Notes on the Music 9 - Nobody

[The ninth in a series of postings on the music in my show Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville. Performances are March 26 and 27 at the Kranzberg Center in St. Louis; tickets at licketytix.com.]

Medley: Alex Rogers / Bert Williams: Nobody (1905); Fred Ebb / John Kander: Mr. Cellophane (from Chicago, A Musical Vaudeville 1975) – Bert Williams – or at least his hapless "Mr. Nobody" character - is often acknowledged as the inspiration for Amos Hart in Chicago. The musical and lyrical similarities between "Nobody" and "Mr. Cellophane" were so strong that the two numbers just demanded to be combined. "Nobody" was so popular that it became, for Williams, what the Prelude in C sharp minor was to Rachmaninov – a career milestone that eventually turned into something of a millstone. Williams' Ziegfeld Follies co-star W.C. Fields once described him as “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew”.

Notes on the Music 8 - Sophie's Choice

[The eigth in a series of postings on the music in my show Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville.  Performances are March 26 and 27 at the Kranzberg Center in St. Louis; tickets at licketytix.com.]

Shelton Brooks: Some of These Days (1911) – "What a Song! Radio's Big Hit! Everybody's Favorite!" boasts the cover of the 1922 edition of the sheet music, which features a huge picture of Sophie Tucker. "I've been singing it for thirty years, made it my theme song", recalled Tucker in her 1945 autobiography. "I've turned it inside out, singing it every way imaginable, as a dramatic song, as a novelty number, as a sentimental ballad, and always audiences have loved it and asked for it." Brooks was one of many black songwriters and musicians whose work Tucker championed. His other hits include "Darktown Strutters Ball" and "I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone", both of which were performed and recorded by Tucker. Mae West had a shot at the latter as well in She Done Him Wrong (1933).  Singing for Miss Tucker in my show is my guest star, Anna Blair.

Notes on the Music 7 - Local Color

[The seventh in a series of postings on the music in my show Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville.  Performances are March 26 and 27 at the Kranzberg Center in St. Louis; tickets at licketytix.com.]

Andrew B. Sterling / Harry von Tilzer: Under the Anheuser Bush (1903) – This glorified advertising jingle was a hit not only in the USA but – under the title "Down at the Old Bull and Bush" – in the UK as well, where it became a regular part of Florrie Forde's act. The Old Bull and Bush was (and still is) an historic pub near Hampstead Heath, so it probably seemed a logical substitute for the name of a St. Louis brewery that was unknown in Britain at the time. The similarity to the 1902 von Tilzer song "Down Where the Wurzburger Flows" is, I expect, far from coincidental. The two German folks songs quoted in the refrain - "Du, du liegst mir im Herzen" and "Oh du lieber Augustin" – were still in the air when I was a kid, but are probably fading now.

Andrew B. Sterling / Kerry Mills: Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis (1904) – Until I actually started learning this song, I had no idea that the verses (but not the chorus) are all in limerick form. I also had no idea there were so many. The song was immensely popular; the sheet music cover features a picture of Gus Williams (who introduced it) along with the words "also sung with great success by" followed by a list of nearly twenty vaudeville stars including Nora Bayes. Billy Murray is absent from the list even though he did record it, along with nearly everything else from the period.

Notes on the Music 6 - Forward Into the Past!

[The sixth in a series of postings on the music in my show Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville.  Performances are March 26 and 27 at the Kranzberg Center in St. Louis; tickets at licketytix.com.]

Grant Clark and Edgar Leslie / Maurice Abrahams: He’d Have to Get Under – Get Out and Get Under (1913) – Early adopters of technology have always had to become self-taught experts. The first motorists were no exception, as this popular novelty number demonstrates. It was a hit for Bobby North, Al Jolson and Billy Murray (pictured), among others. Murray was an early adopter himself, although in his case the technology was sound recording. Grasping the commercial potential of records (pronounced “re-CORDS” in the early days) before many of his contemporaries, Murray cranked out hundreds of cylinders and discs for every major company. With a sharp tenor voice and impeccable diction, he was the ideal performer for the early days of the medium.

Ida Emerson and Joe Howard: Hello, Ma Baby (1899) – Howard and Emerson were a vaudeville team who had great success with this number about the early days of the telephone. The sheet music sold over one million copies – a stunning achievement at the time. Other hits by the team include “Good Bye, My Lady Love” (1904) and “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now?” (1909). This is another one that required minor lyrical surgery to avoid offending a contemporary audience. Chuck Jones fans (and you know who you are…) will recognize it as the theme song of Michigan J. Frog in “One Froggy Evening”.

Edgar Leslie and Burt Kalmar / Pete Wendling: Take Your Girlie to the Movies (1919) – Long before songs from movies were common, songs about movies were all the rage, with titles like “Let’s Go in to a Picture Show” (1909) and “Mary Pickford, the Darling of Them All” (1914) gracing piano benches. Advice columnist Beatrice Fairfax (actually New York Evening Journal reporter Marie Manning), who is mentioned in the first verse, also turns up in the Gershwins’ “But Not for Me”, for those of you who keep track of those things. And for those of you who think of Billie Burke (pictured) primarily as Glinda or Mrs. Cosmo Topper, be aware that in 1919 she was, as they say, “hot stuff”. She was also Mrs. Florenz Ziegfeld.

Notes on the Music 5 - Carolina in the Morning and the Moon at Night

[The fifth in a series of postings on the music in my show Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville.  Performances are March 26 and 27 at the Kranzberg Center in St. Louis; tickets at licketytix.com.]

Jack Norworth / Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth (pictured): Shine On, Harvest Moon (1908) – Nora Bayes had a spectacular career, even if it was cut short by cancer (she died at age 47). She was one of the superstars of the vaudeville stage and, along with Al Jolson and Bert Williams, one of the biggest sellers in the early days of the recording industry. She toured with her own retinue and had a private train car – the early 20th-century equivalent of a Lear Jet. She even opened her own theater on West 44th Street in Manhattan. The song has been recorded innumerable times over the last century, but my personal favorite remains the one Leon Redbone did in 1977.

Gus Kahn / Walter Donaldson: Carolina in the Morning (1922) (Additional music and lyrics by Neal Richardson and Chuck Lavazzi) – Kahn and Donaldson produced some of the most enduring hits of the previous century. This classic “charm song” is one of the most irresistible, but others include “Makin’ Whoopee”, “My Baby Just Cares for Me”, and “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby”. The song was introduced in The Passing Show of 1922 by William Frawley (pictured), who would later achieve fame as the garrulous Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy.

Notes on the Music 4 - Rings on My Fingers, Birds on Her Hat

[The fourth in a series of postings on the music in my show Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville.  Performances are March 26 and 27 at the Kranzberg Center in St. Louis; tickets at licketytix.com.]

Blanche Ring (yes, really) introduced this in the 1909 musical The Yankee Girl. The composer of record for the show was Silvio Hein, although that didn't stop the producers from inserting this song as well as a Sousa march. What it has to do with Yankees in general or Yankee girls in particular is obscure, possibly because Broadway shows back then were often little more than long-form musical revues, in which the plot was only an excuse for the songs and specialty acts. Those familiar with the song in its original form will note that I have taken a couple of minor liberties with a lyric which, in its original form, has somewhat racist overtones.

Arthur J. Lamb / Alfred Solman: The Bird on Nellie’s Hat (1906) – Women were, by any definition of the term, an oppressed group a century ago, but that didn’t stop smart, savvy women from showing up in songs like this one or the somewhat ruder “Cows May Come and Cows May Go But the Bull Will Go on Forever”. “Nellie’s Hat” was embraced by a number of female vaudevillians as well as by British music hall star Ada Reeve (pictured), whose picture graces the cover of the only copy of the sheet music I was able to locate (at an Australian library; let’s hear it for the Internet).

Notes on the Music 3 - I'm Always Chasing Rainbows

[The third in a series of postings on the music in my show Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville.  Performances are March 26 and 27 at the Kranzberg Center in St. Louis; tickets at licketytix.com.]

