Where
to start when formulating a revue of the music of Irving Berlin?
The guy wrote nearly 1,000 songs in addition to the scores
of 21 Broadway shows and 17 movie musicals - not just good
but, more often than not, great material. His catalog contains
enough for multiple anthologies.
In creating their 1992 show "I
Love a Piano," Ray Roderick and Michael Berkeley took
a fairly reliable approach, appending a rather overworked -
yet somehow within this context endearing - gimmick. The schema
is a survey of Berlin's music from the early 1910s, when he
had already emerged as a master Tin Pan Alley songwriter, to
the late 1950s, by which time he was a living legend. The gimmick
is the "life" of a piano with a defect - an apparently
unfixable sour note - that keeps changing hands through the
decades.
The device of tracing the fate
of that little piano keeps things moving in Roderick's Musical
Theatre West staging, the show's West Coast premiere, which
fits some 64 Berlin songs into a briskly paced, generally tight
show.
Berlin mastered numerous, time-honored
genres of American popular song - a fact Roderick and Berkeley
were careful to showcase when drawing from his catalog. "Piano" has
snappy dance tunes, romantic ballads, ragtime songs, Tin Pan
Alley tunes, Jazz Age ditties, heartfelt torch songs, patriotic
anthems, holiday songs that long ago became standards, and
Broadway-style numbers. Roderick's staging and choreography,
John Glaudini's musical direction and the work of the cast
is so self-assured that if you weren't a fan of Berlin's music
before, you will be after seeing this show.
Too numerous to catalog, the
highlights include the flapper-era feel of "Everybody
Step" and "They Call It Dancing," the plaintive
melancholy of "Russian Lullaby," an elaborate medley
of "I'm Steppin' Out With My Baby" and "Puttin'
on the Ritz," a re-creation of Judy Garland and Fred Astaire
as hobos singing "We're a Couple of Swells" (from "Easter
Parade") and an all-stops-out rendition of Berlin's paean
to his industry, "There's No Business Like Show Business."
Paired off into couples, Roderick's
sextet of performers are ingratiating musical-theater personalities
with solid vocal, dance and comedic skills. Stephen Breithaupt
and Julie Dixon Jackson portray seasoned pros Alex and Sadie;
Kevin Earley and Kathi Gillmore are leading man George and
leading lady Ginger; Dan Pacheco and Jill Townsend are juvenile
Jim and ingenue Eileen. Considering these "characters" transcend
the multiple decades they're depicted in, this conceit is a
bit of a stretch. That it works is a tribute to the show's
overarching layout and to the flexibility of the larger genre
of musical theater.
Jackson has a substantial presence
and voice, so it's no surprise she's called upon to deliver
a Kate Smith-style rendition of "God Bless America." Breithaupt
has a pleasingly broad tenor and an equally elastic stage persona.
Earley is called upon time and again for his expressive lead
tenor vocals, repeatedly answering the call. Gillmore's persona
is generally pert and saucy, and though Pacheco and Townsend
provide youthful energy, they never fail to come off as anything
but thoroughly professional. Roderick's expansive choreography,
meanwhile, uses the entire Carpenter Center stage and its considerable
breadth.
If there's one criticism that
can be leveled at "I Love a Piano," it's that its
first act is top-heavy, with more than two-thirds of the show's
musical numbers shoehorned into its seven scenes. Once the
World War II, postwar years, early '50s and summer-stock sequences
arrive, though, the show hits an unstoppable stride, bolstering
it as a tribute to Berlin's musical ingenuity. |
