popular song, that it is conceived by the people, it speaks of the people, and hopefully to the people. And it is an immediate thing. It is also given over by word of mouth. I have never yet learned a single song from a sheet. What is it, the accumulated culture of a people? How is it kept? It is kept in books, it is kept in plays. All this is on the written page, but it has to be brought to life, and that is already through a sieve of sophistication when we talk of books and plays, but when we talk

of music and the music of the people, that's oral. But what's the element, and is that the narrative element, and most of your songs, you're telling a story, is that that that pleases them, or is it the emotion? Emotional. I would say a combination of both with the emphasis on the emotional, because I've seen Spanish a program altogether in nothing but Spanish, hold a non-Spanish audience with as much attentiveness because of the emotional appeal in nothing else. Do you sing, well, I was going to say from the heart, that seems like a corny phrase, but it's the only one I can think of. Do you sing emotionally when you sing these things, or is it a technical thing? I don't even know how to sing technically. I don't know how to do that. Some people do, I don't. I suppose it comes, it's a very interesting thing once I went to meet these dancers, these

Russian dancers at the Varyoska Ballet, they came over here, and they were in New York City at some party, and they called me up and said, would you come over, since they know that I have an affinity with Slavic languages, and meet them fine, so I met them, and I sang a few Russian songs, and pleased them very much. Then I said, I better go and pay my respects, they had this accordion player, who was lovely and a concertina type, with buttons, and they insisted that I go through an interpreter, they wouldn't let me talk to him directly, they always have these watch dogs around. So they said, the Russian accordionist says, Ocean Talantniartist, and the interpreter says, he says, you're a very talented artist, and I said, yes, I know, that's what he said, and it went on like this, and then he asked me, where do you know the accordionist, asked me, how do you know these Russian songs altogether, the music that you do? And I said, well, I tell you the truth to the interpreter, again, I'm not a trained musician,

all this is from God, he doesn't translate it, he said, you're a believer, I said, that's not really what I meant in this context, I meant that it goes from the ears, what I hear goes to the mouth and to the hands, you know, in an immediate process without having to go through a written page, this he translates to the accordionist, he says, it goes from the ears to the hands and to the mouth, and the Russian listens to him, saying this in Russian, he says, I'm a bogger from God. What about the heart though, isn't the heart in the, you know, two or three times I heard you sing these songs, I remember the one about the, is it the Hasidim or the, about the song about the rabbi, whatever the rabbi does, the Hasidim follow, follow. This I was able, this is in Yiddish, isn't it?

It's a little like, quite a little like Jim, it's possible to follow it after you have described it. I had the feeling there that you were almost literally carried away by it so that you got into the joy, the feeling of joy into it, and at the end that you had been emotionally affected by what you had sung yourself, is this true or is this not? Absolutely, absolutely true, you see, this is my own heritage, I don't really call myself a folk singer in that sense, you can be a folk singer only in one idiom, I'm a singer of folk songs or a folk song, singer, whatever the subtle difference may be, but when it comes to this particular idiom, this is my own roots, I inherited that, I hear that at home, I heard it from my grandmother when she was alive, I hear it from my father, and this kind of idiom, and I know the atmosphere in which this is created, I've been among Hasidim at times, when everybody's eyes were riveted on the rabbi who might be deep in meditation with his eyes closed, and they would watch him like a hawk, what will he do next, and

then maybe an eye would open, and then we would start to beat on the table, and they would beat the rhythm of them, and then he'd start to hum a tune which he just made up, and they'd hum it with him, and then he'd get up slowly, very slowly and out of his back pocket, he'd pull a long red kerchief, and one of the Hasidim would take the other end of it, and they'd start to turn around, they'd ever so slowly in a dance, and three and a half hours later, they're still going with this melody, only this time in a frenzy. I know this very well, it's my background, but at the end of that, you had the feeling, you closed your eyes, am I not right, at the end you closed your eyes when the light came down, I had the feeling, well you were then listening to the audience, no, I was carried away, at that time I was carried away, that was the end of the program, and the reason I'm asking all that is because I have the feeling that there has to be something enormously strong to reach all those 10,000 people. I know they want to be reached, they want to be emotionally stirred, but they come from such different backgrounds, I suppose now you say this is Hasidim, this is one Jewish,

