Richard Rodgers On Broadway – Act III – Wigmore Hall

Louise Dearman joined William Burden, Kim Criswell and the Nash Ensemble for Richard Rodgers On Broadway – Act III at the Wigmore Hall, London

Richard Rodgers On Broadway – Act III was performed by the Nash Ensemble with soloists Kim Criswell, William Burden and Louise Dearman at the Wigmore Hall, London.

Like the proverbial No. 9 bus, you wait for ages for one and then two come along at once, and so it was with Do I Hear A Waltz?, which, not having been seen in London for almost nine years, cropped up twice in the space of three days.

First, the fully-staged version at the Park Theatre in midweek, then on Saturday the second half of a Richard Rodgers evening at the Wigmore Hall was devoted to a large dollop, in concert form, of his uneasy but musically rewarding 1965 collaboration with Stephen Sondheim.

This was Part III of the story of Broadway’s most commerically successful composer of musicals which concentrated on the period after he had twice been creatively widowed, first by the death of his long-time lyricist Lorenz Hart and then, in 1960, his very lucrative 17-year partnership with Oscar Hammerstein II came to an end with the latter’s demise through cancer.

It was Rodgers & Hammerstein, of course, who gave us Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific and The Sound of Music among many others, and after Hammerstein’s death, Rodgers wrote additional songs on his own for the movie version of The Sound Of Music, two of which, ‘I Have Confidence’ and ‘Something Good’, were included in the first half of the Nash Ensemble’s tribute.

But without Hammerstein and with his own increasing dependence on alcohol to dull the pain of his own various illnesses, the Rodgers magic was only rarely in evidence.

Few people nowadays speak about his slightly daring mixed-race romance No Strings (from 1962) or Two By Two (with Danny Kaye as Noah) eight years later, while Rex, his penutlimate musical about Henry VIII (played by the uncontrollable Nicol Williamson), vanished almost without trace after a five-week Broadway run in 1976 and has still not reached its “country of origin”, the UK.

And his final work, I Remember Mama, with Swedish actress Liv Ullmann in her first musical, and based in part on a play that he and Hammerstein had produced 35 years earlier, did not fare much better, running for just three months shortly before his death in 1979.

Rodgers took much pride in later life in the achievements of his beloved Mary and they were the only father-and-daughter team ever to have hits shows, The Sound of Music and Once Upon a Mattress, running concurrently on Broadway. Both were up for Tonys in 1960 with Dad emerging the winner, probably just as well for family harmony.

So it was an educational night as much as an entertaining one at the Wigmore Hall and, quite frankly, some of this half-forgotten stuff has not been half-forgotten without reason.

However, Henry VIII’s lullaby to the baby Anne Boleyn gave him (later to become Elizabeth I), which he wrote with lyricist Sheldon Harnick, stood up well in what was said to be its first-ever performance on our shores, as did another song from Rex, ‘Away With You’.

But the best was saved for after the interval with Do I Hear A Waltz?, a slight but charming piece set in Venice involving a lonely American secretary looking for romance and a middle-aged but married Italian shopkeeper.

It is a show that deserves to be more than a curio with Sondheim’s witty ways with words rarely more apparent than in his take on airline food (“Everything that’s brown is meat”) and the demerits of tourists of different nationalities in ‘This Week, Americans’.

And ‘Someone Woke Up‘, ‘Take the Moment’, ‘Thank You So Much’ and the title song are all ballads that grow with the hearing. Sadly, not all of us could hear that well. There was a problem with the sound balance in Act I, not helped by Kim Criswell rushing her song introductions.

Sitting in the 24th and last row, I feared it was just my old ears, but speaking with others younger and much closer to the stage, it turned out to be a general problem and one which thankfully improved as the evening wore on.

The soloists did as well as they could with the mixed material. American operatic tenor William Burden, with a voice you could never tire of hearing, was exceptional, Criswell’s purer-than-pure mezzo-soprano has long been one of the best reasons for going to London concerts, and any fears that Wicked star Louise Dearman might be punching above her weight in mixing it with these two musical heavyweights quickly proved unfounded.

The 13-member Nash Ensemble under the educated baton of David White (once the youngest-ever MD of a West End show, and what a show, Les Miserables!) gave the lush melodies every ounce of their attention in an evening that demanded concentration but in the end was worth the effort.

Jeremy Chapman

Readers may also be interested in:

Do I Hear a Waltz? – Park Theatre – Review

Do I Hear a Waltz? – Rebecca Seale does – Interview

Check out our interview with Louise Dearman in Issue 5 of Musical Theatre Review