Harry Carroll's composer credit would probably have come as a big surprise to Chopin (it's based on a theme from his 1834 Fantasie-Impromptu) if he hadn't been dead. Of course, if he hadn't been dead it would have been a surprise to everyone since he would have been 107 years old. It was written for a 1918 show entitled Oh, Look!. where it was sung by Harry Fox (credited by some with the invention of the Fox Trot dance step) and danced by Rosie and Jenny Dolly (a.k.a. the Dolly Sisters) who were noted for their unique synchronized dance act as well as for their sybaritic lives.

Notes on the Music 2 - Bring Back Those Wonderful Days

[The second in a series of postings on the music in my show Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville.  Performances are March 26 and 27 at the Kranzberg Center in St. Louis; tickets at licketytix.com.]

Darl Mac Boyle / Nat Vincent: Bring Back Those Wonderful Days (1919) (Additional lyrics by Chuck Lavazzi) – No matter where you are in time, things always seem to look better in the rear-view mirror even if (to stretch the metaphor to the breaking point) objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear. America was not a jolly place in 1919 (see Kevin O’Morrison’s play Ladyhouse Blues for a stark illustration of that). Darl Mac Boyle’s original lyrics get all misty-eyed about “the dinners for a quarter”, “the milk without the water”, “the eggs at ten a dozen” and how “drinking ginger ale makes us weak and pale” – a complaint about the dreaded Volstead Act, which implemented the Eighteenth Amendment and ushered in Prohibition. The boost it gave to organized crime persists to this day.

Notes on the Music 1 - Love's Old Sweet Song

[The first in a series of postings on the music in my show Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville.  Performances are March 26 and 27 at the Kranzberg Center in St. Louis; tickets at licketytix.com.]

G. Clifton Bingham / J.L. Molloy: Love’s Old Sweet Song (1884) – Appropriately enough, we begin with a song that dates from the early days of vaudeville. "Love's Old Sweet Song" was a popular hit but had its roots firmly in the European art song tradition; the grace notes in the printed score, high-falutin' imagery of the lyric and classically-inspired cover art all point in that direction. Composer James Lyman Molloy was a lawyer who wrote operettas but also edited a collection of Irish folk songs. The lines between art and popular music were less well drawn over a century ago. Collections for the amateur pianist usually mixed both types of music, so it wasn't unusual for a Beethoven bagatelle to keep company with cakewalk.

The Money Song

[Being another in a series of entries chronicling the development of my cabaret show Just a Song at Twilight - The Golden Age of Vaudeville. These are companion pieces to Andrea Braun's Talking Cabaret with Chuck Lavazzi blogs at the web site for The Vital Voice. Performances are March 26 and 27, 2010; tickets at licketytix.com.]

In my last post I noted that the good thing about being only a few weeks away from opening night is that rehearsals are now more fun than work. The bad thing is that I now have to think a lot more about finding ways to promote the show. It’s time to start aggressively selling it – and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s selling.

This is the aspect of cabaret about which one rarely hears about, despite the fact that it can help to make or break a show. A sold-out house energizes performer and audience alike while a small one tends to be dispiriting.

Most of us doing cabaret don’t have the deep pockets that are necessary to buy mass media advertising and getting free coverage – an interview or feature segment on a high-profile TV or radio outlet, for example – is difficult without the right connections. I’ve been trying to form some of those via social networking web sites like LinkedIn and Facebook as well as by schmoozing at other performers’ shows, but the jury is still out on how effective all of that will be. Whatever name recognition I have as a result of decades of exposure as an actor and critic locally will hopefully come into play here but there, too, I really don’t know how much impact there will be.

Basically, you do what you can and hope for the best.

That said, I’m finding that for the producer/performer on a limited budget, there are options that promise a reasonable bang for the buck. Advertising in the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis’s Studio Series programs, for example, turns out to be remarkably affordable, as is underwriting at public radio stations KDHX (where I’m on the volunteer staff) and KWMU. I haven’t yet investigated ads in the programs of other small professional companies, but am now giving it serious consideration.

Ultimately, I’m facing the classic artist’s dilemma: you want to do art for art’s sake, but if you don’t devote enough attention to the business side of the equation, you won’t get to do the art. Where’s an Emperor Franz Josef when you need one?

[Image manipulation by photofunia.com.]

The Play's the Thing

[Being another in a series of entries chronicling the development of my cabaret show Just a Song at Twilight - The Golden Age of Vaudeville. These are companion pieces to Andrea Braun's Talking Cabaret with Chuck Lavazzi blogs at the web site for The Vital Voice. Performances are March 26 and 27, 2010; tickets at licketytix.com.]

At the climax of the first act of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, there’s a shattering scene in which Salieri suddenly understands the breadth of the gulf that separates him and the overwhelming bulk of humanity from a genius like Mozart. Poring over Mozart’s scores, he is struck by not only their beauty but also by the complete lack of anything resembling errors or revisions. With a sense of awe and horror, he sees that these masterpieces were set down in fully realized form with no discernable effort on the part of the composer, as though he were dictating directly from the mind of God.

For the vast majority of creative folk, of course, the process of producing art is much more arduous. The very early stages of any project are marked by false starts, wasted effort and just plain drudgery. This is particularly true of the performing arts, where the joy of performance is always built on a foundation of exercises, rehearsals, and memorization. Whether you’re a singer, dancer, actor or musician, there’s always a period of simply learning new material that you have to get through before the words, music or choreography are so well-known that they become a part of you. At that turning point, the real joy of creation takes over and rehearsals suddenly become like recess in school – a chance to start playing.

As a performer, I live for that moment. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have come home from a rehearsal and remarked to my wife “it’s starting to be fun now”. Gone are the tedious hours of writing up dialog cards and slow, plodding rote memorization. Now it’s time to start finding the subtext, working out the subtleties of character, and finding the jewel-like moments that make up a satisfying performance.

My cabaret show Just a Song at Twilight – The Golden Age of Vaudeville is finally entering that phase. I have the words and music down, I have almost all of the patter memorized (yes, you do have to memorize lines you have written for yourself) and I’m beginning to get a sense of the flow of the show. My director Tim Schall and I still need to work out some blocking (yes, even in cabaret movement has to be motivated and planned in advance) and I have yet to determine whether or not I’ll be able to work in some choreography but I am basically, as we say in the acting biz, off book.

I know I’m at this point because I no longer have to force myself to rehearse. I’m past the hard slog of getting pitches and words right and into the creative phase. Rehearsing is now a matter of discovery and actually starts to feel less like work and more like performance.

That’s the good thing about being at this stage of the project. The bad thing?  Well, that's the subject of the next post.

[Image manipulation by photofunia.com, by the way.]

High Wattage

Who: Lennie Watts
What:  Manilow ’73–’83
Where: The Kranzberg Center, St. Louis
When: March 3 through 6, 2010

Whether you’re a Fanilow or just a Fanolennie (I’ll only cop to the latter), there was much to admire in Lennie Watts’s Manilow ’73–’83 show at the Kranzberg March 3 through 6. Indeed, with a three-piece combo and a killer vocal trio accompanying him (“backing him” hardly seems adequate), Mr. Watts’s show was, if anything, a little too much to admire for the modest confines of the Kranzberg’s 80-seat cabaret space. I never thought I’d write these words but: this is a show that, with its glitz, high gloss and often higher decibel level, would actually have worked better in the Sheldon’s normally off-putting Savoy Ballroom.

I should confess up front that I am neither a devotee nor despiser of the songs Barry Manilow wrote and/or made popular. The man has been an irresistible force in American popular music and while some of the songs he made into million sellers are pretty cheesy stuff (“Mandy” comes immediately to mind), his own compositions display a high degree of craft and intelligence that’s impossible not to admire. So even though I would be happy never to hear “Can’t Smile Without You” (which, in all fairness, Manilow did not write) again, I can’t deny that I found the evening entertaining.

