By Marilyn Lester***A conductor walks into a bar.. and to his surprise, finds another conductor there. What are the chances? But in Last Call, a play by Peter Danish, that’s exactly what happens when Leonard Bernstein, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, serendipitously runs into Herbert von Karajan, principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, in the fall of 1988. And naturally, they’re going to talk shop. What else? Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall of the Blue Bar in Vienna’s Sacher Hotel?
And so these two titans of music launch into deep conversation. They spar. They parry. They parse. It’s a tight-knit world, theirs—the rarefied and elite world of classical music and the men who inhabit it. But playing these two men are two women. It’s a mystical casting choice and it half works. German-born Lucca Züchner as Karajan gives a convincing performance as the sagacious, fairly sedentary 80-year-old. The swaggering, energetic and charismatic Bernstein, ten years his junior, is played by Helen Schneider, who’s found success in Germany as well as her native America. The larger than life Bernstein would be a challenge for any actor to nail, let alone a woman in drag. Schneider’s performance gives it the old college try, but, with no help from Gil Mehmert’s frenetic direction, can’t scale the mountain. More’s the pity. The text is literate, if repetitive, but through the 90 minute run time, the take-away becomes like a window into the bickering of an old married couple.
Danish is himself a music industry denizen and a composer who has long been fascinated by these two icons. He’s built the play on the fact that the two did meet as chronicled. But what really was discussed, only that fly on the wall knows for sure. Last Call, a neatly titled double entendre (both men would die within a few years of the meeting and they do close the bar), covers a lot of ground: Berstein’s Jewishness, Karajan’s membership in the Nazi party (and protests surrounding his 1955 debut at Carnegie Hall), musical philosophy, rumors of homosexuality. There’s a lot of meat on this bone, but digesting it is a task with its lean toward the esoterica of the conducting world.
Smartly, Danish has written a third character into the narrative duet to liven up the proceedings; this is the establishment’s bartender-cum-waiter, Michael, played by German actor-singer Victor Petersen who brightens the stage with his subtle but 
effective performance. A high point of Last Call is the revelation of Petersen’s talent as a countertenor. His metamorphosis from Michael to bewigged and gowned diva Maria Callas is wondrous, as is his rendition of “Il dolce suono” from Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor—a stunning and stirring performance in its own right.
The concept of Last Call is undeniably fascinating. Yet, with such minutia on the table as the correct way to conduct Gustav Mahler and the appeal of Aaron Copeland, for instance, the play’s best target sudience is no doubt aficionados of classical music. There’s potential here, but Danish is perhaps too close to the subject he’s written about, making one wish for less verisimilitude and more insight to the personal nature of these two men and their relationship, particularly one that’s developed over the course of decades.
Snippets of music and projections dot the production, handled by sound designer Lindsay Jones and Austin Switser respectively. Chris Barreca’s set design compensates for the awkward extra-wide stage, with lighting design by Michael Grundner and costumes by Renè Neumann.
Last Call plays through May 4 at New World Stages 5, 340 West 50th Street, NYC. Running time is 90 minutes without intermission. For tickets and more information, click here.
Photos by Maria Baranova
