Trouble in
Tahiti

Trouble in Tahiti
Words and music by Leonard Bernstein

Lovely life, happily married, sweet little son, family picture second to none!

Bernstein called this one-act musical “An Opera in Seven Scenes” and while it may be operatic in that all of the dialogue is sung, the music and its style sounds very much like other Bernstein musical classics. You’ll hear snippets of West Side Story, On the Town and Wonderful Town scattered throughout this miniature musical which reveals a day in the life of a seemingly perfect 1950s American couple, backed up by a jazzy Greek-style chorus.

As the play opens, the chorus sets the scene for us. They describe the perfect house in suburbia, the lawn, the flowers – another perfect morning the home of Sam and Dinah. They too seem perfect – she’s a happy homemaker taking care of Junior; he’s a successful businessman off to another day at the office. But all is not as it seems as we meet them mid-fight. It seems that he just doesn’t want to talk about it and she just needs him to listen. But before anything is settled, he’s off to work. Throughout the day, we see the competitive and over-confident Sam at the office and at the gym. Dinah visits her psychiatrist and recounts a dream of a beautiful, unattainable garden. At the end of this day, Sam and Dinah come back together and try to talk about their marriage – is hope for them after all?

Bernstein was said to be on his own honeymoon when he started writing this musical in 1952. In 1955 the New York Times called it a “sober, thoughtful look into life that is sleek only on the surface,” and in 2008 the San Francisco Chronicle called it an “eloquent testament to the emotional power of music.” The Shaw Festival presented this as a musical reading in 2010 – here’s some of what The Shaw’s Musical Director Paul Sportelli said about it in terms of its music and the echoes from other Bernstein work:

“It is interesting to see how certain themes and styles present in Trouble in Tahiti are present in other Bernstein works. In Trouble in Tahiti (1952), one hears the influence of jazz that we hear in his earlier On The Town (1944), and in his later Wonderful Town (1953) and West Side Story (1957). Trouble in Tahiti is the only Bernstein work where he serves as librettist/lyricist, and it is interesting to see certain ideas returned to in later works with other lyricists: the idea of a garden figures centrally in Dinah’s first song and in the central Sam and Dinah duet and later appears thematically in Candide (the song “Make Our Garden Grow”). Lyrics from Sam and Dinah’s final duet (“Is there a day or a night, waiting in time somewhere? … Maybe there’s time to go back and take your hand again.”) are remarkably similar to “Somewhere” from West Side Story (“There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us … hold my hand and we’re halfway there, hold my hand and I’ll take you there.”). Bernstein calls Trouble in Tahiti an opera, but for a composer so influenced by popular music and who wrote so many musicals, we feel there is something vital that musical theatre voices can bring to a work of such life and truth.

The production is directed by Jay Turvey with Elodie Gillet as Dinah and Mark Uhre as Sam.