Yes, the adoration of the Fanilows in the audience sometimes made me feel like a party crasher, but if you’re going to attend a show entitled Manilow ’73–’83 you can hardly complain if it attracts lovers of Barry Manilow, can you?

Besides, Mr. Watts and his fellow performers made an awfully persuasive case for this material. Mr. Watts, as I noted in my review of his appearance at Savor two years ago, is an engaging mix of singer, actor, rock ‘n’ roller and stand-up comic who well deserves that label “tender dynamo” laid upon him by my fellow Cabaret Scenes contributor Elisabeth Ahlfors. He loves this music to bits, as he notes early in the show, for “the emotion, the theatricality and those damn key changes”. That love infused the evening with so much joy that only a die-hard Manilow hater could have come away un-touched.

A major contributor to the show’s success is music director and pianist Steven Ray Watkins. As he did in his 2007 appearance with Mr. Watts, Mr. Watkins proved to be a dynamic performer and canny arranger. The vocal lines for the back-up trio were so interesting that they sometimes stole focus from Mr. Watts and the band—or maybe it was just the precision and charisma of the singers. Dubbed “Lady Flash 2010” by Mr. Watts, the ensemble consisted of his New York collaborators Tanya Holt and former St. Louisian Angela Schultz and current St. Louisian Kay Love. All three women are impressive performers in their own right. As a group, they nearly stole the show.

Rounding out the solid septet were Jay Hungerford on bass and Jim Guglielmo on drums. It was a tight squeeze getting everyone up there—the women had to stand to one side, in fact—but the results were certainly impressive in a 1970’s retro way. Even John “JT” Taylor’s lights caught the rock concert rock concert/disco ambience.

Had Mr. Manilow been able to see the show, I expect he would have been pleased. The Fanilows certainly were and, ultimately, that’s the target audience. The rest of us were along for the ride, and it was mostly fun.

Rounding out March at the Kranzberg cabaret room are Katie McGrath’s Second Chances March 18 and 19; Joy Powell’s Feminine Standard on March 25; and my own show, Just a Song at Twilight: The Golden Age of Vaudeville, March 26 and 27. For tickets, surf on over to licketytix.com. The Cabaret St. Louis season continues April 7 through 10 with Eric Michael Gillett’s Wide –screen Songs From and About Movies; visit cabaretstl.org for details.

Finally, fans o' Lennie's can catch up with him at lenniewatts.com.

The Daly Show

Who:Tyne Daly and John McDaniel
What: Songs
Where: Cabaret St. Louis at The Kranzberg Center, St. Louis
When: February 10 through 13, 2010

Hiding behind the deceptively simple one-word title of Tyne Daly’s show is a canny assemblage of music both familiar and obscure from 1904 (George M. Cohan’s “Life’s a Funny Proposition After All”) to 2006 (Kristen Adreassen and Megan Downes’s infectious “Crayola”, winner of the John Lennon award that year), all delivered with the skill you would expect from a veteran actress backed by an award-winning music director. The act, which concluded its national tour this week in Mr. McDaniel’s home town, got a warm reception from the local audience, even if it was nothing like the unabashed love fest Sutton Foster got the week before.

When I’m wearing my Critic Hat (as opposed to my Performer’s Hat, which has the flashing lights), I always try to notice whether or not my reactions are in synch with those of the rest of the house. This time we all seemed to be in agreement: Ms. Daly, Mr. McDaniel and director Dave Galligan gave us a solid, entertaining show – a good evening of cabaret that deserved and got appreciative applause. When we stood, however, it was to put on our coats and leave, not to continue the adulation.

That’s not a criticism so much as a reflection of great expectations. Ms. Daly is an actor with a long and distinguished career on stage as well as film and television. When you attend a cabaret show starring the woman who not only copped a Tony for her Mama Rose but also boats a string of impressive screen appearances, you expect to be not just entertained (which I certainly was) but blown away (which I wasn’t). Given the amount of talent on stage that seems odd.

Part of the problem, I think, was that Ms. Daly appeared not yet completely comfortable with the cabaret form - her patter is occasionally a bit too discursive, for example - and she may still be relying too much on her substantial acting chops. There were times when she seemed to be playing Tyne Daly doing cabaret rather than being Tyne Daly doing cabaret. It’s a fine line that even the best of us can cross without realizing that we’ve done so. Ms. Daly also seemed somewhat physically uncomfortable, but I attribute much of that to the sky-high heels she was wearing. Yes, they looked very cool, but I defy anyone to be at ease in those puppies.

All that said, the fact is that Songs was really quite an impressive show. Ms. Daly was always in the moment. She knew what every song meant and made sure that we knew as well. Big show stoppers like “Fifty Percent” (from the 1978 musical Ballroom) were appropriately impressive, ballads like the Jule Styne/Carolyn Leigh collaboration “Killing Time” (a kind of haiku version of “Losing My Mind”) were compelling, and novelty songs like “Row Row Row” (Ziegfeld Follies of 1912) were great fun.

John McDaniel’s great arrangements and accompanying vocals deserve considerable praise as well. Turning the Buddy Holly hit “Oh Boy” into a ballad, for example, was a nice touch, as was the extended piano solo that concluded Randy Newman’s “Real Emotional Girl”. As those of you who saw him at Savor back in 2007 can attest, Mr. McDaniel is a compelling performer in his own right; Ms. Daly couldn’t have asked for a better collaborator.

Judging from the fact that she premiered a brand-new act at Feinstein’s in New York last month, it looks like Ms. Daly is in cabaret to stay – as well she should. She’s got the smarts, the talent and the ability to work with some of the best people in the business. I don’t see any reason why she can’t make her mark here as well as she has in other areas.

Besides, as anyone who was fortunate enough to see Kitty Carlisle Hart at the Savoy Ballroom back in 2006 can attest, the cabaret tent is big enough to hold you right to the end of your creative life. It’s one of the reasons those of us in our “September Song” years (full disclosure: Ms. Daly is only two years older than yours truly) are not hesitant to enter.

Ms. Daly doesn’t have a web site, so I can’t tell you what she’s up to next, but next on the Cabaret St. Louis calendar is St. Louis’s own Lennie Watts with a Barry Manilow tribute March 3 through 6; you can find out more at cabaretstl.org. Between now and then, the Kranzberg will host Robert Breig (February 17 and 18), Jeff Wright (February 19 and 20 with an encore on April 16), Alice Kinsella (February 26), Christina Rios (February 27) and Monya (February 28) as part of the Presenters Dolan’s array of local cabaret talent; see licketytix.com for more information.

Fostering Talent

In his highly flattering introduction to Broadway star Sutton Foster’s wildly successful fund raising appearance at the Sheldon Thursday night (February 4) for Cabaret St. Louis, Mike Isaacson noted that one definition of cabaret is “when a great song meets a great soul”. Evaluating Ms. Foster’s soul is far beyond my abilities as a critic, but as far as both her songs and singing are concerned the evening met that definition and then some.

If you’ve heard any of Ms. Foster’s Broadway cast recordings you already know that she has technique to burn. Yes, hers is a classic “Broadway belter” instrument (making the traditional cabaret microphone largely unnecessary), but it’s a finely tuned one the can do pianissimo as easily and attractively as fortissimo. Her voice is also seamlessly integrated, top to bottom (although she used the former more than the latter, I thought), so the overall effect was really quite impressive. There were places were her elocution could have been better but, really, that’s quibbling.

Ms. Foster is, of course, more than just a pretty face and spectacular voice. On stage she radiates a self-effacing cheerfulness that’s instantly charming and demonstrates the kind of solid acting skills you’d expect from someone with her resume. If I have a complaint, it’s that her resume was also, for the most part, the alpha and omega of her patter. Only at the very end of the show, in the introduction to an impressive but unsurprising performance of Sondheim’s “Being Alive”, did we get a glimpse into her personal life.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Her resume is, after all, a remarkable and interesting one, and the biographical aspect of cabaret can be (and all to often is) overdone. It’s just that I would have welcomed a little bit less of Sutton Foster the star and a bit more of Sutton Foster the person. Your mileage may vary.

