Fran Landesman would be pleased and proud today. Anna Blair, who first met and sang with her last October, formed a cabaret evening of selections from Landesman’s great songs and poems and performed it with style and grace last night at Jazz at the Bistro. She repeats tonight at 8.
Blair, a veteran local actress and singer, offered nearly two dozen of Landesman’s works, either songs or poems set to music, with music by such as the late Tommy Wolf, her Gaslight Square accompanist, Ann Hampton Callaway, Bob Dorough and Simon Wallace, her London pianist for more than 30 years.
It was a lovely evening, with Blair’s small, innocent voice just right for the sad, somber, still-vibrant, hip songs. Blair simply let the lyrics come through, offering splendid enunciation and allowing the words to stand out without trying to put her own personality out front. She was terrific. Even when she got lost in one song, she simply stopped, talked to accompanist Carolbeth True, returned to the microphone and went back to the top, carrying it off stylishly in a splendid rendition.
Landesman, 87, a New Yorker, married St. Louisan Jay Landesman at a Greenwich Village party and married him in 1951. They moved to St. Louis where his family was in the antique business and a major supporter of cultural institutions. With his brother, Fred, a major partner, Jay and Fran opened the Crystal Palace, on Olive Street in what now is the midst of Grand Center, brought Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Will Holt and Dolly Jonah, Ted Flicker and other members of Second City from Chicago, soon were something new and different.
In 1955, they moved west, to a Landesman property near Boyle Avenue, and planted the first flower of Gaslight Square. Phyllis Diller, Barbra Streisand, Del Close, the Smothers Brothers, Lenny Bruce, Josh White, Herb Hartig and dozens of others performed. Fran and Jay, with Flicker, wrote "The Nervous Set," including two of Fran’s most classic songs, "Ballad of the Sad young Men" and "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," both recorded by dozens of great singers and still among the sheet music on every piano in every New York cabaret. It went to Broadway, but "Spring," tied up in copyright litigation, was not sung there.
Blair has the right approach to all the Landesman lyrics. She leaves them alone and lets them carry their story. This is a Landesman concert, not a Blair concert, and that’s the way it should be.
Blair, whose between-songs commentary could have played in a church, was the polar opposite of Landesman, who dropped four-letter words and various other vulgarities as if they were M&M candies on a bridge table. Blair took notice of that in her introduction, saying that when she first met Landesman last October, she was floored when the 87-year-old writer and singer "used the f-word."
True proved a splendid accompanist; Joe Dreyer, the music director for the show, will fill the role on Saturday.
Landesman’s lyrics are rarely sharper than in a literary poem where she admits, "I like to go to bed with a good book, or a man who wrote one;" and her animal songs, about a pet Brontosaurus or the weather for ducks, show great charm.
The Blair-Landesman combination was a total delight, right from the opening number, the lovely, anticipatory "Small Day Tomorrow." But for Blair and Landesman, it was a big night last night.
At Jazz at the Bistro, Grand Center, tonight at 8.
–Joe