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Liz Rubino & James McClellan
November 5, 2012
“Playing His Songs: Liz Rubino and James McClellan Sing Marvin Hamlisch”
Metropolitan Room – October 12
Performing a tribute to the composer Marvin Hamlisch soon after his death is a nice idea—if a fairly obvious one—for a cabaret show. But, like any other act, it should offer a point of view and some insight into its theme rather than merely comprise a collection of songs. This presentation by a pair of engaging and well-voiced longtime friends from Youngstown, Ohio, was a one-off in New York, and not currently listed anywhere else in their performance schedule. This fact may account for the mostly perfunctory nature of the show, particularly in its first several numbers.
A needless instrumental overture “The Entertainer” (Scott Joplin, adapted by Hamlisch for the movie The Sting) was followed by “One” (lyrics by Edward Kleban, from A Chorus Line). This song either has to be done pretty much as written, sung by a stage full of theatre hopefuls, or completely reinterpreted. Neither of those things happened here. “The Last Time I Felt Like This” (Alan and Marilyn Bergman), the Oscar-nominated song from Same Time, Next Year, hewed close to the movie version, probably wisely. Rubino and McClellan were quick to admit that they had almost no connection to the composer. He had sung one holiday concert with Hamlisch conducting the Youngstown Symphony and found him both nice and thorough. Rubino didn’t so much as offer up, say, a college audition for A Chorus Line.
But I can forgive a lot if any artist resurrects a worthy forgotten song from an obscure source, and McClellan did just that with “The Only Way to Go” (Tim Rice) from a 1975 television adaptation of John Osborne’s play The Entertainer. This pseudo-English-music-hall ditty, sung by Jack Lemmon in the TV show, also carries an undercurrent of desperation appropriate to the play’s title character, Archie Rice. McClellan scored on both counts. And the proceedings in general picked up from here. As with any power ballad, especially one that was a number one hit, it’s probably best to perform it close to the version of the original artist, in this case Carly Simon; Rubino followed that wisdom with a knockout rendition of “Nobody Does it Better” (Carole Bayer Sager), from the 1977 James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. But the pair of performers put new life into two songs from They’re Playing Our Song, which also has lyrics by Sager: “They’re Playing My Song” and “Fill in the Words.”
Oddly, the real standout numbers in this act were solos, not duets. McClellan was touchingly effective in his version of “I Can Play This Part” (David Zippel’s haunting theatrical metaphor for fitting into any relationship) from the stage version of The Goodbye Girl. And Rubino sang “Disneyland” (Howard Ashman), a cabaret evergreen, as well as I’ve ever heard it sung.
No tribute to Marvin Hamlisch would be complete without what are arguably his two best-known numbers: “What I Did for Love” (Kleban, from A Chorus Line) and “The Way We Were” (the Bergmans, from the movie of the same name). And those songs did complete this act. These renditions proved, if nothing else, that the former does not lend itself to a natural duet (a soloist with massive choral backup, yes), and that the latter can be a very effective duet.
The three accompanying musicians were just fine: Michael Moritz, Jr., on piano; Billy LaGuardia on percussion; and, especially, John Perrine on saxophone, an inspired replacement for the more usual bass in such a trio.
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.