While ostensibly a solo act, a good cabaret show is always, I think, a team effort. In this case, the team of Ms. Foster, her music director and pianist Michael Rafter and her director Mark Waldrop was a winning one. The program, to begin with, was nicely balanced between old favorites like “Something’s Coming” (which seems to be everyone’s favorite opening number) and less-familiar material such as the 1957 Dakota Staton hit “The Late, Late Show” and “Say That” - re-write of the Paul Denniker/Andy Razaf classic “S’Posin’” intended for and then dropped from Thoroughly Modern Millie. There were a few lovely ballads such as the classic “Once Upon a Time”, delightful novelty numbers like “Air Conditioner” by Christine Lavin (who apparently doesn’t know how to write a bad song) and, above all, show stoppers along the lines of Drowsy Chaperone’s “Show Off” and (inevitably) Millie’s “Gimme Gimme”.

Mr. Rafter is a talented and sympathetic accompanist as well as an ingenious arranger. Evidence of that showed up early in a medley that skillfully blended songs from three of Ms. Foster’s Broadway hits – Annie, Millie and Little Women – into a seamless whole and continued in his inventive piano parts for simple pop songs like “Sunshine on My Shoulder” and “Up on the Roof”. As for Mr. Waldrop, it’s hard to tell where his ideas end and Ms. Foster’s begin, but whoever came up with the amusing conceit of what I’d call the “Random Show Stopper Moment” surely deserves praise.

The gimmick is that Mr. Rafter selects the titles of five songs from a three-ring binder labeled (I think) “The Big Book of Really Really Hard Songs”, drops them into a gaudy goblet, and has an audience member pick one for Ms. Sutton to sing. It appears to introduce an element of improv show randomness into the evening and perhaps it does, although I suspect that someone with Ms. Foster’s professional acumen would have rehearsed everything in that book well in advance. Certainly her performance of the selected song – Stephen Schwartz’s lovely “Meadowlark” – was a solid as one could want. So, for that matter, was her second dip into the goblet for what was either the third or fourth encore of the evening, Schwartz’s “Defying Gravity”. Still, theatre is all about illusion and you can’t argue with success. She sounded great and her fans – which is to say, nearly all of the audience – loved it.

I say the audience consisted mostly of her fans, by the way, because of the overwhelming enthusiasm of their response. When people start clapping the minute the lights go down and give the performer a standing ovation as soon as she walks on stage, it’s hard not to feel as though you’ve been transported back in time to an early Beatles concert. I mean, nobody screamed, fainted or threw unmentionables, but this was certainly a level of affection that one rarely sees at Cabaret St. Louis shows. Hence the well deserved multiple encores.

This performance of An Evening With Sutton Foster was the first in a series of tour dates, so those of you outside of St. Louis may soon have a chance to appreciate this sparkling talent for yourselves. Visit her web site, suttonfoster.com , to find out where she will be and when. As this is being written, she has appearances scheduled in Cleveland, San Francisco, Naples (FL) and Charlotte (NC). For those of you here in St. Louis meanwhile, the 2010 Cabaret St. Louis season kicks off officially with Tyne Daly and our own trusty and well-beloved John McDaniel February 10 through 13; visit cabaretstl.org for details.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Norah?

Continuing with a look backstage as we assemble my cabaret show Just a Song at Twilight...

The Norah Bayes/Jack Norworth classic “Shine On, Harvest Moon” presents a challenge. The song is so well known that a straight approach runs the risk of being boring. Granted, it has probably been years since anyone actually sang the song as written, but the music is so filled with the elements of ragtime, blues and the first stirrings of what would soon become known as jazz that I thought a more contemporary approach would be fun.

We started out with a kind of “Fever”-style walking bass for the verse but had trouble moving the idea forward in the refrain. At one point Neal shook his had and said “I can’t get out of ragtime!” Much discussion and playing around with the arrangement followed. At one point, the following exchange took place:

Neal: You know, I really feel that a kind of blues or rock approach would work. You should go back and listen to your old Bessie Smith records.
Chuck: I don’t have that many Bessie Smith records.
Tim: Chuck, you’re never going to be Bessie Smith anyway.
Chuck: True on multiple levels.
Tim: What you were kind of doing that last time around was more Al Jolson.
Neal: So maybe we need a little of both.
Tim: Yeah, we need the illegitimate love child of Al Jolson and Bessie Smith. Chuck: Well that would be….that would be Sophie Tucker.

Much merriment followed. Had we possessed custard pies, they would no doubt have been thrown.

I’m still not sure where “Harvest Moon” is going but, like Gershwin’s Porgy, it’s on its way. At our last rehearsal, it had morphed into an upbeat, jazzy number with heavy Jolson accents; I think that might be its final form.

Next: Mr. Nobody.

Bring Back Love's Old Sweet Song

Continuing with a look backstage as we assemble my cabaret show Just a Song at Twilight...

“Love’s Old Sweet Song” and “Bring Back Those Wonderful Days” are the two opening numbers, linked by a bit of patter and piano underscore. Aside from dropping the key from the original A-flat to a more bass-friendly E-flat, not much changed in the first song. This is where the show gets its title (“Just a song at twilight” is the opening phrase of the refrain) and also the opening nostalgic mood.

The patter leading to “Bring Back Those Wonderful Days”, however, got cut in half and the song itself got some major surgery. By the time we were finished, the first verse had been dropped and the second rewritten and moved in between the two refrains. I had substituted new lyrics of my own devising for the second refrain as well.

In its original form, “Bring Back”, which dates from 1919, is a wistful yearning for more prosperous times. The country was in the grip of a both a massive recession and Prohibition was just around the corner, so life probably didn’t seem like much fun. In its new form, the nostalgia is musical, not historical. I have no nostalgia for the world of 1910; any time period predating the invention of painless dentistry is not for me.

By the time we were finished, Neal and I agreed that we had a solid opening number. Well, that’s one hurdle down, anyway.

Next: how do you solve a problem like Norah Bayes?

Life is a Cabaret, Part 3

[Being the third in a series of entries chronicling the development of my cabaret show Just a Song at Twilight - The Golden Age of Vaudeville. These are companion pieces to Andrea Braun's Talking Cabaret with Chuck Lavazzi blogs at the web site for The Vital Voice. Performances are March 26 and 27, 2010; tickets at licketytix.com.]

It’s axiomatic among actors that your approach to a role inevitably changes as you perform it. In a long-running show, it’s not unusual to revise your performance as you become more comfortable with your material and with your fellow performers.

Something similar happens in the process of developing a cabaret show. You start out with an idea, a song list, and a script (“patter”) to link it all together. Once you start rehearsing the show with your music director and director, however, things start to change – often in major ways.

That’s because when you create a cabaret act you are, in effect, writing a new play starring you. That means that, in the early stages, rehearsals are as much about writing the play as they are about learning the material. At this stage, everything is subject to change.

The songs, in particular, begin the journey from their original published versions to the final customized arrangements that will mesh with the performer’s personality and the script to form a cohesive theatre piece. The music director is especially important at this point, of course, but what really happens in rehearsal is a close collaboration among the performer, music director and director.

Listening to the recoding I made of the first full rehearsal with Tim Schall (my director) and Neal Richardson (my music director), I was struck by the way we tossed ideas back and forth and how quickly our notions of what a song meant sometime changed. I'll be posting some examples in the coming days.

Life is a Cabaret, Part 2

[Being the second in a series of entries chronicling the development of my cabaret show Just a Song at Twilight - The Golden Age of Vaudeville. These are companion pieces to Andrea Braun's Talking Cabaret with Chuck Lavazzi blogs at the web site for The Vital Voice. Performances are March 26 and 27, 2010; tickets at licketytix.com.]

