David Alpher and Jennie Litt
It’s always nice when someone comes up with a new way to present the old favorites in a cabaret show. The husband-and-wife team of David Alpher and Jennie Litt have embraced such a notion in their current offering at Don’t Tell Mama, “The Elegant and the Immigrant: Cole Porter & Irving Berlin Together.” Calling them “the foremost composer/lyricists of Tin Pan Alley’s Golden Age,” an unassailable premise, the duo presents a program of song pairings, each comprising one selection apiece by these writers; the juxtaposition is based largely on a supposed common subject matter. Porter and Berlin were contemporaries, born just three years apart. Berlin lived much longer but wrote nothing later than a couple of years after Porter’s death in 1964—and no song in this show comes from later than 1946. Yet, as Litt points out, early in the proceedings, “no two songwriters could have been more different.”
The set starts obscurely, with “Antoinette Birby,” composed by Porter in 1911 when he was a 20-year-old Yale student, and “Sadie Salome, Go Home,” a rare Berlin collaboration (with Edgar Leslie) from 1909, when he was 21. Unfortunately, these two songs are sung in their entirety when snippets or just one verse would have made the point that this was early, unfocussed work. In fact, all 18 songs in the show’s nine pairings are performed in toto, and not all of them should be. For once, we could do here with a couple of the medleys or mashups that so many other acts are overdoing these days. Things do pick up considerably, albeit temporarily, with Alpher and Litt’s second song pairing. She contends that when Porter began a love affair it was about fantasy; when Berlin began one it was about strategizing. She neatly illustrates her thesis with solid versions of “Dream Dancing” and “Change Partners,” respectively.
Some other song yokings work well enough: Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby” and “Porter’s “In the Still of the Night”; Porter’s “Love for Sale” and Berlin’s “Supper Time.” Other pairings, not so much, such as Porter’s “You Don’t Know Paree” and Berlin’s “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” (with lyrics taken from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus,” which is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.) My personal non-favorite is the back-to-back presentation of Berlin’s 1915 vaudeville number “Cohen Owes Me Ninety-seven Dollars” and Porter’s 1956 “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” from High Society. Both songs deal with money, kind of, but are hardly two sides of the same coin, you should excuse the expression.
Alpher is a talented pianist and arranger, but while sharing narration duties with his wife, he is often soft-spoken and understated almost out of existence. Litt, on the other hand, sings well but delivers most of these numbers in a belt too big for the room, mostly standing up. The couple’s combined chat also at times seems like a professorial lecture. (They do teach music and are vocal coaches, more often than not together.) Alpher, himself, can’t sing, which is made clear by his one “duet” with Litt, who moves to sit beside him on his piano bench to do “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Alpher gingerly talk-sings “I Don’t,” and a few other mini-phrases, while Litt carries the vocal load, even co-opting what should be his tag line: “And I don’t, ’cause all I want is you.” It’s even harder than usual to figure out where the director (Lina Koutrakos) fits into the scheme of things, as the couple seems so settled in their approach to the material.
Missing from their patter is the most delicious, perhaps apocryphal, Porter-Berlin story. Early in his songwriting career, Porter was getting work doing shows, but not yet writing hit songs, while Berlin already was on the popular music charts. “What am I doing wrong, what can I do to change the situation?” the slightly younger Porter supposedly asked, or words to that effect. “Write Jewish, in a minor key,” Berlin is said to have advised. Porter subsequently came up with “Begin the Beguine,” “Night and Day, “In the Still of the Night” and “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”—all, among others, filling the bill, and certified hits. I so want this story to be true.
Much, but not all, that is slightly off with this show can be forgiven when it comes to Alpher & Litt’s splendid, long finale, consisting of the composers’ most popular “list songs”: Porter’s “You’re the Top” and Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Litt seemingly sings every verse of the two songs ever written, a huge list of lyrics, and it still isn’t enough. She and Alpher seem suddenly to have relaxed into a more comfortable, audience-friendly mode, and together they make every word and note count and speak volumes. Especially on their slower-tempo version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” which allows for a more wistful, even regretful take on a song that is usually done exuberantly. (Not to worry, on the very last verse Alpher & Litt finally go Merman-esque—or Hutton-esque, if you prefer.) Of course, Porter said it best in his song: “You’re the top/ You’re a Berlin ballad.”
This more thoughtful and satisfying tone continues with the conjoined encore, Berlin’s lovely “The Song Is Ended (But the Melody Lingers On)” and Porter’s exquisite “Jewish” minor-key song “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.”
“The Elegant and the Immigrant”
Don’t Tell Mama – September 25, October 25, November 14, December 20
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.