Though it may be too family friendly to please audiences in search of more visceral perf thrills, Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin, a solo exploration of the life and catalog of the great, and possibly greatest, American songwriter is a delightful evening in the theater. For the most part.
The good elements: You can’t beat Berlin’s songs, most of which were written for the stage, and still sound best there. We get some or all of “What’ll I Do?” and “Always”—two of the finest devotional love songs ever written—as well as “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” “Blue Skies,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Say It Isn’t So,” “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” and the one Felder credits with kickstarting Berlin’s career in 1911, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” plus many, many others.
Felder, who has also done solo shows about Beethoven, Chopin, and Leonard Bernstein, is an astonishingly gifted vocalist and pianist, not merely in terms of pure technique, but in his capacity for restraint. A lot of classically trained singers insist on flexing every available muscle just to make sure the audience knows they can, but Felder lets the songs—which tended to be light, simple, crowd-pleasing pop numbers—guide his delivery, often to gorgeous and illuminating effect.
Everyone has heard “There’s No Business Like Show Business” enough times that it seems less like a song written by a human being than a showbiz Plymouth Rock. But Felder’s delivery rescues it from the familiar Mermanic bombast (no disrespect to Mermanic bombast) and makes it feel and sound brand new, and curiously moving, particularly the lines that slip to the minor just before the end of the refrain.
However, it’s worth noting (as he does on several occasions throughout the monologues that bind the tunes together) that Berlin was not a virtuoso performer by any measure—least of all his own—which presents a small conceptual dilemma. It might not register as a problem to most audience members, but Felder’s vocal skills and manual dexterity so vastly outstrip those of his subject, that it’s easy to lose the sense of Berlin as a songwriter working against his own limitations.
The short film clip of Berlin singing “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” in the 1943 film This Is the Army opened a small window into a very different kind of show, in which Berlin’s knack for indelible melodies and delightful wordplay could be contrasted with his shaky voice and self-admittedly perfunctory “composer’s piano.”
Again, this is a small aesthetic gripe, less a function of the show Felder presents than of my own interest in the reality of Berlin’s oeuvre, which dominated 20th century pop music right up to the advent of rock’n’roll, in which a performer’s limitations were inscribed on the material. Felder includes a hunk about Berlin’s disdain for Elvis Presley—“that boy with the hair and the voice and the hips”—specifically for his swingin’ rendition of “White Christmas,” and it’s clever and rings true, but you can’t help wondering what the show might have been like if it had acknowledged a few more of the complex psychological elements of that particular torch passing.
Complexity is definitely not a menu item in this show, which is obviously fine. The narrative is dominated by the very real reality of Berlin as a Russian immigrant who came to be one of the quintessential American songwriters, in both form and content. Felder hits the patriotic theme hard, which is fair enough, but there’s simply not much even the greatest performer alive could do to enliven “God Bless America,” to say nothing of more leaden paeans to the US of A like “Give Me Your Tired, Your Hungry.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Felder plays these moments with utter sincerity, insisting that we accompany him into the premise that Berlin, who was nothing if not a craftsman, felt this patriotic material to the depths of his soul. This may have been true. Still, in 2018, it’s almost impossible to conceive of unconflicted patriotism in the heart of a thinking person, or to think of “God Bless America” as a full-throated anthem rather than a well-constructed bit of wartime propaganda.
The approach of positing Berlin’s songs as pages torn from his life works much better when applied to the love songs he wrote for his late first wife (“When I Lost You”) or, more heartrendingly, his infant son, Irving, Jr. (“White Christmas”). The conception of songs as reflections of real life, much as the relationship between fiction and autobiography, is necessarily complicated, and there’s a respectable argument that a show like Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin, which is part musical revue, part biographical sketch, isn’t suited to parsing such complications.
Nevertheless, Felder trades on his own ingratiating presence onstage to compress Berlin into a bite-sized saint who just happens to have written many of the greatest, most lucrative songs of the 20th century. It’s no criticism of either man to suggest there might be more there worth considering. “I wrote for love,” he says at a crucial moment. “I wrote for my country. I wrote for you.”
Maybe.
When I heard about this show, my mind leapt directly to the passage in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, in which a character named Philip Roth (who is impersonating the “real” Philip Roth in an effort to convince Israeli Jews to return to Europe) goes off on a brilliantly dark reverie about what he considers to be Berlin’s greatest legacy as a songwriter:
“The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ—down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em. They love it. Everybody loves it. The Jews especially…
“So—Bing Crosby replaces Jesus as the beloved Son of God, and the Jews, the Jews, go around whistling about Easter! And is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. Do you see my point? I took more pride, I told them, in ‘Easter Parade’ then in the victory of the Six Day War, found more security in ‘White Christmas’ than in the Israeli nuclear reactor…”
It would be a stretch for an essentially hagiographic show like this one to delve into such wild literary mischief. And yet Roth’s conception of the Jewish identity that lurks within these beloved songs reflects a curiosity about the mystery of Berlin’s true nature that is nowhere onstage at the Seattle Rep. Instead, Felder bolsters the magnificent catalog of Berlin’s songs with an adult dose of Jewish kitsch—sentimental spotlights on empty chairs, an abundance of audience sing-alongs (the audience I saw it with certainly didn’t seem to mind), and the longest purse-lipped punchline this side of Jackie Leonard’s ghost.
None of which should be mistaken for a complaint about the show, by the way. As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, the only thing that might keep Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin from being for everyone is the degree to which it strives to be for everyone. But Felder is a deeply likable narrator and the songs he celebrates truly are universal—so much so that you might find yourself musing on the nature of universality while you’re happily spinning in their orbit.
So what if it tastes a little like chicken fat on a cracker?
Fewer and fewer modes of popular entertainment, even the biggest hits, are created with an eye towards communicating something, anything, to the whole world. That could be because the world has gotten simultaneously bigger and smaller. It could be because the idea that any one idea might have the same meaning to more than one segment of the population is an outmoded folly.
Or it could be because they don’t make ‘em like Irving Berlin anymore. It’s a pleasure to spend two hours remembering that they ever did.