Cartoonist Keith Knight (The Knight Life, The K Chronicles, (th)ink) has a recurring feature called Life’s Little Victories – celebrations of the little things that go right in life (e.g. “#6173 – Randomly guessing the correct answer to a trivia question”). In researching my show, I experienced a few little victories of my own.

#1 – Finding all of the sheet music you need for free on line. Some work with Google turned up several web sites (all associated with libraries) offering scans of vintage sheet music from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The files – usually in image formats, sometimes in Adobe PDF format – were available as free downloads, enabling me to print out exact facsimiles of the original music. Simply looking at the original cover art and ads for other songs proved to be a great way to get a feel for the period.

My biggest sources here were the Lester S. Levy Collection at John Hopkins University (http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/), Indiana University’s INHarmony collection (http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inharmony/welcome.do), and the Detroit Public Library’s Azalia Hackley Collection (http://www.thehackley.org/). I also tracked down at least one song – “The Bird on Nellie’s Hat” – at the National Library of Australia (http://www.nla.gov.au/digicoll/music.html).

The irony of using early 21^st century technology to track down early 20^th century resources was not lost on me.

Even more ironic, in some ways, was victory #2 – finding MP3s of thousands of Edison cylinder recordings from as early as 1890 on line, also for free. The Cylinder Digitization and Restoration project at the University of California at Santa Barbara (http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/) proved to be a treasure trove of vintage performances by the giants of the vaudeville era. The collection includes not only musical performances, but dramatic and comedic monologues, language instruction and even political speeches. As a window to a world now long gone, the site is priceless.

With a cabaret show, of course, finding the sheet music is only the beginning. Cabaret artists rarely, if ever, perform a song strictly as written. This is an intensely personal art form, which means that songs need to be arranged to suit the performer. And arrangement, as singer and teacher Lina Koutrakos observes, is like a custom-tailored suit. It’s designed to make the person for whom it’s designed look (or in this case, sound) as good as possible.

Which brings us to my first meetings with my musical director, Neal Richardson.

I first met Neal through the St. Louis Cabaret Conference. He was the musical director for the 2008 Alumni Showcase, at which I was performing “Take Your Girlie to the Movies” – a 1919 novelty that’s included in my current show. We quickly discovered a common love of vaudeville and ragtime-era music, so when I decided to take the plunge he was the first person I contacted. He shared my enthusiasm for the project, and so began our collaboration.

Neal, by the way, is a very busy man. In addition to being much in demand as a pianist and music director, he also teaches music theory and musicianship at Webster University, serves Samuel United Church of Christ as organist/choirmaster and is cofounder of Early Music Saint Louis. He’s also a published composer and arranger with numerous works to his credit. I consider myself lucky to have him on my team.

What does a musical director do? In general terms, he goes over your song list with you, suggests changes in song placement and/or the songs to include or exclude. He transposes music into keys better suited to a performer’s range, changes the accompaniment to suit the performer’s intent, and even acts, when necessary, as a vocal coach (and it my case, it was necessary!). A good musical director – and Neal is certainly that – can provide insights into songs that you, as a performer, might not have considered and can have a major influence on the shape of a show.

In my case, for example, two sessions with Neal resulted in a re-ordering and reduction in length of my original song list and considerable clarification of my ideas behind the show. His arrangement of the 1892 classic “After the Ball” has turned out to be the emotional heart of the show – something I hadn’t considered until we started working together.

He also dropped the keys for nearly every song. A century ago there was no such thing as a microphone, so the stars of the vaudeville stage were invariably tenors and sopranos. Higher voices are easier to hear at the back of the house. As a result, the published scores for these older songs are nearly always in keys that are not very friendly to lower voices like mine (I’m officially a bass-baritone). We lower-voice types wouldn’t come into our own until the invention of electrical recording. Bing Crosby was the first baritone to become a major star.

So after two sessions with Neal, I had a fairly solid idea of the musical shape of the show. What I didn’t have much of yet was patter – the spoken words that knit together the musical numbers and provide context.

You’d think that this would be as easy as falling off a log for someone who was been writing about music and theatre for over forty years. If so, you might want to try falling off a log some time without landing uncomfortably on what the late President Reagan would call our kiester. Writing my own show turned out to be just a little bit more complicated than I had thought.

Of which, more anon.

[title of review]

In his gushy liner notes for the 2006 cast recording of [title of show], noted playwright Terrence McNally praises the new musical for restoring “our faith in the possibilities of theatre” and places its concern for the future of the American Musical on a par with curing cancer.

To quote the late Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know”.

He doesn’t suggest that composer Jeff Bowen and playwright Hunter Bell can actually walk on water, but maybe he just ran out of space. In reality, the goals of [title of show] are far more modest and for the most part both the show and the current production achieve them brilliantly.

On paper and CD, the idea of [title of show] looks a bit flimsy: a talented songwriter and author want to write a new, completely original musical but can’t come up with a topic, so they decide (in the song “Two Nobodies from New York”) to write a new musical about a talented songwriter and author trying to write a new musical. The result is a show that’s about only itself and its creators – “talking to a mirror talking to himself”, to quote A Neil Innes lyric. It’s a potentially deadly idea if not handled with skill.

Skill, happily, is something Mr. Bowen and Mr. Bell clearly have in abundance, along with talent, a self-deprecating sense of humor, and a true love of musical theatre. As a result [title of show], despite the occasional misstep, is generally very funny, entertaining and, at times, even touching.

The non-stop musical theatre in-jokes are clever and nearly always hilarious, as are the many gags about the theatrical process itself. This is a show that cheerfully demolishes the “fourth wall” at every opportunity in an effort to make us aware of how that process works. [title of show] also offers, in songs like “Nine People’s Favorite Thing”, some thoughtful commentary on the dilemmas creative folk face in balancing the need for commercial success with the desire for artistic integrity, as well as insight into every artist’s (and, for that matter, every human’s) battles with self-doubt (“Die, Vampire, Die!”) and the difficulty of recapturing a dream lost (“A Way Back to Then”).

In short, if you’re a lover of musical theatre and/or a performing artist yourself (I confess to both), this is certainly a “must see”. And even if you’re neither of those, you’ll probably find it hard to resist the exuberance, energy and talent of the five-person cast.

St. Louis’s own Ben Nordstrom is a comic dynamo as St. Louis’s own Hunter Bell, nicely contrasting with Benjamin Howes’s appropriately restrained Jeff. If, as the real Hunter Bell writes, [title of show] “really does represent our lives”, then Jeff Bowen would appear to be the ice to Mr. Bell’s fire. It’s the classic straight man/funny guy dynamic and it works quite well.

There’s a similar relationship between the two women who complete the cast. Stephanie D’Abruzzo is utterly charming as original cast member Susan Blackwell who, at least in her fictional incarnation, is a funny, self-assured woman coming to terms with the conflict between her unsatisfying “real world” job and her desire to act. Ms. D’Abruzzo is doing so many interesting things on stage, verbally and otherwise, that she sometimes gets perilously close to stealing focus without, happily, ever doing so.

Amy Justman is Heidi Blickenstaff, the only actor in the original show who actually had Broadway experience. Ironically, she is the least confident of the bunch. Ms. Justman is well nigh perfect in the part, and provides a nice balance to Ms. D’Abruzzo’s more eccentric Susan.

Music director and keyboard player David Horstman – well known in local theatre circles for his fine work at the 88s – is music director and keyboard player Larry (originally Kansas native Larry Pressgrove). Mr. Horstman doesn’t have many lines – something that becomes one of many running gags in the show. That obliges him to do the most difficult kind of acting – reacting in character. He pulls it off nicely.

Scenic designer Scott C. Neale is responsible for the small but tidy New York apartment set. It effectively establishes the scene and mood while still leaving lots of space for the high-energy blocking and semi-choreography.

