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“Play a Simple Melody – A Tribute to Irving Berlin”
The Metropolitan Room – September 1, 2, 8, 13
Right off the bat in her Irving Berlin tribute, “Play a Simple Melody,” Jane Scheckter distances herself from her title and from what she apparently considers the canard about the iconic tunesmith’s being a simple, not to say simplistic, melodist and lyricist. It’s as if she’s worried the adjective “simple” undermines full appreciation of Berlin, who, she reports, copyrighted 899 of the few thousand songs he wrote during his 101-year life.
In her haste to shield Berlin from the worrisome “simple-minded” accusation, she may be forgetting the old saw that maintains “simplicity is elegance.” She’s certainly overlooking the fact that Berlin’s songs are in many cases a celebration of the simple declarative thought—”Always,” “How About Me?,” “They Say It’s Wonderful,” “Say It Isn’t So,” “You’re Just in Love,” “White Christmas”; the list is seemingly endless. She may also not be considering that there is sophistication in simplicity, and that quality weaves through Berlin’s canon like a golden thread.
Yes, of course, Berlin embellishes his thoughts for color in ditties like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun,” but he’s always steadfastly on point. Even in the melodramatic “Suppertime,” taken from the headlines for “As Thousands Cheer,” Berlin never wavers from the core emotional truth.
Indeed, an argument could be made that no one distilled songs—whether cheerful or melancholy—to essences as Berlin could do with the flip of an interlinear rhyme. You might even say that when he stretched for something like metaphor, as in, say, “I Got Lost in His Arms” (the only Berlin song this reviewer can take or leave alone), he doesn’t quite pull it off.
What Scheckter is also overlooking—ironically—is how the Berlin songbook is so right for her, because she excels at keeping things simple. When she lifts her voice, tinged as it is with just the slightest hint of brass, she makes trying no tricks an unwavering goal. She delivers the songs straightforwardly so that they speak for themselves. There’s no such thing as a melisma on her horizon.
Throughout her medley of “Remember” and “What’ll I Do?” Scheckter simply stands before the mic with her arms at her sides and gives herself over to the songs’ heart-breaking tempers. At other times, she becomes much more animated, of course, but that doesn’t mean she becomes anything like frou-frou-y. When she wields a Fred Astaire-like walking-stick for “Putting on the Ritz,” it’s all in fun (especially drummer Peter Grant’s work substituting for tap shoes), but it’s never excessive. Only on “Falling Out of Love Can Be Fun” did Scheckter falter, the reason being the comic number’s tessitura sits a smidge too low in her voice.
For years, I’ve believed that Berlin’s best interpreter is Eydie Gormé, who seems to relate to the man instinctively. But Scheckter, who gives the impression of approaching Berlin somewhat more cerebrally, is surely a candidate for ranking alongside Gormé. Simply put, she gets the legendary tunesmith.
For ten years now, by the way, Scheckter has worked with Tedd Firth, one of cabaret’s reigning geniuses. He can take a Berlin melody and explore his own brilliant but never baroque complications. His “Moonshine Lullaby” overture is nothing less than intoxicating, his break in “I Got the Sun in the Morning” heliotropic.
