No More Suffering in Silence

Remember this optimistic bit of peace-march jargon from way back when: “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came”?

There was a time in Joe Cangelosi’s life when he might certainly have wished folks had lived up to that slogan: when he was a young man in Sicily and World War II overran his family’s ranch, not to mention his life.

But when he gave a little war of his own--in the form of a musical about sundered wartime love, titled “Ghibli”--he would rather a few more people had showed up. Like an audience , perhaps, and several of the cast members.

Not many people ever get around to writing their own musical, but retired medical doctor Cangelosi did: the music, the lyrics and the book. The things he couldn’t do himself, such as orchestrations, he paid a hefty amount to have done. Then he produced and directed the thing, twice, in local halls he’d rented.

“The first time I spent around $30,000 on it,” Cangelosi said of his musical’s 1989 debut in a 914-seat auditorium at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. “I’d had arrangements done for the 31-piece orchestra, hired professional singers. And I couldn’t get people to come. From an Italian club I belong to I was expecting 300 of them to show up in the audience. ‘Oh, we’ll come, we’ll come, we’ll come!’ Only 25 of them did, of the maybe 400 people total who came.

“Along with a lot of unbelievable mistakes happening, I had the same problem onstage. When I had ‘Ghibli’ performed again in 1993, I had to cut or shorten some scenes because so many performers didn’t show up. Instead of having 20 people onstage, there would be three or four because the others didn’t show up at the last minute.”

It’s difficult to get the epic sweep and tragedy of war across with three actors, even if they do wave their arms a lot.

I met Cangelosi over pasta and panini last Thursday, introduced to him by Issay restaurant chef Paulo Pestarino, who, it might bear mentioning, could probably cook a laptop computer and make it delicious. Cangelosi looks wickedly good for his 74 years, with thick wavy hair, sparkling eyes and a face that nimbly bears that curious Italian mixture of mirth and melancholy.

Cangelosi was born in 1920 in Madison, Wis., and lived there until age 4, when his father, having done well in the grocery business, moved the family back to the old country to fulfill his dream of owning a ranch. Cangelosi grew up on a rolling spread near Palermo. And it was there, with the onset of World War II, that his troubles began.

He was a medical student when the war broke out. Studying was difficult because “the Americans were trying to kill me, the British were trying to kill me,” he said, referring to the indiscriminate bombing, which, like food shortages, became a part of daily life. Meanwhile, the Fascists had appropriated a chunk of the family ranch for use as a POW camp. Cangelosi said he and his family befriended and did their best to help the American prisoners kept there.

In “Ghibli” (a North African term for “Sandstorm”), the lead character, Emile, is a French prisoner of war held in Germany, pining for his fiancee back home. When he’s finally released, he returns home only to find that his Anne, believing him dead, has married another. He, naturally, enlists in the French Foreign Legion, where he volunteers for a suicide mission traveling alone through a sandstorm to bring help to his beleaguered outpost. In the storm he has visions of his Anne guiding him on, and when he arrives, nearly spent, at the fort, he finds she has dumped her hubby and come there looking for him. It is a happy ending.

Cangelosi was inspired to write his musical by his wartime experiences, though they were significantly different from his protagonist’s. For starts, he was never a prisoner of war, nor even in the military. He says he did once try to enlist in the Italian air force, but only with the intent of deserting and aiming the first plane they put him in for an Allied airstrip. His U.S. birthplace kept the military from accepting him, though.

On the home front, however, he became involved with a woman named Anna. Even after five decades, his sense of discretion asked that the details of this romance be kept off the record. Suffice to say that, in the finest Italian tradition, the love affair was heated, audacious, altogether complicated and fated to have no future.

In his musical, Cangelosi made his characters French, so the hero would have a foreign legion to enlist in. “That’s what I felt like doing,” he said. “I just wanted to disappear, to forget her.” Instead, he moved away to another city, and then to America, to distance himself from the hopeless romance. Though he once married (and divorced) here, and led a full life, he says his Anna was the only true love of his life. Most of the songs in “Ghibli” initially came to him in his time of turmoil and separation in the 1940s. “It was a heartbroken situation, and I started writing songs. I doubt I would have written these songs without this experience. At that time the music was coming in my mind without help of any instruments, one after another. Then, after the music came to me, I had to try to play them on the piano so I could remember them.”