The book of [title of show] could use a bit of work. The scene in which we’re first introduced to Heidi and Susan fell a bit flat, I thought, and material chronicling the show’s fortunes after its first performance at the New York Musical Theatre Festival felt somewhat tacked-on and repetitious. That said if, as its Wikipedia page states, [title of show] is a “post-modern work-in-progress”, then we can probably expect it to evolve as it makes its way around the regional theatre circuit. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me to see the current production and local reactions to it – including, for all I know, the works I’m typing right now – popping up in a future performance.

The bottom line is that [title of show] is a very smart and funny musical that mostly avoids the pitfalls that come with this sort of self-referential humor. If you have any interest in musical theatre at all, you really must see it. Be aware, though, that the book and songs contain plenty of what the press release calls “adult language” (and I call “the way my friends and I talk all the time”), so it’s officially recommended for “those 16 years of age and older”. Performances continue in the Rep Studio Theatre through January 31^st; for more information, you may call 314-968-4925 or visit the Rep’s web site at repstl.org.

To learn more about the ongoing multi-media project that [title of show] has apparently become, check out the official web site at titleofshow.com as well as (stop me if this gets too dizzying) the [title of show] show on Youtube. It’s nice to know that, despite branching out into “one hundred people’s ninth favorite thing” projects like Disney’s Villains Tonight! and “a new half-hour sitcom” for ABC, [title of show]’s creators remain, to some extent, true to their unique project.

Life is a Cabaret, Part 1

[Being the first in a series of entries chronicling the development of my cabaret show Just a Song at Twilight - The Golden Age of Vaudeville. These are companion pieces to Andrea Braun's Talking Cabaret with Chuck Lavazzi blogs at the web site for The Vital Voice. Performances are March 26 and 27, 2010; tickets at licketytix.com.]

The answer to the question “How did you get started on a solo cabaret act?” is very similar to the answer to the question “How did you get started on drugs?”

“I forget, man.”

No, just kidding. Actually, it’s “little by little, and now it’s too late to turn back.”

The whole thing began with an afternoon session at the 2007 St. Louis Cabaret Conference – the four-day professional workshop on cabaret and musical theatre performance that Tim Schall has been producing since 2006. The session was on “building a show”. As an exercise, we were asked to outline a show that we might like to do, paying attention to material selection, flow and the like.

The show I started to put together back then – “Celluloid Heroes: Portraits in Reel Life” – might still see the light of day. But after working at it for the better part of a year, I realized two things:

1) I wasn’t really all that passionate about that particular idea

2) This is a LOT harder than it looks.

What started me thinking about this show was a comment from my producer, Jim Dolan (of The Presenters Dolan) after the Alumni Showcase for the 2008 Cabaret Conference. The song I had chosen for the showcase was “Take Your Girlie to the Movies”, a minor vaudeville comedy number from 1919. The reception was remarkably warm, given the age and obscurity of the song, and Jim suggested that I should consider putting together a show vaudeville-era comedy and novelty songs. Webster Conservatory faculty member Neal Richardson, who acted as music director for the performance, had already said that he shared my fondness for early 20^th-century popular songs and would be interested in acting as music director should I decide to go that route.

Clearly, the Cabaret Gods were trying to make Their will known.

I was up to my eyeballs in acting opportunities at the time, though, so I filed the idea away under “something to think about when I’m not rehearsing two shows at the same time”. In the spring of 2009, between Metro Theatre Company’s To Kill a Mockingbird and the revival of the NonProphet Theatre Company’s Corleone, I had a few months to revisit the idea, and it began to take hold.

I ran some of the song ideas by Tim Schall, my vocal coach, and he was as enthusiastic. The die, finally, had been cast, and I began tackling the first big question: where the heck was I going to find all that 100-year-old sheet music?

The answer proved to be simpler than I had thought.

To be continued...

Sacred Cow

Every performing arts organization has its cash cow for the Christamas / Hannukah / Kwanzaa / Festivus / [Insert celebration here] season. Like any well-bred bovine, they hope it will generate enough money milk to help underwrite the coming season, when audiences may be less inclined to open up their pocketbooks.

For theatre groups it’s often a dramatization of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Opera companies tend to rely on Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, symphony orchestras on Handel’s Messiah and dance companies on Tchaikovsky’s 1892 bon-bon, The Nutcracker.

From 1989 through 2001 the biggest Nutcracker here in St. Louis was the one hosted by the Fox Theatre. It originally featured the State Ballet of Missouri (now Kansas City Ballet) and then (from 1997 to 2001) Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal. In 2007 the Fox and Dance St. Louis brought The Nutcracker back with a bang in the form of the 1987 Joffrey Ballet production.

It’s back again this year, complete with 170 young St. Louis-area singers and dancers to complement the Joffrey artists. And once again visions of sugar plums - to say nothing of flowers, snowflakes, and mice – are dancing merrily in our heads.

The Joffrey production is everything you might expect from a world-renowned company. Designed and (with the exception of the “Land of Snow” and “Waltz of the Flowers” sequences) choreographed by the company’s late founder Robert Joffrey, the production is of the traditional “story book” variety inspired by the Russian original, the 1940 Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo version, and Joffrey’s own collection of collection of antique toys and Christmas cards. It’s visually stunning – a late 19^th-century print come to life, complete with dancing dolls and a 15-foot-tall Mother Ginger.

It was also, some roughness in the winds not withstanding, a pleasure to hear thanks to generally solid playing by the Ballet Orchestra of St. Louis. The Fox so often plays host to touring shows with reduced pit bands that it was a treat to hear something close to a full orchestra in that space.

All the elements you’d want in a polished Nutcracker were present when we saw the show on Saturday afternoon, including spectacular dancing by the principals and precision work by the ensemble and the various specialty turns in Act II. I was particularly taken with Fabrice Calmels and the astonishingly flexible Kara Zimmerman in the sinuous Arabian “coffee” duo as well as by Megan Qurioz and Temur Suluashvili as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Nutcracker Prince. Erica Lynnette Edwards was a standout as a whirling Russian nougat and Calvin Kitten impressed with his gravity-defying leaps in the Chinese dance.

Let me note that while the Act II set pieces tend to attract the most attention in Nutcracker, words of praise are also owed to the remarkable precision with which this company executed the “social dances’” sequence in Act I. Working in full Victorian costume on a reduced set, they flew through the complex contradance-inspired choreography with deceptive ease.

The entire cast, in short, deserves a hearty “bravi”. The ten-year-old princess in our party pronounced the production “awesome”. Who am I to disagree?

The Joffrey Nutcracker is an annual event in Chicago. Let’s hope it will continue be one here as well. Some things are traditional for good reasons. The Nutcracker speaks, ultimately, to the happy child in all of us. That’s someone we need to remember at this time of the year, especially with so many dark political and economic clouds on the horizon.

Upcoming Dance St. Louis events include the Ballet Folklórico De México in January, Chicago’s River North Dance Company in February, Aszure Barton and Artists in March and the Moscow Festival Ballet in April. Visit the web site at dancestlouis.org for more information or call 314-534-6622.

Woah, Nellie!

Nellie McKay is definitely not your mother’s cabaret performer. In my case, in fact, she’s more like my goddaughter’s cabaret performer. A charming, uninhibited singer/songwriter, Ms. McKay puts the “id” in idiosyncratic. Her show has an “I’m making this up as I go along” quality because, for the most part, that’s exactly what she’s doing. The show my wife and I saw on the second of her two nights at the Kranzberg Center here in St. Louis [November 19, 2009] was, so my elves tell me, very different from the one she did on the first.

In an older and more experienced performer, that might come across as contempt for the audience. Ms. McKay, however, is so genuine and unaffected, so enthusiastic about her material, and so willing to share that enthusiasm with us that – at least the night we saw her – everyone appeared willing to go along with the ride through her musical Fun House.

