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Tales from the Jazz Age: An F. Scott Fitzgerald Songbook
June 13, 2013
Café Carlyle – June 13, 20, 21
This revue of songs truly linked to the life and works of F. Scott Fitzgerald is a good idea, if only to provide a cleansing antidote to the late, unlamented, musically anachronistic Baz Luhrman movie version of The Great Gatsby. Co-creators Will Friedwald, who conceived the show, and Sarna Lapine, who directed it, have fashioned a thoughtful compendium of 25 songs, most of them mentioned in Fitzgerald’s writings. The songs are interspersed with readings from the author’s work between 1920, when Tender is the Night, his first novel, was published, and his 1940 death, which left The Last Tycoon unfinished. It was Fitzgerald who dubbed this period The Jazz Age. He also said that the time of his two-decade adulthood represented “the most expensive orgy in history.”
Three able singers, Emily Bergl, Molly Pope and Matthew Saldivar do the vocal honors and read the literary excerpts in a lickety-split 1 hour and 20 minutes. The two women find their inner flapper in such numbers as Bergl’s “Charley My Boy” (Gus Kahn, Ted Fiorito, used in the 1949 film The Great Gatsby) and Pope’s “After You’ve Gone” (Turner Layton, Henry Creamer). Bergl also scores with “Silver Dollar” (Clarke Van Ness, Jack Palmer), in a mode midway between Jean Harlow and Mae West. Pope goes all out in the ballads “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (Harry Warren, Al Dubin) and “Orchids in the Moonlight” (Vincent Youmans, Gus Kahn, Edward Eliscu). Saldivar delivers a touching solo “I’m Sorry I Made You Cry” (N.J. Clesi).
The best duets are Saldivar and Pope’s “Don’t Bring Lulu” (Ray Henderson, Billy Rose, Lew Brown), the two women’s “I’m Nobody’s Baby” (Milton Ager, Benny Davis, Lester Santly, used in the 1962 movie Tender is the Night) and Saldivar and Bergl’s “Nobody Knows (and Nobody Seems to Care)” (Irving Berlin). The most wistfully rousing trio is “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine” (Al Dubin, Joe Burke, used in the 1985 movie Tender is the Night), a song that could sum up Fitzgerald’s take on his era: “When I pretend I’m gay, I never feel that way. I’m only painting the clouds with sunshine.”
Musical director Jon Weber did the nifty arrangements and played appropriately stylish piano on opening night. (Bill Zeffiro, making his Café Carlyle debut, plays piano for the subsequent two performances.) The three-man group’s umbrella title of Rastus Muldoon and the Savannah Band also includes two noteworthy double threats: Joshua Holcomb on tuba and double bass, and Nick Russo on banjo and guitar.
At times the Fitzgerald readings seem to be almost the same length as, and did not really explicate, the songs that preceded or followed them. Also, on opening night the singers appeared under-rehearsed in a way that the band did not. Understandably, the readings relied on the written script, but Saldivar in particular often seemed as if he were seeing the text for the very first time. All three singers took too many distracting glances at their music stands to read lyrics. This may have been remedied by the second show.
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.
This revue of songs truly linked to the life and works of F. Scott Fitzgerald is a good idea, if only to provide a cleansing antidote to the late, unlamented, musically anachronistic Baz Luhrman movie version of The Great Gatsby. Co-creators Will Friedwald, who conceived the show, and Sarna Lapine, who directed it, have fashioned a thoughtful compendium of 25 songs, most of them mentioned in Fitzgerald’s writings. The songs are interspersed with readings from the author’s work between 1920, when Tender is the Night, his first novel, was published, and his 1940 death, which left The Last Tycoon unfinished. It was Fitzgerald who dubbed this period The Jazz Age. He also said that the time of his two-decade adulthood represented “the most expensive orgy in history.”