Sheldon Harnick, Margery Gray Harnick, Penny Fuller, Charles Strouse, Anita Gillette

                                                                                                    Photos by Maryann Lopinto

 

                                          By Marc Miller

 

Want to know why the finale to the 27^th New York Cabaret Convention (that’s right, it’s been around since 1990) was a can’t-miss? Simply glance at the subtitle: A Salute to Sheldon Harnick and Charles Strouse. Those eight words guarantee a stageful of superb material.

 

Both gentlemen, fixtures of fine Broadway musical writing since the Kennedy years or before, are happily still around, and took bows at Rose Hall (they deserved a longer ovation than they got). The seasoned Cabaret Convention audience knows it can count on Mr. Strouse for melody that’s memorable, dramatically appropriate to the situation, and bolstered by harmonies that are never quite what you expect, but more interesting than what you expect—there’s a lot of “oh, how did he come up with that?” with him. Mr. Harnick, who’s gratifyingly back in theatergoers’ consciences after last season’s successful revivals of Fiddler on the Roof and She Loves Me (and a recent Fiorello! off-Broadway), is simply one of the best lyricists the theater ever had. Few can define character or establish mood as he can; his language is elegant, imaginative, and unhackneyed; he has a benevolent, generous view of humanity that shines brighter as other theater lyricists become more cynical and negative; and when the situation calls for it, he can evoke hilarity or come up with a surprising rhyme like nobody’s business. And, as the Cabaret Convention song selection revealed, while his lyrics work brilliantly inside his musicals, they also stand magnificently on their own.

 

Todd Murray, Klea Blackhurst

 

The evening’s host, the always welcome Klea Blackhurst, didn’t need to spend a lot of time waxing eloquent about Harnick’s and Strouse’s achievements, choosing to let the material speak for itself, but she did lend her clarion belt to a couple of unexpected choices. She opened with a Strouse-Lee Adams standard almost everyone knows but few remember as Strouse-Adams, the one that begins, “By the way, Glenn Miller played/ Songs that made the Hit Parade...” Her Harnick selection, closing the first half, didn’t feature music by his usual collaborator, Jerry Bock, but rather by John Philip Sousa: a tongue-rattling setting of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” which, characteristically for the old-lefty Harnick, celebrates the First Amendment. She nailed every word, and sent us out into intermission grinning.

 

Any tribute to Strouse and Harnick is by definition also a tribute to Adams and Bock, and any song list to such an evening is by definition a great one. Eric Comstock’s “Night Song,” from Golden Boy, a woefully underrated score, throbbed with restlessness and longing. Valerie Lemon’s “The Very Next Man,” delivered with bridal gown and bouquet, found laughs that even Fiorello! original Thea, Patricia Wilson, may not have located. Shawn Ryan offered probably the gayest “Little Girls” ever, accompanied by his memories of being probably the only boy on the block who played the Annie cast album over and over. Shana Farr, in a beautiful gown and with no less than Steve Ross on piano, served up one of the great unknown Bock-Harnick ballads, “Where Do I Go from Here?”, cut from Fiorello! And Anita Gillette delivered “What Makes Me Love Him?”, from The Apple Tree, with a stillness and contemplativeness that moved me to tears.

 

Anita Gillette, Penny Fuller

 

More gold in the second half: Penny Fuller, who created Eve in Applause, graduated to Margo with a scathing “Welcome to the Theater.” Scott Coulter’s “There’s Always One You Can’t Forget,” from Dance a Little Closer (lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner), was compelling enough to make one want to reinvestigate the score to this one-nighter. Liam Forde was exuberant in another Bock-Harnick rarity, “All of These and More,” from their debut score, “The Body Beautiful.” And Todd Murray is so handsome that it probably doesn’t matter if he can sing or not. But he can, ain a ringing baritone, and he offered a gracefully romantic “Dance a Little Closer” and a sadder-than-usual “Sunrise, Sunset,” being interrupted midway through by Blackhurst, who presented him with the Margaret Whiting Award for 2016. It’s deserved.

 

Superb as most of the selections and most of the talent were (Joshua Lance Dixon’s “A Lot of Livin’ to Do” was needlessly slick and lyrically imprecise, and Stearns Matthews’ “Miracle of Miracles” felt wimpy), there was plenty of missing Strouse and Harnick that rates rediscovery. Nothing from Strouse’s Rags, an unusually tuneful and ambitious score with many extractable moments. And before he ever teamed up with Bock, Harnick wrote his own music to songs for several 1950s revues, several of which—The Shape of Things, Merry Little Minuet, Isms”—are still pertinent and still hilarious.

 

The Cabaret Convention, of course, is something of a misnomer—it’s not really cabaret, the pianist is more than ten feet away and there’s no sauvignon blanc in front of you. What it is, though, is a bountiful Whitman’s sampler of current cabaret talent, at a price that would barely get you a drink at Café Carlyle or Feinstein’s. The talent at this closing night was impressive, and the material was better than that; it was a two-and-a-half-hour evening, and for many of us, it could have gone on hours longer. “The night was too short” is not a frequent complaint at the Cabaret Convention. It applies here.

 

Cabaret Convention, Oct. 21, Rose Hall at the Time-Warner Center.