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“Does This Song Make Me Look Fat?”
Laurie Beechman Theatre – January 14, 21, 28, February 8
Some cabaret performers choose to pack a show with languid ballads. Sure, they may feature the odd up-tempo number and perhaps a comic turn or two: bones thrown to the notion of variety. But mostly these singers go for pull-the-stops-out intensity: songs focusing on love gone south, preferably with plenty of sad, sustained notes. Jeff Harnar takes the opposite tack with his show “Does This Song Make Me Look Fat?” Three or four movingly sung ballads are delivered over the course of the show, but mostly this is an evening of mischievous fun: bright musical pinwheels spun by everyone from Cole Porter and Noel Coward to Tom Lehrer and Allan Sherman. Early in the show, Harnar admits that he’s always had a thing for the musical funny. Blessedly he decided to share it with the class in this engaging program.
He opens with Porter’s “I’m Throwing a Ball Tonight,” with additional lyrics of his own making. With this opener, Harnar sets the tone for the evening: he’s breezy, light, nimble of tongue, and has charm to spare. His easy rapport with the audience is impressive.
A series of songs about New York City dominates the first part of the show, including Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields’s sunny “My Personal Property,” with additional lyrics by Barry Kleinbort. The number has a funky 1970s-style beat, served up by the talented trio consisting of musical director and pianist Lawrence Yurman, bassist Jered Egan, and percussionist Ray Marchica. Something about the arrangement seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place it until the song’s bridge, which turns out to have been borrowed from Coleman and Fields’s underappreciated “My City,” (from their score for the 1973 musical Seesaw). “The Shape of New York” (Bob and Jim Walton) is introduced with Harnar displaying a New York City subway map. It’s Exhibit A for the song’s premise that the five boroughs bear a likeness to a certain anatomical figure. The song’s bawdy and very funny lyric edges toward the vulgar at times, but Harnar has such winning matter-of-factness, such a light touch about the whole thing, that he completely sidesteps the gutter.
Larry Kerchner’s “What’s Your Phobia?,” a list song delivered with the accent of a Freud-like psychoanalyst, is one of the evening’s comic highlights. Another is a suite of songs by Rick Crom imagining Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! as written by Stephen Sondheim. This gives a devilish Harnar the chance to channel Mandy Patinkin in the role of Curly. I was delighted also to hear what Harnar does with Lehrer’s “The Elements,” in which the periodic table is set to the music of Gilbert & Sullivan’s tongue-contorting “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.” The last time I recall hearing the Major General’s song in a cabaret club, it came off as an “am I not talented?” parlor trick. Harnar, though, doesn’t pat himself on the back over his delivery of the rapid-fire song. He seems to savor the exotic names of all the gases and minerals that Lehrer catalogs in the song; his performance is as sprightly as a piccolo solo.
As the 2012 Winner of The Noel Coward Foundation Cabaret Award, Harnar has a special connection with Coward, and he includes two of the songwriter’s selections late in the program, including “Sail Away” (which he also sang at last fall’s New York Cabaret Convention). Here we get some dramatic relief from the program’s frivolity. Harnar sings in a vigorously spirited mode. It’s a turn unlike anything preceding it in the program, and it earned sustained applause the night I saw the show.
Among other late-program selections is a smart pairing of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s “The World Goes Round” with Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon’s “That’s Life.” I don’t know whether these songs have ever been fused previously, but together they provide a succinct overview of the ups and downs of human existence. Harnar clearly sees the glass as half full, finding joy even in life’s imperfections (he omits Kay and Gordon’s concluding line about rolling up in a big ball and dying).
The follow-up to this medley is Billy Joel’s “You’re My Home,” which is somewhat out of key with the rest of the song list and, frankly, a bit of a comedown. Its lyrics are certainly among the more pedestrian heard during the evening. Wisely, then, Harnar ends where he began, encoring with another Porter selection: “Can-Can,” the songwriter’s ingenious catalog of Montparnassian high-kickers. The song is an overflowing fountain of giggle-prompting rhyme—and an apt conclusion to this hour of merriment.
Mark Dundas Wood is an arts/entertainment journalist and dramaturg. He began writing reviews for BistroAwards.com in 2011. More recently he has contributed "Cabaret Setlist" articles about cabaret repertoire. Other reviews and articles have appeared in theaterscene.net and clydefitchreport.com, as well as in American Theatre and Back Stage. As a dramaturg, he has worked with New Professional Theatre and the New York Musical Theatre Festival. He is currently literary manager for Broad Horizons Theatre Company.
Some cabaret performers choose to pack a show with languid ballads. Sure, they may feature the odd up-tempo number and perhaps a comic turn or two: bones thrown to the notion of variety. But mostly these singers go for pull-the-stops-out intensity: songs focusing on love gone south, preferably with plenty of sad, sustained notes. Jeff Harnar takes the opposite tack with his show “Does This Song Make Me Look Fat?” Three or four movingly sung ballads are delivered over the course of the show, but mostly this is an evening of mischievous fun: bright musical pinwheels spun by everyone from Cole Porter and Noel Coward to Tom Lehrer and Allan Sherman. Early in the show, Harnar admits that he’s always had a thing for the musical funny. Blessedly he decided to share it with the class in this engaging program.