BWW First Person: BANDSTAND Heals at Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre

In his earliest memory, my grandfather is four years old. The year is 1919 and he stands on his tenement building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he watches an army parade. Soldiers are returning from the Great War, and eternal peace on Earth seems possible.

He is too young to be filled with pride. On his way back to the apartment, where his mother is hard at work sewing a garment for her husband's sweatshop, he is saved from falling over a clothesline down onto the glittering ceremony of Allen Street.

"I saved your life," says his uncle Eliasof, a colorful and unpredictable Greek Jew with a frightening grin. And he would remind his nephew that he did save his life to the end of his days, when he hanged himself after losing his wife. The boy looks up at his immigrant uncle and asks him an unforgettable question.

"What is God?" he asks.

"God is Nature," he replies in a serious tone, though not without leaving him with a spry cosmic giggle before patting his nephew on the back and leading him back to the care of his worrisome mother.

"Look what he did today," she tells her husband, who is sick with fatigue after a long day overseeing Yiddish-speaking stitchers in an industrial garment sweatshop on Forsythe Street. He is breathing heavy after an alcoholic bout at the cantina on Rivington Street. His son knows what is next as his father takes his belt off and chases him around the house.

About a decade later, the year the young boy became a man according to American law, his father died of liver failure. It was 1934, and the Great Depression moved him west to enroll in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He was a tree-hugging employee of the War Department, clearing trail in the shadow of Mount Rainier.

He sent twenty-five dollars from his thirty-dollar pay every month to his mother in Brooklyn, where she raised his five younger siblings. After his return to New York, he watched as his second-oldest brother enlisted to serve in the Second World War. As first-born, he could not simply stay at home. Another brother joined. Three stars were placed in the window sill of the family home under the Williamsburg Bridge.

In basic training in Virginia, he entered the transportation sector with a company of men mostly from New England, though with one fast friend from Brooklyn. They were all bound for North Africa, and eventually one of the toughest battles in WWII, at Monte Cassino in Italy. Wounded as he crashed his jeep under Luftwaffe fire, he later made his way into liberated France, where he met a lady. She took him home. The next morning, her husband arrived. As he always told the story, the married man was so grateful to the American soldier that it was a joyful meeting, and he left the couple in peace.

Finally back on American soil, he would continue to march as a proud veteran for as long as he could walk. And he kept telling his war stories into his last, hundredth year. Many of his first mornings back home from the war, as his wife of over sixty years let out, he took a drink on waking up and went right back to sleep. The war had found its way inside him, and he made futile attempts to drown it like so many of his comrades.

He had heard the life of a man drop like a sack of potatoes. He saw men stacked like cords of wood. He witnessed the bombardment of a monastery in a fight of more than ten armies over four battles that nearly took his life. First, only drink softened the trauma. Ultimately, his longevity proved that he could let those painful memories go by expressing them with his characteristic humor through the everyman theater of folkloric storytelling.

Donny Novitski, played by Corey Cott, is the protagonist of "Bandstand." He is a fictional veteran whose story is no less moving than my grandfather's because its believability runs parallel to the real experience of powerlessness in the face of war trauma. From the lightning shocks that clap thunderously over the heads of the combat soldiers and throughout the theatre, to the final, climactic bar of musical send-off, "Bandstand" is an elegiac love letter to veterans everywhere who have borne the brunt of human tragedy since time immemorial.

They sat with the public in the teary-eyed audience, and as the performers cried out to them gripped to the heights of expressible gratitude, everyone felt the spirit of the nation still returning, not quite yet home until greater peace within is won.

Novitski is an unknown musical genius who left the small world of nightclubs in his hometown of Cleveland to serve in the Solomon Islands. One night, he dropped a grenade and it detonated beside his best buddy. As he returns home, he is snubbed out of the regular gigs of his peacetime past. His fight continues as he rallies a band of fresh veterans to pursue a dream of grandeur, to enter a national music contest in New York City.

Through music and lyrics by Richard Oberacker, who makes his Broadway debut with "Bandstand", the veterans find catharsis, a form of therapy even, by playing together in the newly formed band. The idea is best captured by the song, Breathe, and Cott sings it with a soothing legato: "And I, breathe through the instrument. Breathe through the end of the phrase. / And as everyone plays. It gets easier." One bandmate, the burly bearded bassist Davy Zlatic, played by Brandon J. Ellis, finds refuge in drink and jokes. He was hit with mustard gas and pepper spray, he laughs, "I'm a seasoned veteran."

"Bandstand" is full of musical gems. Everything Happens is a philosophically-rich lament sung by the uplifting and comical Beth Leavel who plays Mrs. June Adams, the mother of the widow to Novitski's late friend. Although she is not a veteran herself, she has been through the darkness of hell without knowing exactly how her husband died until his best friend tells her that its was from his Friendly Fire. Such stories weigh in authentic. They blast apart the stereotypes of American war heroism.

Laura Osnes is a refreshing voice as the songbird widow Julia Trojan, as she powerfully captures the special dramatic form of the Broadway musical. This Is Life encapsulates her relationship with Novitski, a forbidden love complicated by the trauma of mutual loss, of the revolutionary secret that the sacred trusts in life and friendship could be broken by one simple, human mistake. That they end up together is ultimately an aside to the grandiose sound that the band of veterans invigorate for the audience, leaving everyone, including those onstage, in tears that long to fall over the hallowed earth of buried, young souls.

Together with Cott, she sparks all of the classic Broadway chemistry of onstage camp and pomp, as they elegantly grace a spectacular vintage scenic design by David Korns, formerly working with the 2016 Tony Award-winner choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, whose high style is in full form for Bandstand, as its acts swing with charged simultaneity, every dance step and lyric pronunciation overlapped and textured to pure theatrical harmony.

In the ultimate scene of "Bandstand," the veterans are confronted with the typical double-bind reality for professional musicians and wounded warriors alike. What at first seems like an ideal opportunity turns out to be just another capitalist profit scheme for and by the wealthy. They fight back and rebel against the cultural establishment with all of the grit they can muster to cast off the psychological shackles of the postwar hero. Instead of playing the song that won them the national audience, Love Will Come and Find Me Again, they perform Welcome Home, an uncensored and liberated anthem to returning veterans, originally written as a private poem by Julia Trojan to her beloved war-torn brothers.

It is a sheer break with reason when capital becomes more valuable than life. And it is that ongoing strain on humanity that made my grandfather a factory hand and veteran. After four decades on the assembly line, he finally took college over cash. He read liberally and kept a library open to everyone he met. When he could not read any longer in his late nineties, he told his stories. I was there to hear them, and I think my active listening very well may have extended his life. I still hear his stories, and sometimes even his voice now in certain places, with certain people, in certain moments.

I heard his story once and emotionally again in "Bandstand." When storytelling in theater and in any art is meant to heal, to remember in the literal definition of the word as a unitive force towards holistic positivity, the life of its listeners, and of its voice, is sustained.

Photo by Jeremy Daniel