Jason Danieley

October 10, 2015

Jason DanieleyIn his recent autobiographical show, “Romantic Notions,” at Feinstein’s/54 Below, Jason Danieley’s song choices and performance styles covered several decades and ranged from sweetly touching to wildly energetic. This solid and eclectic singer was abetted in this ambitious enterprise by a superb trio led by music director and pianist Tedd Firth, and including bassist Pete Donovan and percussionist Clint de Ganon. Firth and Donovan, along with Charlie Rosen, also provided the show’s shimmering arrangements. Donovan’s for “Time After Time” (Jule Styne, Sammy Cahn) was especially nifty. de Ganon’s drumming on many songs, among them George Harrison’s “Something,” approached a Buddy Rich-style musicality well beyond basic beats.

Getting right to his thesis, Danieley opened his set with Eden Ahbez’s “Nature Boy,” not because “Little Jason,” as he called his early self, resembled the song’s title character, but because the lyrics underlined his set list’s essential message: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn/Is just to love, and be loved in return.” Little Jason came to that musical notion early, singing in his bed at the age of eight and absorbing the romantic example of his parents, who had met when they were 15 and 17, and thus feeling some urgency to get on with romance, himself, at a young age.

Accordingly, he performed two love songs from decades before he was born: “With a Song in My Heart” (Rodgers & Hart) and “I Wish it So” (Marc Blitzstein, from Juno). The latter number has almost always been sung by a woman—Nelson Riddle’s arrangement for Rosemary Clooney has long been my go-to version—but Danieley proved that that needn’t be the case.

Danieley’s affection for the music of the 1980s, the decade of his adolescence, may not have been shared by many in his audience, but he certainly made a case for it with his exuberant, stage-wide rendition of “Believe It or Not” (Mike Post, Stephen Geyer, the theme song for TV’s The Greatest American Hero). And “The Power of Love” (Huey Lewis, Chris Hayes, Johnny Colla, from Back to the Future), which he delivered in a sort of gospel-rap style, made for a memorable encore.

Up until 1996, when he was 25 (“late by my parents’ standards”) and met the love of his life, Marin Mazzie, his notions of romantic love may have been only theoretical and once-removed, but when the real thing came along in his recounted tale, his musical emphasis became more urgently personal, with such songs as Cole Porter’s “I Am Loved” and “For Once in My Life” (Orlando Murden, Ron Miller). The emotional capper here was the song to which Mazzie walked down the aisle at their wedding: “And This Is My Beloved” (Alexander Borodin, adapted by Robert Wright and George Forrest for Kismet).

While the written narrative of his romantic journey was just enough, Danieley’s occasional ad libs sometimes bordered on the jejune and were otherwise unnecessary. The songs he so carefully picked spoke for themselves, for romantic love, and for this very talented artist.

“Romantic Notions”
Feinstein’s/54 Below  –  October 2-5

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About the Author

Robert Windeler is the author of 18 books, including biographies of Mary Pickford, Julie Andrews, Shirley Temple, and Burt Lancaster. As a West Coast correspondent for The New York Times and Time magazine, he covered movies, television and music, and he was an arts and entertainment critic for National Public Radio. He has contributed to a variety of other publications, including TV Guide, Architectural Digest, The Sondheim Review, and People, for which he wrote 35 cover stories. He is a graduate of Duke University in English literature and holds a masters in journalism from Columbia, where he studied critical writing with Judith Crist. He has been a theatre critic for Back Stage since 1999, writes reviews for BistroAwards.com, and is a member of The Players and the American Theatre Critics Association.