Stevie Holland

November 4, 2009

“Love, Linda: The Life of Mrs. Cole Porter”

The Triad – October 28-November 21 (Wednesdays and Saturdays)

With cabaret shows, there’s nothing more commonplace than sets built around a songwriter or songwriting team. This is especially true when the same songwriters are picked—or picked on—time after time. Maybe I wouldn’t mind if someone honored the songs of Walter Donaldson, or DeSylva, Brown and Henderson, or John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey (which even that top-flight contemporary songwriting team won’t do in their own we’re-married-and-endlessly-talented shows).

This year, it’s Johnny Mercer, and I never thought I’d see the day when I’d find his oeuvre overly familiar, but the current Mercer Centennial Endurance Race is beginning to get to me. I feel the same way about, say, Stephen Sondheim or Cole Porter, probably because they’re considered safe for audiences. (In Sondheim’s case, commercial with New York and London sophisticates—and pseudo-sophisticates—but maybe nowhere else.) These days, I go for Porter when someone like the Oak Room’s Paula West includes his songs because she loves them and not because she’s soft-soaping her audience.

Which brings me to Stevie Holland, who’s offering a Porter show at the Triad and to whom I send congratulations and abundant thanks for finding a spanking-fresh new way into the supernal songbook. She calls her piece “Love, Linda: The Life of Mrs. Cole Porter” and she brands it a “one-woman musical.” Her angle? She attaches the songs to the effervescent, if sometimes less than Champagne-bubbly, tale of Linda Lee Porter, darling Cole’s only spouse.

In a Southern accent (no telling whether it’s Mrs. Porter’s Virginia accent), Holland recounts Linda Lee’s introduction to, courtship by, and conjugal years with the master tunesmith. Of course, “conjugal” can be misleading, since she knew of her hubby’s homosexuality when they married and accepted it primarily because she was glad to have some respite after her first marriage to an abusive man.

Holland—who co-wrote the libretto with husband Gary William Friedman (all arrangements by him)—describes the high-life that the well-connected and fabulously rich Porters (she was richer than he) enjoyed in Paris and New York. Nor does Holland scant the Missus’s disenchantment when Porter went Hollywood by writing successful songs for films and whiling away his off-hours pursuing in situ male beauties. (My guess is that much of the research for the project was done in William McBrien’s comprehensive 1998 “Cole Porter: A Biography.”)

As full-throated as she is tall and handsome (as was the darker-haired Mrs. Porter), Holland has chosen songs—all of them written, I think, before Linda Lee’s 1954 death—to reflect what the lady reports went on in the pair’s social calendar and with his professional obligations. You can be sure ‘Riding High” is included. As is my idea of the second-best American popular song ever written: “In the Still of the Night.”

As presented (and directed by Ben West), the implication is that all songs were written by Cole with Linda Lee as inspiration. Not so, of course, since Holland and Friedman have programmed them out of chronological order and never indicate that many of the master’s most passionate ballads may well have been inspired by male lovers. That’s one lapse. Another is the frequent jazz treatment (three-piece band) of songs that, I’d wager, Mrs. Porter wouldn’t have necessarily favored—particularly the raucous “Night and Day.” Still, it’s Porter and it has enough of his fizz.

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