At base, we have Harry Connick Jr. singing fourteen or so songs by Cole Porter. Given Connick’s way with a tune, his nimble pianistics, and his expert arranging skills, the show—a tour promoting his newest album, True Love: A Celebration of Cole Porter—more or less describes itself. Yes, Connick will be swinging along to a high-octane band, concentrating on the music and lyrics of the unlikely songsmith from Peru, Indiana.
Rather than simply standing up there and singing the songs, though, Connick has gone out of his way to provide not only a Porter concert but a bells-and-whistles show. And it’s a dandy one. The singer is no stranger to Broadway, having appeared locally in revivals of The Pajama Game and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, in two prior extended-run Broadway concerts (in 1990 and 2010), and as composer-lyricist of his own 2001 musical, Thou Shalt Not, which might well have scared him away from Shubert Alley altogether.
Connick goes through Porter standards, sticking to the more melodious titles (“Just One of Those Things,” “I Love Paris”) while mostly eschewing those upon which Porter lavished high-comedy lyrics (with nothing along the lines of “Let’s Do It” or “You’re The Top” in evidence). No complaints, as there’s something to be said for sticking to what you do exceptionally well and doing it exceptionally well.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
There is one dark horse in the mix, an obscure title called “Mind If I Make Love to You,” which Porter wrote for the 1956 motion picture version of High Society, and which, unlike the vast majority of his later songs, he never saw fit to have published. Connick has clearly adopted the song for extra attention on his CD and in his stage show, and has been heavily promoting it. Even so, it does not seem to scale the same heights as Porter’s bests. The singer—who is also credited as director, author, coproducer, and arranger, doing fairly well on all bases—also includes his own “Take Her to the Mardi Gras” in a New Orleans jam session segment.
The 90-minute affair attains its loftiest heights with two late-in-the-evening sequences. Readers already planning to see the show can skip this description to preserve the surprise; those on the fence might find it intriguing enough to compel attendance. Connick begins his examination of “Night and Day” by explaining how masterful Porter was as an arranger and orchestrator. (Unless Connick knows something we don’t, this is a false supposition. Porter’s three main Broadway orchestrators each suggested that Cole had neither interest nor input into arrangements, carefully keeping himself snobbishly walled off from the music staff. If he had a rare comment or objection after hearing the charts, he would not say anything; rather, he would dispatch a toady to deal with the matter.)
Connick then sits at a desk and describes how Porter might orchestrate the song, with the notes he “writes” for the different instruments appearing on the expansive screen above the stage. This serves as a fine explanation of how Connick (rather than Porter) builds his arrangements, and the visuals are so nifty that one only wonders what Leonard Bernstein might have accomplished with this technology.
After which Connick hauls a massive wing-to-wing piano onstage—704 keys, by my count—for “Begin the Beguine,” hopping and sometimes dashing from one part of the keyboard to another. Meanwhile, an on-screen tap-dancing Cole Porter jumps down to the stage and engages in a wild challenge tap with Connick atop the stage-wide piano cabinet. The entire number is fantastical—did Fred Astaire once do something of the sort?—and rather phenomenal. Luke Hawkins is credited as choreographer and as the filmed Cole, while the onstage Cole is danced by Aaron Burr. At least, the Playbill calls him Aaron Burr; and mind you, Cole never looked like this.
That piano, along with the altogether effective scenery, is designed by Beowulf Boritt and Alexis Distler; the excellent multimedia comes from Boritt and Caite Hevner. Ken Billington, meanwhile, bathes it all with stunning beams of filtered light. There is no credit for the film segments, but whoever directed them has done a marvelous job. The opening sequence alone, a Wellesian fantasy of Porter, starts what we might have assumed to be a plain old song-by-song concert on fanciful footing. (Porter and Welles, in fact, once tangled on what turned out to be one of Broadway’s biggest fiascos of the midcentury. But that’s a discussion for another time.)
Connick, meanwhile, sings his way through the evening in familiar Sinatra style, stopping along the way to dazzle us at the keyboard. The excellence of his arrangements—conducted by Andrew Fisher—is accentuated by the top-notch soloists in the singer’s entourage. Standing out, although so casually identified that we cannot be too sure, are Mark Braud on trumpet, Jerry Weldon on sax, Geoff Burke on clarinet, Arthur Latin on drums, and Neal Caine on bass. Not to mention that ol’ New Orleans boy himself, scruffily unshaven, at the Steinway. And yes, he does at one point strip down to his undershirt, occasioning some hoots from his salivating fans.
We do, alas, have one complaint to offer. The evening—at least from the tenth row on the aisle—is amplified beyond endurance. It almost seems like the promoters of this nationwide tour devised a sound system capable of use in the largest venues on the route, some of which might well be more than twice the size of the Nederlander. Coming to Broadway for a high-profile visit, don’t you think they might have had someone sit in the house at a music rehearsal and listen to how it sounds? Apparently not. (No sound designer is credited, or discredited.)
Here we have a dynamite 25-person band that, it goes without saying, can easily fill the 1,200-seat Nederlander. But the music doesn’t seem to emanate from the stage. Even when Connick is soloing, do we hear the sound of the keys striking the hammers striking the piano strings? Nope. The sound comes from those blasted, blasting speakers on the side of the stage, so loud that it all sounds almost tinny. But that doesn’t take away from the effectiveness of this evening with the seriously talented Harry Connick and his celebration of Cole Porter.
Harry Connick Jr.—A Celebration of Cole Porter opened December 12, 2019, at the Nederlander Theatre and runs through December 29. Tickets and information: harryconnickjr.com
