by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I was a bit disappointed by
the New York Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Eve concert, mainly because
instead of a classical (or even light-classical) program, they did a tribute to
the late Broadway and Hollywood songwriter Marvin Hamlisch, best known for “The
Way We Were” (one of four Academy Award-winning songs introduced by Barbra
Streisand) and the score for A Chorus Line. Alas, none of Hamlisch’s other musicals had anywhere near the success
of A Chorus Line — which may at least in
part have been due to his and his collaborators’ choice of plots: they did
three from his 2002 adaptation of Sweet Smell of Success, but Alexander Mackendrick’s and Ernest Lehman’s
marvelously dark and cynical movie became the excuse for two absurdly romantic
love ballads and a generic “success” song (sung by the story’s seedy
protagonist, press agent Sidney Falco, nèe Falcone, played in the movie by Tony Curtis and on stage by Brian
D’Arcy James, who sang the song last night) more along the lines of “I Believe
in You” from the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying than the deeper, richer, nastier piece one would
think this story would have inspired. There was also a song from Hamlisch’s
last musical, an even unlikelier story source — The Nutty Professor — that was similarly sappy. I like Hamlisch’s
music — it tries so hard to be endearing it’s really hard not to — but I don’t think he was a great songwriter;
even among his contemporaries Stephen Sondheim towers over him (if the N.Y.
Phil wanted to do a tribute to a
modern-day songwriter, I spent much of the evening wondering, why on earth
didn’t they do Sondheim instead of Hamlisch?), as do John Kander and Fred Ebb —
there’s nothing in the Hamlisch oeuvre that comes close to the scores for Cabaret or Chicago. I’d put Hamlisch at or a bit above the Andrew Lloyd Webber level —
there’s nothing in Hamlisch’s music as annoying as Lloyd Webber at his cornball
worst, but he doesn’t really reach farther up the quality scale than Lloyd
Webber at his best (I can’t help but compare “The Way We Were” to “Memory” from
Lloyd Webber’s score for Cats — both songs are built around the word “Mem’ries,” with the second
vowel contracted, and both were memorably recorded by Barbra Streisand.)
Much
of the evening was devoted to A Chorus Line, though the great “tits and ass” chorus from
“Dance 10, Looks 3” was spoiled by an unfunny alteration in the lyric when
Audra McDonald, serving as host of the show as well as occasionally singing
(she opened with “The Way We Were,” and while she didn’t phrase it as
eloquently as Streisand the combination of her pipes and the best music of the
night made the rest of the show seem anticlimactic), told singer Beth Bairs
that the PBS brass would allow her to sing “ass” but not “tits,” so she had to
spin out a series of substitutes that rhymed with “tits.” (This reminds me of
Sondheim’s careful avoidance of the obscenities his actual characters would
have used in his lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story; the line “When the spit hits the fan” from the
“Jet Song” still rankles, especially since 33 years later he got to use the
S-word in Sweeney Todd.) It was
an O.K. program, which surprisingly did not mention Hamlisch’s most significant
contribution to musical culture other than “The Way We Were” and A Chorus Line — his arrangement and adaptation of the music of
Scott Joplin for the film The Sting — a Joplin piece in one of Hamlisch’s (mostly) idiomatic arrangements
would have been a major boost to this program, especially since even as it
stood the two best pieces on it were the ones Hamlisch didn’t write: a violin-and-piano duet on Richard Rodgers’
“Manhattan” with Joshua Bell (taken from an earlier PBS show from six years ago
on which the still-living Hamlisch had appeared; Bell returned to play a “live”
version of the violin part he’d played then but Hamlisch’s part was reproduced
from the earlier recording and played back on a Yamaha Disklavier, a
computer-operated high-tech player piano; why they didn’t just show the
original film clip is a mystery to me, unless they wanted to show off the
technology that makes instrumental as well as vocal “ghost duets” possible) and
a lovely version of Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” taken from Bernstein’s own
arrangement for the Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story” (which makes the song even lovelier than the Irwin
Kostal arrangement used in the actual show).
