Review: A Twilight Face-Off Between Two Legendary Conductors in Last Call

Drag: The Musical is still running at New World Stages, but another drag act has set up camp across the hall. Last Call, the new play by Peter Danish that opened there Sunday night, might seem like the stuff of serious drama at first glance: a speculative dramatization of an apparently real-life encounter between classical-music legends Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan at a Vienna hotel in 1988, when both maestros were in the twilight of their careers.

But with two women playing both figures—Helen Schneider as Bernstein and Lucca Züchner as Karajan—and with director Gil Mehmert encouraging them both to ham it up, the selling point becomes not so much anything Danish might have to say about these two great musicians as two aged queens going at each other for 90 minutes. Call it Grumpy Old Conductors.

How favorably you respond to such a spectacle may depend on how well-versed you are in the life and work of both artists. Bernstein and Karajan were the dominant forces in the classical-music world through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, with both conductors releasing tons of recordings throughout those decades. There were always rumors of a rivalry between them both, especially once Bernstein joined Karajan on the Deutsche Grammophon label in the late ’70s. Though never fully substantiated, such rumors are the starting point for Last Call, which has these two artists engaged in raging dying-of-the-light arguments even as they both face their respective ends (Karajan died in 1989, Bernstein in 1990).

Inevitably, Karajan’s Nazi Party membership is a point of contention that naturally offends the Jewish Bernstein; though Karajan maintained he merely joined to advance his career, that fact has nevertheless colored some critics’ and musicians’ views of him and his work. They also debate their diametrically opposed approaches to artistic creation. Whereas Bernstein was sometimes criticized for taking liberties with a score in his interpretations, Karajan was often knocked for what some perceived as his excessive obsession with sonic beauty.

Despite differences in ideology and lifestyle, they do find some points of convergence—such as legendary soprano Maria Callas, with whom both worked and for whom both had immense admiration. The mention of Callas allows the show’s third performer, Victor Petersen, to tap into his countertenor side, singing “Il dolce suono” from Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor while dressed in a black gown; he otherwise plays a waiter named Michael.

Danish is himself a composer, and his knowledge not only of his two subjects’ work but of classical-music history in general is evident throughout. Diehards will surely get throwaway references to conductors like Karl Böhm and composers like Aaron Copland as well as entire exchanges in which they argue over the right ways to conduct the music of Anton Bruckner (Karajan was considered a preeminent interpreter, even by Bernstein himself) and Gustav Mahler (Bernstein helped popularize him in the ’60s).

Alas, all this fanboy knowledge has not necessarily translated into convincing drama. Even Bernstein and Karajan’s argument over the latter’s Nazi Party membership is brought up in a clumsy way, with Bernstein labeling Karajan’s assistant a “Nazi” and Karajan cheekily pointing out how it took a record-breaking 20 minutes to bring that subject up. Moments like those suggest a playwright less interested in exploring these artists’ inner lives than in showing off how much he knows about them.

Mehmert’s direction furthers that impression, especially when it comes to the two central performances. There’s a certain tonal whiplash in seeing Schneider and Züchner’s gleefully over-the-top performances clash with the elegant naturalism of scenic designer Chris Barreca’s re-creation of a bar in Vienna’s Hotel Sacher. No matter that Karajan’s own interest in Zen Buddhism suggests a less irascible personality than the one displayed here. As Danish himself emphasized in a speech he gave just before the performance I attended, he wasn’t aiming for verisimilitude and ought not to be judged by that yardstick. Fair enough. But even for this admirer of both artists, the campiness eventually wore out its welcome over the course of its overstretched 90 minutes.

The best one can say for Last Call is that Danish’s play may at least intrigue some audience members enough to encourage them seek out the recorded output of these two seminal musicians. However different their approaches to music-making were, at least both Bernstein and Karajan could agree that in the end, spreading the love of music that was more important than their own egos.