Jaron Vesely

July 23, 2009

“Swingers & Standards”

Maybe it’s because he’s one of the Bistro-awarded Pink Flamingos that Jaron Vesely knows how to get his on-stage points across, casual or dramatic. But in his step away from the group for a solo grab for boite attention, he sure demonstrates extreme comfort. During an opening medley that includes the Michael Buble-Andrew Van Slee “Peroxide Swing” (paired with Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke”), he advises “don’t be cool, don’t be slick,” even as he’s being way cool and way slick.

But when I fully realized how accomplished Vesely at his Metropolitan Room stand-alone bow was during the musical break on “Story of My Life,” which Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green agreed should be cut from the “Wonderful Town” score. Yes, you read me right. Perhaps Vesely’s supreme moment in an act he calls “Swingers & Standards” was when he wasn’t singing at all but just looking forward, sustaining the mood of a doleful ballad as only a masterful singing actor can.

Vesely held his pained gaze through more than a dozen measures of musical director Scott Bradlee’s virtuosic piano escapades. Only as the fellow was about to resume the melancholy lyrics about a life gone wrong did he lower his head in resignation. Possibly Vesely learned this valuable lesson about filling a break-a lesson about the art of concentration-at the Tisch School of the Arts, where he trained; possibly he found it rehearsing with director-performer Miles Phillips. Whatever, he distinguished himself while at it in the underplayed acting.

“Story of My Life” wasn’t Vesely’s sole first-rate achievement, of course. The thin, lithe, wiry Vesely, wearing a dark three-piece suit, has a Diesel-engine baritone and shows it off plenty. The vocal high marks were Richie Supa’s “Misery,” which he laced into with a fury and, later, a “Sing Happy” that contained all the underlying anger that Fred Ebb and John Kander put into it for a climactic turn in Liza Minnelli’s “Flora the Red Menace.” He wasn’t bad either on the Joseph McCarthy-Harry Carroll-Frederic Chopin “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” and the Milton Ager-Jack Yellen-Bob Bigelow-Charles Bates “Hard-Hearted Hannah.”

All was not smooth sailing in Vesely’s set, however, because he eschewed his early small-craft warning about the advantages of not being slick. By contrast, he was sometimes too slick. Yes, with the word ‘swing” in his title, he was going for jazz adornments. There, tricks with the voice too often take precedence over lyric sentiments. Every once in a while, he fell into that pit. His first few numbers suffered accordingly, and that includes the overly-swung “On the Street Where You Live” (Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe). There were also occasional pitch problems and overdoing Jewish jokes.

For some reason, Vesely and Phillips are partial to medleys, and they don’t always work. Why combine the William Saroyan-Ross Bagdasarian “Come On-a My House” with Jeff Buckley’s “You Should Have Come Over” despite the implied connected theme? And the attenuated number in which Vesely tore through chart items by Beyonce, Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Pink and a few others didn’t land as satire or straight-forward appreciation. It plopped somewhere in between.

Nevertheless, let those slide. Vesely is too good to be chastised severely for the occasional lapse. This Flamingo is well-nigh fabulous on his own.

The Metropolitan Room 34 West 22nd Street July 10 at 9:45 July 18 at 5

 

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