It helps that she has genuine talent. Her voice is a flexible and accurate jazz singer’s instrument which she employs to great effect in numbers like “A-Tisket a-Tasket” (where she seems to actually be channeling the late Ella Fitzgerald at times) and the Gershwin classic “Do Do Do”. She’s also a respectable pianist and is able to use a ukulele for something other than simple strummed chords. In Jobim’s “Meditation”, for example, her delicate touch turns the often-maligned instrument’s sound into delicate filigree for the Brazilian classic.

That song was one of several numbers drawn from Ms. McKay’s latest CD (and, in appropriately retro fashion, vinyl LP) Normal as Blueberry Pie – A Tribute to Doris Day. A great admirer of the legendary singer’s upbeat approach to life, Ms. McKay shares both her love of the Great American Songbook and her “communion with nature and animals, and common civility”. Not surprisingly, then, the evening included Day classics such as Bacharach’s “Send Me No Flowers” (from the 1964 film of the same name, her third with Rock Hudson) and “Sentimental Journey” (her first big hit with the Les Brown band in 1945) as well as some delightful McKay originals that demonstrated that shared love of animals.

I mean, really: how can you not love someone who could write pet-friendly numbers like Pounce” (“I’m gonna pounce, pounce, pounce [meow] like a pussy cat”) and “The Dog Song”, which comes complete with two pairs of pants.

[A slight pause while we reflect on the sheer cheapness of that joke.]

If the essence of cabaret is the revelation of the individual performer’s personality through music, I’d have to say that Ms. McKay’s show is essential cabaret. From the opening number – “The Very Thought of You” sung to percussionist Ben Bynum’s solo glockenspiel – to the jazzy final performance of “Crazy Rhythm”, her show was quintessentially Nellie McKay. It was, far as I could tell, a pure expression of who and what she is in all her eccentric, cheerful, self-effacing and often very funny glory – a reminder that she made her bones as a stand-up comic before getting visibility as a singer/songwriter.

Speaking of the talented Mr. Bynum, he deserves something of an accompanist’s Purple Heart for keeping up with Ms. McKay’s peripatetic peregrinations through the evening, including her attempt to lead the audience through “Young at Heart” (which only around six of us knew, as far as I could tell). True, she lost him completely during the last-minute “St. Louis” medley while working her way from Kerry Mills and Andrew Sterling’s “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” to “You Came a Long Way from St. Louis”, but by then there had been so much good-natured give and take between them that the confusion became just another part of the entertainment.

How long that approach to the art of cabaret will work for Ms. McKay is, I think, an unknown. Her impressive credentials not withstanding she is, in her late twenties, still in the early stages of what is likely to be a long career. A degree of giddiness that is acceptable and even pleasant in a young performer won’t necessarily work as well as that performer ages. It will be interesting to see where Ms. McKay’s unique style takes her in the coming years. I know I’ll be watching; you should as well.

To find out where Ms. McKay will be appearing next, surf on over to here official web site at nelliemckay.com or check out the unofficial fan pages at nelliemckay.org and nelliemckay.net. You can also find information there on her four albums, at least some of which I am now strongly tempted to buy.

The 2009 Cabaret St. Louis season at the Kranzberg Center closes December 9^th through 12^th with an appearance by Bill Charlap and Sandy Stewart. For details, call 314-534-1111 or visit the web site, cabaretstl.org.

Ecstatic Heights

“[T]he contributions of immigrants...can be seen in every aspect of our national life. There is no part of America that has not been touched by our immigrant background.” – John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants, 1963

From the Irish in the 1820s to the current wave of new arrivals from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, immigrants have brightened and enriched American culture. We are, indeed, a nation of immigrants. In fact, it you go back far enough, we’re a world of immigrants - and have been since we started moving out of Africa millennia ago.

In the Heights – the dynamic and thoroughly entertaining new musical on view at the Fox through November 22, 2009 – is the latest in a long line of Broadway hits that have reflected and celebrated the changing wave of cultures arriving on our shores. Granted, the show – which was born nearly a decade ago at Wesleyan University in Connecticut – features music and dance that are very contemporary, but it has roots that go back through Ragtime, West Side Story, Abie’s Irish Rose, and the comedies of Harrigan and Hart. Its 21^st-century flash, in short, is firmly grounded in tradition.

Quiara Alegría Hudes’s book is solidly in the American mainstream with its celebration of family, star-crossed lovers, and conviction that anyone with what the Victorians called “pluck and luck” can make a difference in the world. Set in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, In the Heights revolves, in classic musical theatre fashion, around a pair of love stories.

Usnavi, whose Dominican parents named him after the first boat they saw when they arrived in the USA (it read “U.S. Navy”), runs the local bodega. He dreams of returning to the Dominican Republic with his beloved Abuela Claudia, the neighborhood elder and his virtual grandmother, and of working up the nerve to date Vanessa, who works at the local salon. Meanwhile Benny, the black dispatcher at the cab company owned by Latin immigrants Kevin and Camila, carries a torch for their daughter Nina, whose own dream of a college education has been deferred – if not destroyed – by a failed first year at Stanford.

Also on hand are Sonny, Usnavi’s somewhat feckless younger cousin; salon owner and local gossip Daniela; Sonny’s friend and street artist Graffiti Pete; and Piragua Guy, waging commercial war on the Mister Softee truck with his pushcart of crushed-ice-and-syrup confections.

As the play’s story unfolds over a sweltering July 4^th weekend the characters’ lives intertwine in funny and touching ways en route to the inevitable joyous finale celebrating home, heart and, above all, hope. Yes, that finale is based on a lucky break right out of Dickens but that, too, is part of the tradition.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s score, on the other hand, is a very cool and non-traditional mix of hip-hop, salsa, merengue and soul as well as more conventional pop and musical theatre sounds. It’s nicely matched by Thomas Kail’s fluid direction and Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography, which seamlessly blends African and Latin American moves with classic jazz dance. Like the neighborhood re-created in loving detail by Anna Louizos’s set and Paul Tazewell’s colorful costumes, In the Heights is almost constantly in motion.

All this is brought to life by a mostly young and entirely talented cast of 27 terrific performers - all of whom can sing, act and dance up a storm - headed by Kyle Beltran as Usnavi. He cleanly articulates the character’s rapid-fire rap narrative while convincingly conveying his winsome charm. Rogelio Douglas Jr. is a forceful and sympathetic Benny and Shaun Taylor-Corbett is all stoner charm as Sonny.

Daniel Bolero and Natalie Toro play off each other nicely as the embattled Kevin and Camila. Isabel Santiago is great fun as the opinionated Daniela, while Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer radiates not-quite-innocent sensuality as Usnavi’s unrequited lust object, Vanessa. Arielle Jacobs, whose varied credits include creation of the “eco-website” helphealteearth.com, is a winning Nina.

Rounding out the principals in fine style are Elise Santora, repeating her Broadway role as Abuela Claudia, and David Baida as Piragua Guy.

In the Heights is a dynamite piece of musical theatre the captures a unique place in space in time while still ringing changes on universal human needs and aspirations. Some of the humor is definitely on the adult side so you might want to leave small children at home, but on the whole it’s as uplifting a celebration of neighborhood and family values as you’re likely to find anywhere.

You might want to bone up on the story in advance, though, by watching some of the video excerpts on the official web site or the related Youtube channel; I found the Fox’s acoustics to be a real barrier to understanding all the lyrics. On the other hand, my “thirty something” goddaughter caught everything, so maybe it’s just my aging ears.

You’ll find In the Heights at the Fox through November 22^nd. For ticket information, you may call 314-534-1111 or visit the web site: fabulousfox.com.

If In the Heights is the future of musical theatre, then that future looks like a rainbow. And who doesn’t like rainbows?

The Good Word(s)

Words! Words! I'm so sick of words! I get words all day through; First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do? - Liza in My Fair Lady

That famous lyric of his not withstanding, the late Alan Jay Lerner was a great lover of words of all sorts. Indeed, at the beginning of what he calls “a disquisition on the genius and words of Alan Jay Lerner” (officially I Remember Him Well: The Songs of Alan Jay Lerner) Steve Ross notes that Mr. Lerner took an “almost sensual pleasure” in the English language. Given that Mr. Ross clearly does the same, you’d think that this combination of lyricist and performer would be a match made in Cabaret Heaven.

