During Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road, a revue built on Hoagy Carmichael’s songwriting career, there’s some mighty impressive singing by the seven-member cast. Fittingly enough, Kayla Jenerson does a silvery rendition of “Stardust,” perhaps Carmichael’s biggest royalty-grabber. That’s the item on his long ASCAP list that’s been labeled “the song of the century” and has reportedly logged as many as 16,000 recordings.
Not bad for a guy who dropped out of law school in 1927 and wrote his “Stardust” melody that year – with Mitchell Parish, adding the lyric a few years later in time for Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong to cut separate 1931 versions, the Brunswick label on Crosby’s version (with verse) announcing “Star Dust.”
Just before Jenerson’s turn, Sara Esty does right by “Skylark,” which this reviewer often considers the most beautiful popular ballad ever composed. It’s difficult to think of a more touching and poetic opening line than lyricist Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark, have you anything to say to me?” Imagine coming up with that sentiment of longing, or did it just soaringly skylark out of Mercer’s endlessly creative brain?
Not too long before Jenerson and Esty do themselves proud with those numbers, Markcus Blair soothingly begins a trilogy of World War II-ish tunes with “Memphis in June,” Cory Lingner follows with “Can’t Get Indiana Off My Mind,” and Dion Simmons Grier follows that with “Georgia on My Mind.” At other charmed moments, Danielle Herbert persuasively takes on “How Little We Know” and Mike Schwitter neatly protests on “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”
Note that the above selections are all lushly insistent solos. They’re interludes when Carmichael’s songs are featured in one, as the stage phrase goes. But concentrating on songs isn’t necessarily the impetus for Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road, conceived by Susan H. Schulman, Michael Lichtefeld, and Lawrence Yurman, and developed with Hoagy Bix Carmichael, directed by Schulman, choreographed by Lichtefeld, and music supervised and arranged by Yurman.
Instead, the conceiver-and-creator team have concocted what more often registers as a 90-minute diversion than a tribute to Carmichael. It more often takes the shape of a so-so jukebox musical. Within minutes of the opening sequence, longtime Hoagy fanciers who’ve fetched up to hear about, as well as hear, Carmichael may start thinking this isn’t the revue for them.
Schulman and collaborators start with a medley incorporating, among three others, “Stardust” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” The latter was written with Mercer for a never-made Betty Hutton starrer and was, rather, introduced by Crosby and Jane Wyman in the 1951 Here Comes the Groom, going on to win that year’s Best Song Oscar.
Does this Carmichael outing care about any of that? The short answer is: No. Mercer’s playful “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” verses are dropped, beginning with the rhyme-y “Sue wants a barbeque/Sam wants to boil a ham, Grace votes for bouillabaisse stew.”
Yes, this is a Carmichael not a Mercer homage; all the same ticket buyers present to hear full accounts of the composer’s hits might prefer to hear them intact.
Evidently, however, Schulman et al have decided they only need “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” to let patrons know they’re in for a cool, cool, cool evening of entertainment and that this tuneful round-up – a sequel to the York’s Irving Berlin’s Cheek to Cheek revue last season – will be just that and only that.
They’ve crafted a five-part piece taking place in club rooms representing the 1950s through the 1980s. Thus: Stardust Roadhouse, Somewhere in Indiana; Club Old Man Harlem, NYC; USO Canteen; Club Heart and Soul, Hollywood; The Stardust Roadhouse, Years Later. (Jim Morgan keeps the design relatively easy with cabaret tables and a five-foot-or-so bar shifted around for each locale. Costumer Alex Allison follows suite, suits and gowns.)
Sure enough then, there’s an array of chanting and terping (some deft tapping), with Furman’s upstage six-person band tasty, tangy and Hoagy-esque throughout. One truly inspired number pops up along the often-repetitive route. It’s the two-handed piano fave of years gone by, “Heart and Soul” (Frank Loesser’s lyric). Lichtefeld jazzes it to heart-and-soul-wracking speed and then has a cast member bring in a toy piano so that sizzling Herbert can pick out the much-adored melody on the truncated keyboard.
Granted, much of this is entertaining, but why never a spoken word about Carmichael and how he came to be who he came to be? When busy conceiving, did this group dismiss such an approach as embarrassingly obvious? Did they wave aside the notion that the audience for Carmichael, who is not foremost in music-lovers’ minds these hip-hop days, might want to hear as much about their idol as they could?
Did it not occur to them that there might be people in the audience who don’t realize he regularly worked with lyricists? If they don’t thumb to the last program page, they could leave thinking he always did it entirely on his own under that buttermilk sky of his. They might have wanted to learn any number of pert and pertinent Carmichael facts. To begin with, he was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1899 as Hoagland Howard Carmichael.
Lucky for us, he was, and Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road goes far attesting to his greatness, though not far enough.
Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust Road opened December 1, 2022, at the Theatre at St. Jeans and runs through December 31. Tickets and information: yorktheatre.org