one part of the Jewish nation, the Hasidim. Yes, but I also said if you recall that it is not only peculiar to Jews alone or to Hasidim alone, because I experienced the same feeling in the Baptist church, Negro Baptist churches in the south, and anybody who was ever known fervor of any kind, not fanaticism fervor, and real deep faith that expresses itself in song, in dance, in belief, in action, will identify with that. He may not have met a single Jew in his life, and he can identify. I suppose this is then an expression of pure universal emotion, isn't it? I think so. You say further, this is a form of emotional response, isn't it? Well, yes, you see what the Hasidim did essentially is, they took a phrase from the Bible, which is everybody's Bible, and the phrase is there for altacy, which says, with all my bones

will I sing the praises of the Lord, and they literally put it into action. That means with all my bones, whatever you do, every action throughout the day, is a song of praise to the Lord. And isn't this something that we all want to return to? I'm asking you, as an expert, now I have the feeling that it must be, that audience and some of that audience were sophisticated, and I would think would resist emotional involvement, and yet they yield to it, or lift it up by it, and carried away, and apparently delighted by this emotional participation. Well, I found that, and I'm as sophisticated as the next one, I'm very much an urban 20th century person, I myself get very sick of my own sophistication. I was interested in the Psalms that you spoke, is this something you said, this is something rather new? It's something that I've had in my dream about for many years, and of course I never had enough money until a few years ago to put this dream into, to make a reality out

of some of this dream, and I hear, whenever I heard the words of the Bible, I read them. I felt there was music that belonged to it, and then years later I commissioned an Israeli composer to write a symphonic score, but not as background music, because I don't believe in that. That's Hollywood stuff, but as an integral part of the words, so that it would fuse, we did a whole record of that, it's called a poetry in the prophecy of the Old Testament, where we did things like the creation, the fall of Adam, which is very interesting incidentally, because I don't attempt to play these parts, or to play the Lord, or Adam and Eve, but the score is so strong where you see they make fig leaves, Adam and Eve do, and they hide themselves, because they suddenly ashamed of their nakedness. When the Lord said suddenly to Adam, where are Thau? And as I say where are Thau, the timpani goes, boom, boom, where are Thau?

And it said, you're afraid, not of my voice, not being the Lord's voice, but you're afraid of the voice plus the timpani, plus the drums, and then Adam says, I hid myself. I was naked, and said, who told you that I was naked? The woman, so then it has the one, because there has done this, that's what will happen, and the snake will crawl in its belly, and you to Adam will toil. All these things are dramatically feasible, dramatically possible pieces. They can be read, they can be understood. They can also be heard with music. I was here then with music, so that's what we did. I was impressed by two things about that. Now the first place, you're using the King James version, aren't you? King James Bible.

I used in the whole work actually a conglomeration. I looked through all the available English texts. I used, I mainly based myself on the King James Bible, but at times, since I know the Hebrew original, when I didn't like a particular word in its King James translation, I took the Sonsino Bible, which is the 18th century Jewish family Bible, published in London, and looked through that to see whether they may not have a word that I liked a little better. But it's only individual words, fundamentally that is the King James. You read two songs, and fundamentally that's the King James version. What interests me about that is this, this is classical English poetry. This and Shakespeare are the basic English poetry, and they represent something from which modern poetry has revolted against, and yet your audience, many of whom I would suspect of being interested only in the most modern poetry, respond to this classical English

diction just as warmly as they do to anything else. What seemed to indicate a trend back, a possible trend back to establish standard poetry in a popular audience? Well, perhaps not, perhaps I don't fancy that I can reverse a trend, not do I really want to, but frankly, in my book, who is to say that you can, that once a modern poetry fancier, you've lost all taste and all possibility of appreciation for ancient poetry? I don't believe this is so, I myself like Langston Hughes and the Bible. Well, I wonder if many have a Catholic at taste in poetry, is you? With a small sea. With a small sea. I tell you, and I really am convinced that people have more Catholic at taste than we give them credit for.

