WE ARE STARDUST
With Stardust for Christmas we celebrate our 14th installment of the holiday series that has become a true annual tradition for us and our audience. These romantic musical comedies have been our yearly Christmas greeting to the community and have also reflected my own ongoing interest in the World War II era in America. How the events of the day might have touched a small band of entertainers in a modest nightclub in Greenwich Village has become a microcosm of the time. Then as now, this region of lower Manhattan is a place where all manner of personality, performer, activist and artist rub shoulders in an atmosphere of tolerance and cultural adventure.

The Stardust Club is a refuge for intrepid hearts searching for transcendent moments in the tawdry realm of popular song and dance. The 1940s was a truly extraordinary decade for American popular music as it was performed in environments like nightclubs and dance halls. African American Jazz had become mainstream via recordings and radio in the 1930s but with American involvement in World War II, big band music would travel with G.I.s to far corners of the globe and become the soundtrack of a decade. Even nations at war with the United States appropriated our popular music, if only as a guilty pleasure.

Sixty seven years ago this December, America woke up one morning to the catastrophe of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the inevitable plunge into a war already in progress. The destruction of the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001 has often been compared to this event but the difference is that many folks receiving word of Pearl Harbor had already been through another World War and the Depression. On both occasions we turned a corner as a people who would never be the same again.

We know how that challenge of World War II was resolved. Our country emerged from that conflict as an international success story with a seemingly unstoppable economy and a military and industrial complex unmatched in human history. That’s the upside. The downside is that we had also invented the most powerful destructive weapon of all time and had become inextricably involved in global intrigues that dog us to this day. A visit to December 1941 is a visit to a place before our wealth and invasive media made us the most overexposed country on earth, to be admired and to be reviled. Private life was no less complicated then, but I think our sense of ourselves may have been more clear. Right and wrong were largely understood to be well defined concepts before the knowledge of our power and entitlement made ethics a negotiable term.

Because I work in theater, I work to get to the heart of any story and to sort out the best way to reveal it for an audience. Likewise, actors work to interpret, illuminate and clarify meaning. We bring as much information to the task as we are able and then attempt to throw all the debris and extraneous stuff out the window. I relate that to the state of mind an American might have had on December 7th, 1941 when the signal was sent that it was time to clear your head and buckle down. The imperative was clear: Fix This at Any Cost.

There have been a number of those transformative shocks in modern America. World War I, the market crash of 1929, the Depression, World War II, the Korean War and the war in Viet Nam. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy left a deep mark and September 11 continues to be scrutinized for all its possible implications. But as our American History accumulates, it could be that the “fix this” response has become more nuanced and reflective. We are in serious trouble as a nation right now and face a multitude of challenges and choices. But we have just emerged from an astonishing and profoundly historic election. We have found new leadership in a way that would have been unthinkable in 1941. My personal view is that one reason the majority of us have made that choice in leadership is that Barack Obama has asked us once again to buckle down as a people and live up to our promise as a nation. We have not heard anyone express belief in us as more than privileged consumers for a very, very long time.

So when the curtain goes up on the Stardust Club and our humble little band of players this year, remember that on Christmas Eve of 1941, a great deal was at stake in the real world. But the Stardust is a place to take heart, to stand up to the challenge, and learn who you are. Our show is an entertainment, a play with music, but remember that American song and dance is the outward vibrant expression of the inner exuberance of a free people. Sixty seven years later we are still free, but today that freedom invites us to become a responsible people as well. Yes we can.

Linda Whitney -
Artistic Director Harlequin Productions &
Director of the Stardust series