New York round-up – tributes to Cy Coleman, Harold Arlen and Irving Berlin

During a recent visit to New York, Patrick Honoré was entertained by top-notch tributes to three of Broadway’s greatest composers – Cy Coleman, Harold Arlen and Irving Berlin.

On top of all the new musicals opening this spring, Broadway was alive with the sound of the music from three of its greatest composers. The first of these geniuses, Cy Coleman, was celebrated on two occasions. First, during the legendary Cast Party at Birdland Jazz Club, where famous host Jim Caruso and the great pianist Billy Stritch paid tribute to their friend.

Lillias White opened the evening by belting out a lost gem from Coleman’s last work, Like Jazz, which unfortunately never made it beyond LA. Guest singers from as far as Paris demonstrated the versatility of the composer’s repertoire during a magical evening organised around the launching of a wonderful new book about the master, Andy Propst’s You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman, and its companion CD. Two weeks later Coleman was again celebrated at 54 Below with Our Guy Cy, also featuring White and Stritch.

54 below, the home of the great Sondheim Unplugged series (the moving last edition featured original Sweeney Todd and Merrily cast members), was also the site of the world premiere of a new musical celebrating another somewhat neglected giant of American music: Harold Arlen. Cleverly directed and choreographed by Scott Thompson in a relatively small space and featuring a full band and a stellar 12-member cast headed by the extraordinary Vivian Reed, One For My Baby was a long overdue jukebox musical exploring the Arlen songbook. True, there have been many Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern catalogue musicals, but the creator of such worldwide standards as ‘Over the Rainbow’ and ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ has been somehow overlooked; so it was great to see this show finally doing him justice.

The great Reed, too rarely seen on Broadway and the original star of the musical revue Bubbling Brown Sugar in the late 1970s, which brought her to Paris where she had a TV concert and recording career, is still at the top of a game physically and vocally, starting the show with a showstopping rendition of ‘Get Happy’.

The rest of the cast, including the spectacular Luba Mason, Kevin Earley and Timothy Oliver Reid, was equally top-notch and what an experience to see such incredible talents performing such strong material. Though there is much work to be done on the book, One For My Baby has such high entertainment value that we can only wish for a bright future for it on Broadway.

The 92nd Street Y presented, as part of the Lyrics & Lyricists series, a tribute to another giant of the American songbook, Irving Berlin, with All Singing! All Dancing! Irving Berlin In Hollywood. Impeccably choreographed and directed by Randy Skinner, who previously and successfully visited the Berlin repertoire with the stage version of White Christmas, this compilation of numbers the master wrote for the movies was both highly entertaining and very well documented.

The repertoire didn’t just include the most familiar material, like the Astaire and Rogers standards, there were lesser-known ditties from obscure movies such as Second Fiddle and even the never heard before ‘I Used to Play It By Ear’, a very moving ballad from the sadly unfilmed last Berlin would-be movie musical Say It With Music. The six cast members, accompanied by a four-piece band, did wonders all through the two-hour programme and Skinner’s tap dancing numbers were as good as ever, but the icing on the cake was the guest appearance of Don Correia and Sandy Duncan delivering a wonderful ’We’re a Couple of Swells’ from Easter Parade.

Hurray for Hollywood and Broadway, but most of all thanks to Birdland, 54 Below and 92nd Street Y for treating us to timeless melodies, an ingredient that is sometimes missing in new Broadway musicals.