And yet it would be wrong to think of Paul Bunyan as didactic. It is also gorgeous.Īfter the logging is done, the banjos are broken, the woods are cut down, and the young have grown old, the cast sings, "From a Pressure Group that says I am the Constitution / From those who say Patriotism and mean Persecution / From a Tolerance that is really inertia and disillusion: / Save animals and men." This is strong and beautiful stuff, daring when Auden wrote it and Britten set it to music, uncannily relevant to Paul Bunyan's homeland today. The finale is a stunning literary and musical feat, at least as accessible as anything in the Brecht-Weill canon, and innocent of the topical specificity that often dates political works. The piece boasts a chorus of immigrant loggers who sing laughingly that "we're handsome, free, and gay," cavorts with panache through one of our nation's founding myths, and then ends on a dark cautionary note that is improbably moving. The 1941 score has sublime choral numbers, cute but never cutesy characterizations, musical passages foreshadowing the operatic master that Britten shortly would become in Peter Grimes, as well as stanza after luminous stanza that prove Auden was Auden from the start. Paul Bunyan is a liberal fantasy about America dreamed up by two brash outsiders with equal doses of affection and concern. It is by no means a perfect work, but its challenges are timely, its pleasures immense. In the case of Paul Bunyan, the unclassifiable musical entertainment that had its South Florida premiere Saturday night at the Miami-Dade Auditorium, the rewards are actually double: This is the work of not one but two young gay geniuses - Benjamin Britten and W.H. The minor works of a genius are often more rewarding than the best that lesser mortals can bring.
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