To borrow a phrase from West Side Story, Saturday “won’t be just any night.” The legacy of famed composer and great American symphony conductor Leonard Bernstein and wife Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein has been put into film and is screening in Houston. Their daughter Jamie Bernstein will be in town for a special advanced viewing of Maestro in partnership with Houston Chamber Choir on December 2 at IPIC Theater, 4400 Westheimer.
Bradley Cooper directs and stars in the film, along with Carey Mulligan. He also co-produced the film with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Cooper and Josh Singer wrote the screenplay, which chronicles the complicated lifelong relationship between the music legend and his wife. The film is in limited release and will be available on Netflix starting December 20.
By purchasing a ticket, guests will receive a drink ticket for a specialty cocktail, one entrée, unlimited popcorn and soft drinks and a box of candy. Following the movie, audience members are invited to a Q&A session with Bernstein.
Bernstein and Houston Chamber Choir’s founder Robert Simpson have a long-established relationship, so when the organization learned of her availability, it immediately got to the business of creating this one-night-only special event. It promises to be filled with entertainment, and the theater provides the perfect setting to absorb all the details that went into the film’s creation.
“I’m so glad for every opportunity that people have to see this film in the theater in a spacious room with really good sound because it’s a big, glorious, blazing film,” Bernstein said. “It really benefits from being listened to with a good sound system and viewed on a really big screen.”
Bernstein says that her family was deeply involved in the research that went into recreating the storyline, and she also noted that Cooper was dedicated and thorough as he took a deep dive into the family’s chronicles.
“He consulted with us about all sorts of issues all the way along,” she said. “At some point early in his research, he decided that instead of making a conventional biopic … what he really wanted to do was tell the story of Lenny and Felicia … to tell a love story about our parents.”
That meant that Cooper continued to ask the Bernstein family probing questions to gather the personal details, and he decided to set up camp on their property to give the film legitimate justice. The family graciously agreed.
“He got so immersed in our whole family existence and story that after visiting our family’s country house in Connecticut, he decided to film there,” she added. “He did three different filming sessions there, so that was the level of connection that we were having all the way along.”
With tons of literature that captured the spirit and life of Leonard, telling his story was relatively easy. Telling the life of the lesser-known wife was more difficult. Bernstein mentioned her fortunate surprise at Mulligan’s ability to portray her mother with such scarce background material.
“To play our mother, Carey had so much less to go on and to research than Bradley did,” she said. “There’s so much audio and video that Bradley could absorb in his attempt to recreate our dad, but there wasn’t nearly as much for Carey to go on when it came to portraying Felicia. Yet, somehow, we don’t know how she did it … somehow she really did manage to channel our mother and convey the essence of our mother in her performance.”
Bernstein says she is glad that her mother gets to have a spotlight, especially since she – despite her own talents – lived somewhat in the shadow of Leonard.
“She was a very special, unusual person and really hard to describe. She was very subtle, very nuanced and complicated, and she had this incredible sense of humor and this deep soul which included a lot of melancholy and feeling things very deeply,” Bernstein said. “She was also an incredibly gifted artist, both as a performing artist and as a painter. She had so many gifts, and now the world gets to learn about her through this unbelievable performance by Carey Mulligan.”
Conclusively, the Bernstein family is greatly excited for the film as it follows in the renaissance of his work and the family’s origin story.
“One of the things that we’re most thrilled about is that there’s so much of our dad’s music in the scoring and the underscoring of the film,” she said. “My brother and sister and I are hoping that everybody will fall in love with his music and that it will have this new life in the world.”
Only 68 seats are available for this screening, so run (don’t walk) to snatch a ticket to Maestro.
Houston Chamber Choir and Jamie Bernstein’s presentation of Maestro takes place starting at 6:30 p.m., Saturday, December 2 at IPIC Theater, 4400 Westheimer. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit HoustonChamberchoir.org or houstonchamberchoir.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket/#/instances/a0F4w00001qj9zmEAA or call 713-224-5566. $200.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
