James Gaffigan Leads Bernstein’s MASS at The Kennedy Center’s 50th Anniversary Finale

Resurrecting ‘Mass,’ Leonard Bernstein’s epic hymn for a broken America
By Michael Andor Brodeur
The Washington Post
September 8, 2022

In September of 1971, the nation was cracking in half.

The front pages of The Washington Post were aflame with violence and conflict: the ongoing catastrophe of the Vietnam War, political upheaval in Latin America and, here at home, racial unrest as busing foes boycotted schools. The bad news was unrelenting.

That is until the edition of Thursday, Sept. 9, when The Post’s lead story took a markedly different tone: “Bernstein’s Mass,” read the headline, “A Reaffirmation of Faith.”

Washington Post music critic Paul Hume gave the premiere of composer Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” a glowing front-page review (Photo credit: *The Washington Post*)

This good news topping A1 was the previous evening’s official premiere of “MASS,” composer Leonard Bernstein’s genre-hopping magnum opus. “MASS” was Bernstein’s response to a request from Jacqueline Onassis for a piece to honor her first husband and inaugurate the soon-to-open John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a $66.5 million colossus overlooking the Potomac River and declaring the arts as central to American life — if not to D.C. pedestrians.

(Onassis herself wouldn’t see the show until its second opening at the Kennedy Center in the spring of 1972 — four years to the day Robert F. Kennedy was shot by an assassin. Her reception of “MASS” remained something of a mystery, not least of all to Bernstein, with whom she shared the presidential box. “She never said one word,” Bernstein told The New York Times. “I think she was speechless. She still hasn’t said anything.”)

Half a century and one pandemic year later on this Sept. 15, the Kennedy Center will belatedly celebrate its 50th anniversary with a new production of “MASS” that stars baritone Will Liverman in the spotlight role of the Celebrant. This rejuvenated “MASS” is helmed by director Alison Moritz and choreographer Hope Boykin, with conductor James Gaffigan leading the National Symphony Orchestra, the Heritage Signature Chorale and the Children’s Chorus of Washington.

Opening night performance of “Mass” at the Kennedy Center on Sept. 8, 1971 (Photo credit: Fletcher Drake)

Billed as “A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers,” Bernstein’s “MASS” arrived as an assertive smear of genres, composed — largely in a six-month blur before its premiere — to encapsulate the vast range of artistic and performance programming to be housed at the Kennedy Center. Like the artistic center it was created to anoint, “MASS” was under construction right up until the final moments.

The original production assembled more than 200 performers on the Opera House stage, christening the lavish red theater with a “melange of music, dance and drama,” as The Post’s theater and cinema critic Richard L. Coe described it in 1971, as well a controversial blend of ancient texts and contemporary speech.

“It’s bigger than a major Broadway musical,” director Gordon Davidson told The New York Times that year of the “unprecedented” challenge of staging “MASS.” “And there’s less rehearsal time for it.”

Bigger than Broadway, too, was Bernstein’s vision for (and anxiety over) “MASS,” which seemed to distill the most potent parts of his best-known works — tonal and thematic shades of “Candide” and “West Side Story” drift through — into a provocative concentrate of American music and theater.

Davidson was joined by conductor (and Bernstein protege) Maurice Peress and choreographer Alvin Ailey, who was himself leading a company of dance legends-in-waiting, including Judith Jamison (a 1999 Kennedy Center honoree), Dudley Williams and Lee Harper.

At first glance, it might be easy to mistake “MASS” for other hippie-adjacent blurs of music, theater and spirituality from the period — “Hair,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and the like. Stephen Schwartz, whom Bernstein enlisted six months before the premiere to help freshen the liturgical libretto (which mixes Latin, Hebrew and English) with contemporary lines, had only months earlier staged the off-Broadway premiere of his own breakthrough blend of the sacred and the secular, “Godspell.” (“The speed of the work on the project was simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying,” Schwartz writes in the program notes to the new production of “MASS.”)

Rehearsal in 1971 for “MASS” with Bernstein and Ted Kennedy (right) (Photo credit: Fletcher Drake)

But, groovy vibes aside, “MASS” endures as a rich and complex work in Bernstein’s oeuvre, and a vessel for some of his most personal revelations. In the more charitable of two reviews of “MASS” run by The New York Times, the critic Howard Klein drew this distinction: “ ‘Hair’ and ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ are manifestations of antiwar feelings and the new quest for transcendental faith. Bernstein’s ‘MASS’ is a cry for peace and brotherhood among men and as such is a humanistic document.”

The music here and there may veer into dated tropes, the lyrics may at times skew too clever by half, but at 50, “MASS” still somehow feels both intimate and transgressive — the sound of an artist trying to bridge a spiritual divide. And at 53 (his birthday was a couple of weeks before opening night) Bernstein fully believed that music — maybe even his — could repair the cracks in the world around him.

The true power of “MASS” comes from the clash of contradictions at its core: Bernstein’s location of the universal through an investigation of individual faith. Or the way the composer’s pluralistic yearning to be everything at once results in a work that is quintessentially, well … Lenny.

Speaking to those who took part in the premiere — the oral history below draws from conversations with nearly a dozen musicians, singers, dancers, critics and others who brought its spirit and spectacle to the Opera House stage — it becomes clear that “MASS” was far more than a show. It was a spiritual experience.

“It’s not a Mass of death, not a Requiem, there is no ‘Dies Irae,’ ” Bernstein told The Post in July 1971. It would still be weeks before he would finish composing it, but the end was in sight. “It is a celebration of life.”

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