GEOFFREY HOLDER
THE LIFE OF A WIZ
By G R John
Sunday Express
Vox / Mix
December 16, 2001
Page 3
Memories of The Wiz came flooding back with the appearance on my table of the publication, Geoffrey Holder: A Life in Theatre, Dance and Art, by Jennifer Dunning, a dance critic for the New York Times and author of a biography of dancer Alvin Ailey.
I had seen the production 20 years before when adding lustre to a pleasant New York holiday, I took in a performance on Broadway of The Wiz, hailed as "the new musical version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Dunning's work has resulted in an impressive book, a lavish production large as the life of its hero and quite as colourful. It transforms the fellow who speaks in dulcet tones in the current television ad glorifying the services provided by BWIA into a man of so many parts that one wonders how he has managed to put them all together so satisfactorily in six-feet-high and more than 200 pounds of flesh and bone.
The mystery is solved with the assertion "he was a huge baby: thirteen pounds, according to the scale in the nearby Chinese shop to which his father carried the infant". In other words, as Dickens' Topsy did, he just "growed".
Dunning's book answers the question: What makes Geoffrey Holder dance, act on stage and screen, arrange and design ballet and stage dances, write a cook book, direct stage performances, take pictures with his cameras, design costumes, paint?"
Geoffrey is incomparable. He looks like nobody else, the height, the girth, the moon face, and that extraordinary smile, not a grin, but a smile that seems to embrace his whole countenance.
Most of his pictures show this happy face. But they determine also he is a man of moods. He can give way to anger when thwarted as he did when he clashed with Alvin Ailey over an incident in the production of The Prodigal Prince when he thought he had been deceived by the dancer.
Geoffrey Holder would have been outstanding as a master of any single one of the art forms that captured his skills, his talent, his energy. As Dunning shows, he has excelled as most if not all of them.
Some of the stories of his early life in the little house on Richmond Street just off the Tragarete Road petrol station and of his school days at Tranquillity and later, Queen's Royal College were told in abridged detail in what must now be considered a companion volume, the 1994 much smaller, less ambitious publication Boscoe Holder, by Geoffrey MacLean.
Dunning expands on MacLean's version of these stories and incidents. She shows that neither Boscoe nor Geoffrey could have escaped their destiny. They were born into a world of art, to a mother, who was skilled teller of stories and who related to neighbours in dramatic style plots of films she had seen, and an unorthodox father who brought into their house a piano, "a magical piano", that filled all of one room of their three-room dwelling place, and which Boscoe "manhandled" until he mastered it.
The inborn talent was there and both brothers got all the encouragement and support they needed.
But the book. Perhaps Dunning may have got carried away with the sheer magnificence of her topic resulting in Port of Spain being referred to as "Port au Spain" on the frontispiece. Nonetheless, many of the pictures taken from Geoffrey's appearances on stage and screen and his public life are reproduced in glorious colour. My favourite appears on Page 111, a portrait of a brooding Geoffrey in a golden-coloured gown, long feathers sticking out atop his shaven head, a black circle delineated on his brow, the actor perched on a lounging chair against a background of trees and flowers. This was Geoffrey as William Shakespeare the Tenth in Doctor Dolittle.
The 238-page documentary, for that is what the book is, shows a number of other pictures covering the many stages of Geoffrey's life and his spectacular career converted into a visual representation of Duke Orsini's exhortation in the opening scene of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "Play on give me excess of it."
But as one turns the pages of the Dunning production, the surfeit fails to sicken the appetite. To the contrary, it sharpens the senses, challenges the intellect, gives point to the view that without art we might as well be dead.
So we go through the book to revel in one page of delight after another.
The eight pages of costume designs for the show The Wiz give an insight into the passion that informs Geoffrey's art. Each design can stand by itself as an icon to creativity. Each, in whole and in detail, tells the story of the character in the Frank Baum classic.
Page 74 features a black and white picture of Geoffrey painting in the garden of Jacques Sigurd I Montmartre, Paris. Sigurd was a French screenwriter, well known as the discoverer of the French screen actress, Simone Signoret.
Sigurd, says Geoffrey, "gave me my grandfather's culture, France, on a platter. He had an incredible influence on my life, my art, and my way of thinking. I gained great inspiration from his life and his affinity with art. He pushed me and made me take great risks. He was an incredible man."
Geoffrey's words are amplified, given strength by the scene pictured on a double spread early in the book. The artist, dressed in what seems to be his favourite colour, white, including slippers, sits left arm under his chin, in his studio in SoHo, New York. He is surrounded by his pictures, nudes, a crucifixion, Carmen de Lavallade dancing, her train swirling behind her, a couple lying back to back on a bed, one of them with hands clasped in prayer.
