Simon Green and David Shrubsole on piano           Photos by Heidi Bohnenkamp, 2016

 

 

                                       by Eugene Paul

 

With almost a Cowardian flair and an almost Cowardian performer as his star, pianist, composer, lyricist David Shrubsole has created an intimate pastiche for star Simon Green, its full title, Life is for Living: Conversations with Coward, giving Green a  bouquet of Noel Coward’s songs, letters to his adored mother, Violet, gossipy anecdotes and wise, meaty observations with which to ensnare an audience and Green does it up brown. What’s more, it’s far from all nostalgia, there’s a continuing currency of relevance in Coward’s witty observations, a certain bite, not a nibble.

 

As Shrubsole wryly puts it:”There are probably greater painters than Noel, greater novelists than Noel, greater librettists, composers of music, singers, greater dancers, comedians, tragedians, stage producers, film directors, cabaret artists and TV stars.  If there are, they are twelve different people.  Only one man combined all twelve labels – The Master.”  He was quoting Lord Louis Mountbatten waxing euphoric about his friend Noel Coward, on his seventieth birthday, thus adding still another dimension to  the Coward mystique: friend and notable to royalty

 

Simon Green’s acting and singing presentation, not an attempt at imitation but his own well conceived creation, in addition to its charm, captures the solid worth of Coward, the man as much as it does  the solid worth of Green, the man,  oddly, in a little aside which occurred during his performance. Because the theater was set up as a cabaret, one of the tables nearest the stage harbored a cabaret customer type which plagues cabarets: talking on the phone during the star’s performance. Green stopped. Pin drop time. He leaned over, quietly asked if the audience member was well, waited for the excessively  nodding silent yes, stepped back, continued. Not a word of admonition.  None needed.  Absolutely Cowardian, that bit of steel.

 

It shows up, that underlying bittersweet edge, in Simon Green’s very opening number, ”Something Very Strange is Happening to me”, in which, despite all the frippery of the word play, Coward is marveling at seeing smiles on faces which is far from the ordinary, and he wants to “hold each shining moment in my heart”. It continues in his next Coward song, “Don’t turn away from Love” because you know there’ll be an end to it. Green follows that with a wisp of nostalgia, cutting a birthday cake – another Coward birthday – with Elaine Stritch, and singing Coward’s  “Go Slow, Johnny”, maybe she’ll come to her senses.

 

Coward admired – and envied – Irving Berlin – Green movingly sings “Always”.  He admired -- and envied--, the great British star, Ivor Novello. Shrubsole plays the lovely waltz from Novello’s The Lilac Domino. Green  sings in his program  Coward’s homage to Cole Porter ,  George Gershwin, and gets back to Coward’s hard headed worry, “What’s Going to Happen to the Tots”, which rattles on in wittily scurrilous notions about us and about where events are taking us without our paying attention to our children when there aren’t any more grown ups.

 

Simon Green perfectly captures the cynical bravado and worldly despair behind Coward’s “I Went to a Marvellous Party”. I’d heard Beatrice Lillie perform it for its absolute lunacy, but Green makes perfectly clear that Coward had utterly different thoughts composing it.” It is my considered opinion that the human race is cruel, idiotic, sentimental, ungrateful, ugly, conceited and egocentric to the last ditch and that the occasional discovery of an isolated exception is as deliciously surprising as finding a brazil nut in what you know to be five pounds of vanilla creams.” There’s some of that behind the hit song he wrote for Elaine Stritch in Sail Away. “When the storm clouds are riding through a winter sky, sail away, sail away.” Sounds too apt.

 

Life is for Living: Conversations with Coward. At 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59^th Street. Tickets: $25. 212-278-4200. 75 min. Thru Jan 1.