Including the very young ones, those are the ones I'm concerned about. What do you call very young? Well, I mean the teenagers and the college students. Yes, including them there. You think that they like both and a mind that's open to influences, even traditional influences than the older people who are more certain their ways and likes in this life. Well I had felt that way, except that I thought that the most poetry read today for young people, by young people, tends to be extremely modern and by implication at any rate to reject anything as conventional as the King James Psalms. You think that's not so? No, it isn't, because the popular acceptance of folk music by the high school and university and college kids is a living proof against that notion. The very idea of folk music and the poetry that is the lyrics part of the folk music is all old poetry.

It's conventional. He's like this wallow, they fly so high, she's like that. I wonder if there's any connection between that and the increasing popularity of the Shakespeare festivals. The Shakespeare festivals at Stratford, Connecticut, Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare in the Park, these are all patronized by enormous audiences, 50,000, 150,000 people and that's a mass audience and that's partly a young one. So they're going back to conventional basic poetry. Well, there's another reason for that too and it's a very ignoble thing, as you know, because we live in a country, we live in a country that has English as its official tongue and because of the peculiar economic setup of our theatre, being a commercial theatre and a theatre undertaken for the most part, for profit only, there is no small change or certainly no big change in putting on Shakespeare.

There has been no Broadway producer for years now who was willing to lose money because that's what it boils down to, is losing money. Consequently, a country with an Anglo-Saxon tradition was bereft of its great poet playwright Shakespeare on the living stage and therefore it was left to the festivals only such as Ontario, Canada or Connecticut or Joseph Pap in the Park and now there's going to be some here in Boston also. To be the sole purveyor of Shakespeare for anybody, including the youth, that is required to take Shakespeare in the schools to know it, to recite it and yet doesn't have much of an opportunity or, if any, to see it live. Yet they embraced it, I think thousands of children had to go to Stratford, Connecticut as part of high school work, but that doesn't account for 150,000 others who go voluntarily to see Shakespeare.

There's another aspect of the Psalms as you read and impressed me and that was this. These are hymns not only of praise, as you made clear, these are hymns of praise, praising God. They are also hymns of faith and of joy. They are immensely affirmative. Now, this impressed me, the reaction to this because I think of the young people, most of us think of the young people who constituted a large part of your audience as being not imbued with faith, not inspired by hope, not inclined to praise, but we think of them as being negative and even despairing. How do you come for that? Do you think that they are not negative and despairing that they accept this idea of praise? Well, they may be negative and despairing in a generalized analysis, but they are certainly open to notes of hope. This is a youth who's been bereft of much hope by their elders.

They think, quite rightly, that they've been handed a world, not of their own making, that has them wandering on the brink of disaster, and they are welcoming notes of hope. They don't see any for themselves, but they like to find it and they're receptive to hope more than to anything else. And not only to hope, but to praise, rather than dispraise. What was it you said in describing the Psalms, or in describing your particular religion? I see them. You said we were taught to live and breathe with every praise God with every fiber of our being. This is an enormously affirmative thing, isn't it? That's what joy is. That's right. It was joy and there was ecstasy, and it was even in the face of mortal danger. That's right. Because there's a song which came out of, it's an old song, but it was sung by the people who went to the gas chambers during just recently in the Second World War.

And the song was, I believe with all my heart in the coming of the Messiah, and even though he should tarry, I still believe. This is a firm, this is faith carry to the highest possible degree on the brink of ghastly and cruel destruction, isn't it? They should be in a mood of despair, you know, I feel that they would be in a lamenting movement. Right by the law was never that way. Well last night, when I heard you at the arts festival, I heard nothing in the audience to indicate anything but a total rapport when you read these magnificent songs of praise and hope and joy. No wrestle to indicate that they might be uneasy in the presence of that enormous faith of that praise and joy.

And so they were carried along by it, and that, to me, seems to be one of the most hopeful things I've ever known in my life, that all those young people were not only willing to respond, but eager, and you, in a sense, were so closely tuned to them, that something in them responded, and that they must have that same sense, potentially at any rate of praise and hope and joy. Thank you very much. This conversation between Theo Bekel and Elliot Norton, drama critic for the Boston Record American and Sunday advertiser, was recorded in the studios of WGBH TV, Boston. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.