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Tom Wopat
March 9, 2013
54 Below – February 25
He claimed, on stage, to be “as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.” If he really was, it didn’t show. Throughout this generous one-night stand, Tom Wopat was assured in his choice of material, vocal delivery and lyric sensibility. And his use of that hoary simile to describe his purported state was the only down-home reference from this former star of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and current cast member of “Django Unchained.” Dapperly dressed in a light gray suit and slim tie, he announced he was doing a “‘Mad Men’ thing.” Indeed, almost all of his selections were from the 1960s or before, two nice exceptions being his own “self-inflicted” compositions. One, “Summer Dress,” describes a sensual reverie about an elusive woman; “I Still Feel That Way” neatly delineates his age range. While demonstrating in performance the wisdom of his 61 years, he said, “I still feel 16 most of the time.”
The man was fearless in his selection of the other material in this show and on his current album. Indeed, the live set comprised the 14 tracks on his new CD, “I’ve Got Your Number,” plus one interpolation and three short encores. Wopat even performed the songs in the exact same order as on the recording, “top to bottom.” His first three numbers have long been associated with three disparate performers: Swen Swenson, Tony Bennett, and Bruce Springsteen. But Wopat managed to make each song, and his subsequent ones, his own. For example, whereas Swenson enacted “I’ve Got Your Number” (Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh, from Little Me) as a male striptease, Wopat, in his warm, confident baritone, seemed more to be sizing up a corporate suitor or competitor. Similarly, his renditions of “The Good Life” (Sacha Distel, Jack Reardon) and “Meeting Across the River” (Springsteen) won’t necessarily make you forget their originators, but they do prove anew that there is a legitimate alternative way to interpret the songs. Later in the set, Wopat even took on “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” (Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II), the subject of many estimable recordings. I’ve always thought Carmen MacRae’s was definitive, but Wopat offered an equally touching masculine version.
He had superb help from his musical director (and arranger on five songs) Tedd Firth, the seven arrangements by John Oddo, and a surround-sound septet of backup musicians. Each of these musicians is solo-worthy and deserves to be acknowledged by name, as Wopat did frequently from the stage: Tedd Firth, piano; Barry Danelian, trumpet; Peter Grant, drums; Sean Harkness, guitar; Ed Howard, bass; Birch Johnson, trombone; Bob Malach, tenor saxophone.
While he has a couple of one-night engagements of this show scheduled for as far away as Palm Springs, unfortunately Wopat won’t be doing an extended engagement any time soon as he is in rehearsal for the Broadway revival of The Trip to Bountiful with Cicely Tyson.
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.
He claimed, on stage, to be “as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.” If he really was, it didn’t show. Throughout this generous one-night stand, Tom Wopat was assured in his choice of material, vocal delivery and lyric sensibility. And his use of that hoary simile to describe his purported state was the only down-home reference from this former star of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and current cast member of “Django Unchained.” Dapperly dressed in a light gray suit and slim tie, he announced he was doing a “‘Mad Men’ thing.” Indeed, almost all of his selections were from the 1960s or before, two nice exceptions being his own “self-inflicted” compositions. One, “Summer Dress,” describes a sensual reverie about an elusive woman; “I Still Feel That Way” neatly delineates his age range. While demonstrating in performance the wisdom of his 61 years, he said, “I still feel 16 most of the time.”