Hershey Felder has made a nice career for himself by creating solo shows in which he portrays great composers who perform their music while relating their life stories. Beethoven and Bernstein are among the pianist-writer-actor’s various impersonations in these events that he tours around the country and abroad. In 2001, Felder had a three-month Broadway run in George Gershwin Alone.
Felder now arrives at 59E59 Theaters in his latest incarnation, Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin.
Irving Berlin (1888-1989) remains high among the top tier of 20th century pop music masters who crafted the Great American Songbook. Beginning with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” Berlin’s first international hit of 1911 vintage, the dozens of chart-busting song classics that the composer-lyricist wrote for stage and screen over the next few decades made him millions and into a household name.
Berlin’s personal life was a remarkable realization of the American dream: A Jewish immigrant who fled pogroms in Russia, Berlin started out as a youthful busker on the Lower East Side and quickly became a Tin Pan Alley wonder boy before graduating to writing smash musicals for Broadway, where he built the Music Box Theatre.
By the later 1920s, Berlin had wed Ellin Mackay, an elegant heiress, after a widely publicized courtship that her Catholic father opposed. The hits kept on coming through the Depression and into World War II, during which Berlin led his This Is the Army troupe across Europe and the Pacific. More Broadway and Hollywood successes followed, such as Annie Get Your Gun, until changing times and musical tastes gradually turned the long-lived Berlin into a recluse.
Such is the general outline of the biography that Felder deals out over 105 minutes. He frames the show poignantly at Christmastime, when, for the last 20 or so years of Berlin’s life, a band of hardy fans would gather outside his Beekman Place residence to carol “White Christmas.” Sadly, due to a family tragedy, the elderly Berlin had little fondness for the holiday and never invited the carolers into his home.
But this time, Berlin greets the audience and proceeds to tell the story of his life.
Felder adopts slick black hair and black spectacles to suggest Berlin in his later 1940s looks. The parlor where Felder holds forth as the songwriter is an unattractive, old-fashioned room (Felder is credited as the set designer), but it features a Christmas tree, a large picture frame over the mantel (used for a series of projected images of people in Berlin’s world), and most essentially, a concert grand piano.
Assuming a mild Noo-Yawk accent, Felder explains Berlin’s primitive piano technique and then launches into his colorful biography, which is straightforwardly rendered through an anecdotal text. Although Felder is scarcely an actor, he’s okay as a genial storyteller, and even better as a rather flashy pianist. During the show, Felder sings and plays perhaps two dozen Berlin standards as they figured into the songwriter’s life, plus fragments of other numbers in passing. Felder’s voice proves more resonant than pleasing, but he offers an affable presence and easily coaxes the audience into sing-alongs on “God Bless America” and several other classics. His arrangements of the wonderful songs are smartly done.
The production is modest yet capable. Trevor Hay, the director, neatly paces the easygoing flow of the show, which suffers a tad visually from the lurid colors that Richard Norwood’s lighting spills across the stage. Brian McMullen’s projections of people and places helpfully illustrate the narrative.
Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin is not a high-concept entertainment that aims to garner new admirers of the songwriter’s works or to provide fresh insights regarding the man’s craft. It is instead a sincere and agreeably performed musical celebration of a great American artist and the enduring songs that he wrote.
