Lyricst and Lyricists:
From Camelot to California: The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe at the 92nd
Street Y.
Frederick Loewe (left) and Alan Jay Lerner.
There are
some evenings at the theater so carefully planned, so perfectly executed, and
so designed to be ephemeral that they stick and don’t stick at the same time –
the moments that don’t stay with you are replaced by a feeling of knowing the performers, of having lived in the music, and of walking on
air. Monday’s closing night of Lyrics
and Lyricists’ Lerner and Loewe program, From
Camelot to California, was one of those nights.
Reviewing
the events of such a night runs the risk of merely cataloguing slightly varying
instances of unadulterated praise. If I
find it difficult to summarize the feel of the evening broadly, I suppose I can
thank Rob Berman, the artistic director of Encores! and guest artistic director,
writer, and host for the concert, whose dedication and talent more than earn
him the title of the thinking man’s impresario.
His adoration for the music of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe is
contagious, as it could hardly avoid being – there are thirty-three songs in
the program and each one is perfect. He
also plays four-handed piano, with the conductor and pianist Mark C. Mitchell,
like a dream. For that, I suppose, I owe
thanks to orchestrators Joshua Clayton and Larry Moore, who pull the astonishing
trick of doing Lerner and Loewe right with only a five-piece band.
There are
five members of the cast, too: Chuck Cooper, Lilli Cooper, Bryce Pinkham, Ryan
Silverman, and Lauren Worsham. Each one could
sing the telephone book and pack Radio City.
If I single out Bryce Pinkham, who was designed in a lab to do musical
comedy, it’s only because I’ve seen every one of his stage performances over
the last five years, and because he effectively sings “On the Street Where You
Live” two times in a row and even that’s not enough. Trying to put into words the collective and
individual talent of this group of actors would be a waste of time. They’re as good as any reasonable person
could expect, and more.
While I
admit a personal bias – Lerner and Loewe are the team who made me fall in love
with musical theater – there is no denying that this music is consistently
profoundly good in a way few other American songbook writers could match. Choosing highlights would be like picking a
favorite child – but Lilli Cooper’s show-stopping “Show Me,” Lauren Worsham and
Cooper’s heart-rending and elegant “I Loved You Once in Silence,” Pinkham’s “On
the Street Where You Live,” Chuck Cooper’s “Camelot (Reprise),” and Ryan
Silverman’s nearly flawless mash-up of “Gigi” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to
Her Face” (which are essentially variations on a theme) come to mind. Perhaps the only imperfect detail in any of the
performances is that, after Berman’s rhapsodizing about the perfectly placed
rests in “Almost Like Being in Love,” the corresponding rests in “The Parisians”
were mysteriously missing. And Silverman
muffed a lyric in “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” Can you sense I’m nitpicking?
The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe is
over. You can never see it. It wasn’t recorded. As Berman put it late in the show, the
impermanence of our worlds, as Lerner and Loewe well knew, is what makes them
beautiful. (Berman’s inter-song
narration, incidentally, is the best-written I’ve ever seen at a Lyrics and
Lyricists event.) So, absent the
opportunity to recommend the show, I’m left with nothing but to say, simply,
thank you, and to hope for more crystalline-perfect evenings, perhaps involving
one or more of the participants in this concert, in the near future.
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