Once back in the United States, “I tried everything I could not to know anything about Anna. Because I knew the way I was feeling the first year or two, I was pretty close to going back. Then I decided to let it go for good. But you can’t forget these things,” he said.

He threw himself into his job and his life in his rediscovered country, eventually settling in Orange County and opening offices in Fullerton and Irvine. In the ‘80s he limited his practice to acne cases, since in that field doctors are less apt to get emergency calls at 11 p.m. When he retired in 1988, he returned to his music.

He’d composed a few other songs over the years, but it was his 1940s melodies that called out to him, and within six months he’d formed his musical around them. He had them orchestrated, assembled a cast and crew, rented a hall and in May of 1989 debuted “Ghibli” at OCC’s Moore Theater. He was so upset by flaws in the staging then, he said, that he didn’t want to go onstage to receive applause at the end.

He was even more disappointed by the two scaled-down performances he staged last year in the auditorium of Huntington Beach High School. Even though he pans the performances, he wished critics would have come to review them.

“All the problems onstage aren’t important because they can be corrected. What is important is for me to have an idea if the story is good, if the music is good. It’s nice to have something written so that I know if I should continue or if I should just forget about it,” he said.

So, how is this doctor’s musical?

I think I can say without reservation that it was altogether more enjoyable than the prospect of having Andrew Lloyd Webber try to remove my appendix.

Cangelosi loaned me a video tape of one of the 1993 shows. I can’t claim expertise in the realm of musical theater--unless you count playing fuzz-guitar in a high school adaptation of “Jesus Christ Superstar”--but I’ll venture a few opinions anyway.

I liked most of the songs, which were solidly constructed and forthrightly emotional in the manner of Elvis’ “It’s Now or Never.” The staging, as Cangelosi maintained, is fraught with problems. One dance scene, he noted, goes on interminably because Emile was offstage having trouble with a costume change.

It is Cangelosi’s book, though, that is the most problematic element. Between songs his characters fall into stilted, formulaic speech that makes it difficult, at best, to view them as real flesh and blood. Emile’s first words to Anne are “Where have you been all my life?”

Then there are Emile’s final words in the work: He has been separated from his love by four years of internment, then heartbreak, then near-death in the desert sands. Yet within seconds of being remarkably reunited with Anne, Cangelosi has him close with this speech:

”. . .Thanks to the United States of America we are again a free nation. We have learned our lesson: Only military strength can keep us free. Maybe all nations, in the future, will become civilized in the true sense of the word. Then all nations will guarantee the right to freedom for all. All problems will then be solved by common sense, by logical reasoning and by . .”

“And by LOVE!” Cangelosi has Anne chime in, though any woman I’ve ever met would by this point have chucked Emile back into the sandstorm and gone off looking for a romantic man who didn’t mistake her for the UN General Assembly.

I wouldn’t feel just in making light of Cangelosi’s effort if I couldn’t admit to having written far, far worse stuff in my life. Nobody ever sets out to write anything that’s less than world-changing. You think you have the strongest, purest emotions in the world, and a glowing, hazy vision in your head of those feelings’ ideal artistic expression, which you suppose the magic and mystery of the theater (or whatever chosen art form) will only make more profound.

It’s never guaranteed that such visions will translate to the world outside your head, though. You might imagine your years of all-too human longing represented by a lone figure struggling against a scouring, howling sandstorm. And you wind up instead seeing that representation reduced to being 15 seconds of some guy on all fours scampering across the stage of a high school auditorium. Even compared to Samuel Beckett, that’s bleak .

“With this musical I meant to show how powerful love is,” Cangelosi says. Regardless of the opinions he receives, he says he’ll keep writing songs, trying to express that power. He has been hoping to hear some encouraging words on his musical, though, saying he’s at a loss to know if he should try to stage it again. As much as I hope he rewrites the thing a few times first, let’s cheer him on and wish him well.