I saw a new show called Like Jazz yesterday, Dear Readers, at the Mark Taper Forum. It is a revue with music by Cy Coleman and lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. The patter delivered between the songs by actor Harry Groener was scribed by Larry Gelbart.
It certainly was not an unpleasant way to spend two hours in the theatre, but this is not great material, by any stretch. The songs are about various aspects of jazz: different styles of jazz, the instruments associated with jazz, the people--well-known and anonymous--who create jazz.
While the music is pleasant enough, I can't say it is particularly memorable. Most of the the songs are narrative story songs, which plays right into the Bergmans' penchant for literal straightaway lyrics, untouched by poetry, metaphor or wordplay. (Can you tell that I'd never be accused of being a fan of the Bergmans?)
The low point of the show was a ballad called "A Little Trav'lin Music," which offered the most banal song lyrics I've ever heard sung from a stage. Worse, it was performed by Jack Sheldon, whose skills on the trumpet are considerably superior to his vocal ability. Sheldon was also given "Don't Touch My Horn," which no doubt was intended to be a song filled with double entendre. I'm sorry, the entendre was not very double.
There was a touching ballad about the woes of anonymous piano bar pianists, called "Another Night, Another Song," pleasantly delivered by Cleavant Derricks. Patti Austin did fine with the numbers she was given, and Lillias White was a delight in her songs. She was lucky to have the rousing first act curtain number, "Those Hands." She made her entrance for this song atop an upright piano as it was rolled onstage, a visual from which only the heartless could not take pleasure.
(Seeing Miss White in this show, and recently having seen her in the film Pieces of April, makes me hungry to see more of her. I know she made a splash in The Life a few years ago, which I, unfortunately, missed. This artist deserves much greater exposure than she has had.)
And now, for my standard gripe: the amplification was deplorable. The onstage orchestra consisted of 18 pieces, 14 of which were brass. There was a microphone at each stand and the volume levels consisted of loud and louder. Mediocre as the lyrics that could be heard in the smaller numbers may have been, it was near impossible to make them out in the bigger ensemble songs. The Mark Taper Forum holds 750 seats, and I can assure you that had the brass played unamplified, they would have had no problem filling the hall with sound.
