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keeps everything fresh,” Alan Cum-

ming says in a phone call with

Ravinia

Magazine. Cumming, who will perform

his one-man show

Legal Immigrant

in

the Pavilion on July , is a Tony Award–

winning actor and prolific character actor in

films and on television, a writer of TV sketch

comedy, a novelist, a memoirist, a children’s

book co-author, a singer, and musician. Try

saying all that in one breath.

Cumming even owns his own bar,

Club Cumming in New York, and he is

the executive producer of his new

CBS TV series,

Instinct

. “That’s a

really healthy thing, to not be

so focused on oneself,” he says

of this new addition to his

formidable résumé. “It makes

me aware and helps me to

understand the significance

of other people’s roles in the

[creative] process. I’m much

less likely to be jaded.”

Steve Martin, returning

to Ravinia on August  with

festival first-timer Martin Short in

An

Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of

Your Life

, is another exemplar of the

multi-faceted artist. He’s an iconic co-

median, actor, novelist, playwright, and

musician, as well as a noted art collector.

In the late s, Martin was selling

out ,-plus-seat venues and was the

most successful stand-up comedian of

his time. “I was astonished that popular

culture had fixed its attention so intensely

on my little act,” Martin wrote in his 

memoir,

Born Standing Up

. But in , in

what he called an artistic crisis, and feeling

that his phenomenally successful act had

“reached the top of the roller coaster,” Martin

abruptly quit stand-up.

He has made a career out of defying audience

expectations. In his first film,

The Jerk

, Martin

was the crowd-pleasing “wild and crazy guy.” In

his second,

Pennies from Heaven

, based on the grimly

comic Dennis Potter teleplay, he was anything but.

As a writer, Martin first published comic piec-

es (

Cruel Shoes

), but in due course branched out

into plays that deftly juggled the intellectual and

the absurd (

Picasso at the Lapin Agile

;  Tony

nominee

Meteor Shower

) and novels (

Shopgirl

;

An

Object of Beauty

). In recent years, he has returned

to the stage, not as a stand-up, but as a musician,

playing banjo with the Steep Canyon Rangers. “A

lot of people ask me, ‘Steve, why a music career?

Why now?’ ” he joked during his last

Ravinia appearance. “And I say, ‘Guys,

you’re my band.’ ”

This summer, Ravinia is celebrating

the centennial of Leonard Bernstein, a

true Renaissance man whom the

New York Times

hailed

as “one of the most prodigally talented and successful

musicians in American history.” Ravinia President

and CEO Welz Kauffman—a multi-hyphenate in

his own right, a classically trained pianist who is re-

sponsible for the festival’s financial as well as artistic

integrity—worked for five years with conductor

Marin Alsop to program the present multiyear

Bernstein tribute.

Alsop, who was Bernstein’s

last (and only female) protégé,

wanted concerts that not

only shared the composer’s

own work, but also recog-

nized the music and causes

he championed to create a

representative portrait of arguably

America’s most celebrated musician. “In

the history of multi-hyphenates, no one stands

taller than Leonard Bernstein,” Kauffman says.

“Composing

West Side Story

would be career

enough for anyone; the same with being music

director of the New York Philharmonic. But

those are just two achievements in a life that’s

been examined in more than  books and

counting. Here was an artist at the top of his

game as a composer of film scores, Broadway

musicals, symphonies, ballets, and songs; a

charismatic conductor of international repute;

a pianist whose recordings still generate excite-

ment; and a resurrector of forgotten geniuses

like Mahler. He was a mentor, father, social

activist, television personality, and America’s

music teacher with his televised ‘Young People’s

Concerts’—created at a time when television

was young and would dare to broadcast classical

music as a public service—and books [

The Joy of

Music

,

The Infinite Variety of Music

,

Findings

].

“All this success had a downside, though, as

some critics in his own lifetime attempted to dimin-

ish his accomplishments in jack-of-all-trades fashion

because of his enormous popularity. But his life was

so well documented across so much media that today

people with any musical background revere the

man and his music. The name alone is a symbol of

achievement.”

Another revered name on the Ravinia schedule

is Audra McDonald, a returning Ravinia favorite,

who on July  will headline the festival’s gala

concert benefiting its Reach*Teach*Play music

education programs. She perhaps speaks for

Alan Cumming (left) and Audra McDonald (below)

both return to Ravinia in mid-July, but audiences

have almost certainly also seen them previously on

the theater stage or television screen.

PHILLIP TOLEDANO (ALAN CUMMING); ALLISON MICHAEL ORENSTEIN (AUDRA MCDONALD)

JULY 9 – JULY 22, 2018 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE

33