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“Traveling Light”
59E59 Theaters – December 15 – January 3
There’s a theory I’ve come up with about Simon Green that isn’t really borne out by the facts included in the program notes for his “Traveling Light,” at 59E59 Theaters for the holiday season. This theory’s concocted from the mention of his having sung the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Extrapolating from that—and from the long list of impressive assignments he’s had in musicals over the years—I’m wondering whether he once had a rich and resounding baritone he somehow lost, so that now he relies on his suave Englishman’s charm to compensate for what’s left of sounds he used to have no trouble producing.
That’s a long way around to saying the tall, good-looking bloke in suit and trendy narrow tie pulls off this trip stateside on the basis of his polished treatment of the material he and musical director/accompanist David Shrubsole have chosen. (He was here last year doing “Coward at Christmas: A Cabaret for Noël.”) That’s to say, he pulls it off for audience members who aren’t sticklers for vocal perfection and are so taken with a thoroughly at-ease personality they aren’t worrying that any minute the tones could dry up and disappear.
Since I’m one of this group—and have forgiven cabaret entertainers such as Mabel Mercer, Julie Wilson and Andrea Marcovicci for their transgressions—I enjoyed much of what Green is offering on his return visit. Disregarding any temptation this year to bow to the season, he’s compiled a show on travel, by which he means the real kind as well as traveling in the mind.
His itinerary isn’t, by the way, restricted to songs about traveling—and he certainly doesn’t incline himself towards obvious traveling songs. A Noël Coward aficionado, of course, he leaves out the Master’s “I Travel Alone” and “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?” He does slot Coward’s “I Like America,” “This Is to Let You Know,” and a bracing prose excerpt written about sailing into New York City harbor.
Other pieces—some of them set to music by Shrubsole—come from Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and, as the melody unfolds, a disturbing rearrangement of the rhyme scheme), W. H. Auden, Pam Ayres, Henry Charles Beeching, and A. A. Gill, little-known here but one of contemporary Great Britain’s most exhilarating prose stylists.
If the line-up makes Green’s voyage sound esoteric, well, to some extent it is—deliberately, I suspect. But not to worry. Green includes songs by, to name a few, Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz (“Rhode Island Is Famous for You”), Leslie Bricusse (“Fabulous Places”), Irving Berlin (“How Deep is the Ocean?”), Richard Rodney Bennett (the very amusing “Let’s Go and Live in the Country”), Stephen Sondheim (“Children Will Listen”), Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill (“My Ship”) and Ivor Novello and Edward Moore (“The Land of Might-Have-Been”). Perhaps the real find is “Errantry,’ a tongue-twister if ever there was one that Donald Swann set to J. R. R. Tolkien words.
Looks like plenty of material, and it is. Indeed, the program occasionally starts to feel as if it’s one long medley that Green—who does leave the stage once or twice to sip water—doesn’t want to interrupt for fear of losing his momentum. Nevertheless, Madeira drinkers, it’s for you.