And, of course, you’d be right as the rain in Spain, except that this match was first made in January at The Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel - which, I suppose, is close enough to Cabaret Heaven for rhetorical purposes.

The Kranzberg Center may not be as celestial as the Oak Room but it, too, was close enough to heaven when Mr. Ross brought his show there this past week (November 4 through 7, 2009). From the breezy rendition of “I’m on My Way” (from the 1951 near-hit Paint Your Wagon) to the charming closing medley of “Almost Like Being in Love” and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” Mr. Ross had us all in the palm of his hand - a neat trick, since he was playing piano at the same time.

I have commented in the past on Mr. Ross’ uncanny ability to immediately connect with and completely charm his audience, so all I need say here is that nothing has changed since the last time he did that just over a year ago. He may need more memory aids than he once did, but then Mr. Ross is one of those performers who can even shuffle notes gracefully.

As is usually the case with a Steve Ross show, the evening is a well-chosen mix of the popular and obscure, spanning nearly all of Lerner’s forty-plus years as a lyricist. The obscure stuff includes songs from shows that are the chronological bookends for Lerner’s career: the charming ballad “My Last Love” from What’s Up? (1943 – his first collaboration with Fritz Loewe, with a plot that sounds like something out of an S.J. Perelman parody) and a trio of tunes from My Man Godfrey (1986, left uncompleted and unproduced at the time of Lerner’s death).

The Godfrey set was particularly welcome, including as it did both the ingratiating “Try Love” (which invokes the spirit of Cole Porter) and the enormously witty “I’ve Been Married” – as clever a demolition of the institution as you are likely to find outside of the work of Stephen Sondheim (“I have tied the wedding knot / Until the blood began to clot / For living life connubially / Isn’t any jubilee”).

You will not be surprised to learn that Mr. Lerner was married eight times.

Other delightful discoveries in the program included “I Never Met a Rose” from the 1974 film version of The Little Prince (a box office failure that has since gained a cult following), “Hurry! It’s Lovely Up Here” from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (“the only song I know of about encouraging plant growth”), and “It’s Time for a Love Song”, a touching lament for lost youth and romance from Carmelina, an unsuccessful 1975 collaboration with Burton Lane. As Mr. Ross notes, “there aren’t many songs of rue and regret.. in the canon of Lerner and Loewe. But Lerner and Lane – well, that’s something else.”

The bulk of the evening, of course, was taken up with Lerner’s many hits – especially the ones he wrote with his long-time partner Fritz Loewe for shows such as My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Brigadoon. As is typically the case, Mr. Ross put his own unique stamp on all of them, including an introspective performance of “If Ever I Would Leave You” that brings out a wistfulness long hidden by Robert Goulet and his many imitators (not to knock Mr. Goulet; as written, the character of Lancelot is not much given to wistfulness). He even managed the neat trick of turning one of the most famous duets in film history – “I Remember it Well” – into a solo by subtly shifting between characters and dropping an unnecessary verse. It’s a lovely idea; I might have to steal it.

Through it all, Steve Ross the singer is well served by Steve Ross the pianist and music director, with smart arrangements and the occasional flashy keyboard solo. Steve Ross the musical historian is also on hand with interesting biographical tidbits and anecdotes about Lerner and the famous names who were a part of his creative life. It’s a wonder the stage isn’t more crowded.

But seriously: Steve Ross will continue to offer his entertaining traversal of the work of Alan Jay Lerner at the Kranzberg Center through Saturday, November 7^th. For ticket information, call 314-534-1111 or visit the Cabaret St. Louis web site at cabaretstl.org.

Next in the Cabaret St. Louis fall season: Nellie McKay on November 18^th and 19^th, followed by Bill Charlap and Sandy Stewart in December. The 2010 roster hasn’t been announced yet, but the featured artist for the annual Cabaret St. Louis fundraiser in February has: Broadway superstar Sutton Foster. Tickets will presumably be available soon; check the web site for details.

Of Mice and Men

Nature, that framed us of four elements Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds. Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world And measure every wand’ring planet’s course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite And always moving as the restless spheres, Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, That perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. - Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great

Adrian Veidt: I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.
Doctor Manhattan: “In the end”? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.
- Alan Moore, Watchmen

The way in which a heroic figure turns tragic is, to some extent, analogous to the way in which a normal cell becomes cancerous. The hero falls when normal confidence gives way to hubris. The cell becomes cancerous when normal growth becomes uncontrolled. In both cases a healthy trait, when carried to extremes, becomes toxic.

And – to stretch the analogy past the breaking point – in both cases an admirable end is compromised by flawed means. Besides, as Doctor Manhattan cryptically notes – and as the final pages of Dr. Bob Clyman’s compelling drama Secret Order illustrate – nothing ever really ends.

Consider the case of William Shumway (Todd Lawson), the protagonist in this powerful opening to the Rep’s studio season. His intentions are beyond reproach – he wants to find a cure for cancer. The results of his research are promising enough to be published in a prestigious journal where they attract the attention of Dr. Robert Brock (Richmond Hoxie) at an equally prestigious cancer institute.
In short order, Shumway is elevated from University of Illinois professor to head of a state-of-the art lab in New York City. There he becomes the mentor of the brilliant, motor-mouthed graduate student Alice Curiton (Angela Lin) and the unintended nemesis of the ageing Dr. Saul Roth (Stan Lachow), whose budget is gutted to help fund Shumway’s more charismatic work. A presentation at a high-profile conference in Denver leads to even more attention, funding for his work begins to pour in, and Brock begins to make half-serious references to Sweden.

There’s just this one little problem with some of the lab mice.

You can probably lay out the rest of Secret Order’s plot yourself and you’d probably be right, although you might not anticipate the nature of the very Faustian bargain that’s offered in the final scene. But then, predictability is the essence of tragedy. It’s the inevitability of the fall that makes it so powerful. Melodrama is about plot. Tragedy is about character. And the well-drawn characters are what propel this show.

Dr. Clyman is a practicing clinical psychologist, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his script is filled with keen observations on the ways in which ambitious people can deceive themselves and others without ever consciously intending to do so. There’s also a deep understanding here of the malleability of human memory. Like Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen, Shumway and Brock find themselves, towards the end of the play, groping towards but never truly finding exactly where and how they went wrong.

All this is wrapped up in dialog that sizzles with intelligence and energy. It’s literate without being ponderous and makes telling moral points without preaching. It rings true because it is true. This is a script that will almost certainly have a life locally beyond the premiere.

The Rep’s production is almost as good as the material. Risa Brainin’s direction is sharp and focused and the rotating flats on Mark Wilson’s set make the numerous scene changes lightning fast. Mr. Lawson beautifully captures Shumway’s arc from earnest achievement to self-delusion and Ms. Lin is utterly credible as his manic and devoted assistant. Mr. Hoxie, a few opening night line issue not withstanding, is a delight as the overbearing but not entirely oblivious Brock.

As Saul Roth, Mr. Lachow had problems that went beyond a few line flubs, alas. At least on opening night, he seemed to have not fully learned the role. As a result the play’s final scenes, which center on his character, fell somewhat flat. By the time you read this, however, he’ll have a few more performances behind him and may be more assured in the part.

The bottom line, in any case, is that Secret Order is an enthralling and timely seriocomic examination of the conflict between the objective discipline of science and the subjective world of the minds that practice it. It’s a strong opening for the studio season and belongs on the “must see” list of anyone looking for an evening at the theatre that will give them plenty to discuss over drinks afterwards and ponder for some time after that.

Secret Order runs through November 15^th in the studio theatre at the Loretto-Hilton Center on the Webster University campus. For more information, you may call 314-968-4925 or visit the web site at repstl.org.