Valerie Lemon has a lovely voice with an embracing tone, and she looks good in an outfit that took its inspiration from a tuxedo, with a black cravat over a flowing white collar and outsized white cuffs. She opened a four-night cabaret run at the Kranzberg Arts Center last night, and the 75-minute set allowed all of us to clear Grand Center before the curtain dropped at the Fox.
It was a pleasant evening, more enjoyable than watching the Blues get hammered or anything else on television, but as a writer and a man who has made a living with words for a long time, I was bothered. The evening was billed as Lemon "singing the music of Marvin Hamlisch." I always have thought that one played music and sang lyrics.
There's an old show-biz story, possibly apocryphal, in which Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein II, wife of the famed lyricist, heard her husband's composing partner on "Show Boat," Jerome Kern, complimented for writing "Ol' Man River." "I'm sorry," snapped Mrs.Hammerstein, "but Jerome Kern wrote 'la, la, la-la.' My husband wrote 'Ol' Man River.'"
I feel much the same way. Hamlisch wrote "la, la, la, la-la," but Edward Kleban wrote, "What I did for love."
Coincidentally, one of Hammerstein's greatest sets of lyrics, "South Pacific," is playing practically next door.
Lemon told glowing stories about Hamlisch after every number, and the homage was charming, but I've always considered him a good writer of popular music for movies and theater, not a great composer. When it comes to the Great American Songbook, my money would be on people like Frank Loesser, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington and Cole Porter, to name a few.
Still, Lemon scored with "What I Did for Love," "At the Ballet" and "Nothing," all from "A Chorus Line," with lyrics by Kleban. "A Beat Behind," from "The Goodbye Girl," (lyrics by David Zippel) and "Smile," from "Smile" (lyrics by Howard Ashman) were first-rate, with accompanist and music director John DiMartino joining in from time to time. DiMartino, making faces from a large repertoire as he played, is in line to be a wonderful grandfather.
Dipping into the early days of Hamlisch's career, Lemon showed considerable skill in "Sunshine and Lollipops," a 1965 creation with lyricist Howard Liebling, and "Life Is What You Make It," (lyrics by Johnny Mercer), a 1971 song from the little-known film, "Kotch," directed by Jack Lemmon and starring Walter Matthau, and providing Hamlisch with his first Academy Award nomination.
Valerie Lemon Sings Music by Marvin Hamlisch, at the Kranzberg Arts Center through Nov. 13
—Joe
Comments
One response
Mr. Pollack first of all seems put out that Ms. Lemon would do an evening of an evening of Marvin Hamlisch at all. Having a preference myself for the composers Mr. Pollack mentioned, my reaction was the opposite of his. I welcomed the exposure to an enormously accomplished artist that heretofore I had been rather ignorant of. Whether he is a “Great” or not is completely beside the point. Also Mr. Pollack’s point that only lyrics are sung seems erroneous to me. A song is a marriage of words and music. Ms. Lemon was veritably playing the wonderful notes that Hamlisch wrote with the exquisite instrument that is her voice at the same time that she sang the lyrics so she was indeed singing the wonderful music of Marvin Hamlisch. And since she has worked so closely and extensively with with Hamlisch, as she so assuredly sang his music, she was also delightfully singing her life. James Howe