A Concert in Longwood Gardens

It's a rainy summer night in Longwood Gardens. With some gently drizzling raindrops floating in the air, a beautiful pond in front, and friends around, I am comfortably sitting in a canvas chair, waiting for a concert to start. Life can't be more perfect.

To be precise, it is more than a pure concert but a combination of a classical music broadcasted in the moist air, a firework show in the dark sky, and a display of dancing fountains of the different colors across the entire spectrum as the background. Standing alone, each of the three may by a well planned plot leads its audience on a journey to a solitary world, where pains, grieves, and regrets compete with joys, delights, and hopes to mirror the ever changing moment of defeat and victory of an often disoriented soul in the real world, at the end of which unknown to the flesh world, the struggling soul at last is distilled or liberated, either by reckoning its true peace or by releasing its long stored passion. On this self-reflection journey, long or short, each of these three forms of art naturally relies on its own inherent features to do the trick, and thus necessarily requires an independent and clearly confined space to successfully play its mysterious hands. A distraction of any kind will enviably corrupt the strife for their desired achievement.

In the Longwood Gardens' world, however, the director decides to combine these three forms together to tell a unique story, but in vain. The uniqueness of a story rests on its fascinating details, using a specific fashion to tell it may reveal these details in a specific angle but does not necessarily make the story unique. Bundling three different ways up to convey the messages of a same story runs the risk of tearing the story apart, for it may easily distract the audience's attention from the story itself to the way it is told, leading them more likely to choose style over substance, constantly and unconsciously.

To be fair though, the fountains' performances do guide me to follow the story in the music much better than I otherwise could if with the music alone. The ever changing forms and shapes of the fountains, together with the different colors cast upon, visibly interpret the different phases of the melody I may identify, the gradual transformation from calm to tenseness, the replacement of the bright sunlight by some dark clouds, and the gathering storm afar and its unstoppable approaching. I listen to the changing rhythm of the music and decode the reinforced energy within as the passion is being built-up, the strength is being accumulated, and the preparations are falling in place, all for the dreadful challenge of the final confrontation, like watching a vivid struggling being is to unfold its core meaning of life and death on an imagined stage.

But right before the defining collision is to occur, the fireworks, whose existence so far has largely been ignored, take the center of the stage and dominate it with an undeniable power, unmercifully hijack the entire show with the loudest explosions that defy the final high-notes of the music and their eye-blinding fire sparkles flying all over the dark sky. The sudden intrusion of the fireworks successfully wipe out all the traces of the story along show’s journey so far, quickly arise a deadly block to blind the mind's eye to see the pathway forward, and brutally blow away the well concentrated spirit ready for the moment of truth. The show afterwards becomes foreign and unidentifiable as the music's beautiful notes are being miserably buried in the competing noises in my crowded eardrums, and the colorful fountains, having lost any reason to dance for any more, appear to be nothing more than some meaningless water wildly jumping up and down, begging for people to spare some of their already thin attention.

Things, for unknown reasons, may sometimes take a dramatic turn towards an undesired path. Tonight in Long Wood Gardens, a wonderful story, almost well told, is taken apart into three unrelated sections, with each trying to tell its own at the cost of the others', and a soul searching journey, otherwise fully completed, fall short of its destination by one heart-breaking inch, all because of the firework demands for some due attention at the worse possible moment. The director, possibly because of his or her self-consciousness of charging too much for the show of a short period of time, tends to make up the audience with as many good things as possible, but ends up compensating them one firework too many. Life is indeed full of various kinds of chocolates, yet I, greedy better off not to be, would like to enjoy them one at a time.

All said, it is still a summer night wonderfully spent though.