Another group of pictures show Geoffrey dressed in white down to his shoes dancing at President Nixon's White House celebration of Duke Ellington's 70th birthday. And he is there posed with President George Bush Senior, shaking President Carter's hand and standing next to President Nixon.
On other pages the ubiquitous Geoffrey is seen with Roger Moore, Maya Angelou, Bishop Tutu, Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis, Pearl Bailey, Marlene Dietrich, Oliver Messel, James Earl Jones and other celebrities too numerous to mention.
The most entertaining are those depicting his stage and screen performances as well as those in which other performers are shown in productions with which Geoffrey was associated. But to dwell on them would be to fall into the trap of believing that's all there is to Geoffrey.
We read the story of his great love. Geoffrey met Carmen de lavallade who was in the cast of The House of Flowers. She was, in Dunning's words, "a beautiful young modern dancer."
"From the moment he saw her, Geoffrey was smitten with the slender, sweet-voiced women whom he had been asked to protect ... "Carmen Lavallade is here", he told a friend, George Allen, a friend who was touring in Silk Stockings and with whom he was having diner that night. "And you know something? I want to marry that girl ..." He wooed her by simply being there for her on the road.
The story of The Wiz, how Geoffrey got involved in its production, its early stops and starts, the problems and challenges he faced, his relationship with the performers and the people behind the scenes, some good and some bad, and how he was catapulted to the status of director, is a book all by itself.
The Wiz won the Tony as the Best Musical 1975. It won six other Tonys. Geoffrey was rewarded with two of them: Best Director and Best Costumes.
The Wiz, Dunning quotes Geoffrey as saying, was a different kind of 'black' show and a new-style musical that the whole family could attend. But it was more than that.
Geoffrey made theatre history by being the first black man to be nominated for the direction of a musical and the first to be nominated for direction and costuming.
"A roar went up from the audience as Geoffrey's name was announced. He jumped up and began to run down the aisle, then turned and raced back to kiss Carmen. She laughingly pushed him towards the stage. He bounded onto it, resplendent in a white suit and lucky blue cravat, looking genuinely stunned. Then he began to dance. Grinning bemusedly, (Ray) Bolger grasped Geoffrey's hands and joined in the dance, a frail mouse beside his towering bear of a partner."
The cast of the The Wiz fascinated me. It included Deborah Burrell, born in Trinidad, the daughter of Sybil Lazarus, of San Fernando, married to the American soldier, Jim Burrell, who taught us basketball.
Earlier that season, I had seen her sister, Terri, in Bubbling Brown Sugar, the musical review that featured Ellington's music, at the National Theatre, Washington, DC.
So for me, at any rate, Geoffrey Holder's The Wiz was a triumph for Trinidad, a representation of a magical island on which the presence of a charlatan wizard can be sent packing and the environment freed of political blight, corruption, crime and all the evils that attend it, where people, if left alone, may live happily all together.
Geoffrey, the multi-talented individual, the artist par excellence, the friend, the lover, the apotheosis of the Trinidad man, not even remotely modest, when we consider his own words in the Dunning book:
"He (God) loved Geoffrey. He adored Geoffrey. He said: 'Geoffrey come. Come. Come. Come sit here with me. Look around the world and tell me where would you like to live. Show me a family you want to be born into ...'
"So I went with him. I was cute. And we sat together on top of one little cloud. Beautiful cloud. And he showed me some beautiful emeralds. One emerald was called Barbados. One was called Jamaica. One was called Martinique. One was called Guadeloupe.
"And on Trinidad there was an incredible man. His name was Arthur. And he was married to Louise. And Arthur and Louise had four children: Boscoe, Marjorie, Kenneth and Jean. And Arthur was strong, like a mythological character. Mucho macho. Arthur was incredible. And Louise was gorgeous.
"And I loved Arthur, and I loved Louise. And Arthur took what little money he had - this was during the 1930s - and he bought a piano. And he brought it into a small house. The first boy, Boscoe, crawled to the piano and played the piano. Pang pang pang pang pang pang pang pang ..
"I loved the sound of the music. I told God, 'God I like that music.' So he kissed me, right here, and I went down to Trinidad."
The 101 Gallery which is distributing the book Geoffrey Holder: A Life in Theatre, Dance and Art, holds a private launch Tuesday at the gallery, Tragarete Road, Port of Spain.