‘Favorites from the Silver Screen” simply does not do justice to the song and shtick on stage at Village Players Theatre, Feb. 23 and 24. How about “Just What the Doctor Ordered For the Mid-Winter Blahs?” The title is too long to print on a ticket. But it’s just what a spunky quintet served up in the third installment of VPT’s inaugural Classical Vocal Concert Series.
Let me tip my hand about one of Oak Park’s best-kept secrets: These mostly local singers, stocked with talent and peppered with wit, will send you home all sunshine and smiles, even on a snowy Saturday night. Happily there is one performance remaining (See sidebar).
The show began with a friendly announcement to turn off all cellphones, beeping devices, and pacemakers. Pacemakers! Someone must have been expecting the geriatric set. But for young or old, this sizzling two-hour show is enough to make you think you’d awakened on the Great White Way-without breaking the bank. The ensemble even comes out to meet the crowd at the end.
If a catchy collection of memorable tunes from days gone by sounds like a prescription for a snooze, think again. Long ago, lyrics from the likes of Oscar Hammerstein set a standard for Broadway wordsmithing that has yet to be topped. In fact, Hammerstein tutored Sondheim, whose works did not make it into this show. Endurance pianist George Howe, who also sang a few tunes, effortlessly kept up a constant patter of clever, schmalzy harmonies at the keyboard. Fast action and star-quality voices add up to one enchanted evening, including of course, “Some Enchanted Evening” of South Pacific fame.
At times the acting falters, compared to the brilliant singing, but this was in no way caused by the adept scripting and musical direction. Whistling, wisecracks, and prop surprises keep the pace bustling. Even “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” sometimes sung as an invitation to a staggering trek, comes across in this jazzy version more like a walk in the park.
Perhaps the cheery nature of 1950s lyrics is too sugar-coated for the age of the Internet and Iraq, but boundless optimism on stage and screen got a whole generation through its own trials and challenges. Life must have been awfully good back when people sang “Somewhere over the rainbow …” and “Raindrops keep fallin’… but nothin’s worryin’ me.” Or maybe life was good because they sang.
The cast of Jack Crowe, Elizabeth Heath Fauntleroy, Paul Geiger, and Jeanne Scherkenbach was joined by guest tenor Franco Martorana. His two dazzling solos in a more operatic vein complemented the popular style of the ensemble numbers. Martorana’s singing is robust and heartfelt, but Geiger’s rich and reverberant rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” a near-reincarnation of William Warfield, was the evening’s show-stealer.
Broadway and later film composers took their cues from classical opera, the original musical drama. Yet another trick from the classical realm was a quodlibet, or “what you would like,” in which the composer stitches together more than one familiar tune, often simultaneously. The show’s quodlibet of run-on snippets from Broadway hits was an enthralling crowd-pleaser.
The curtain, figuratively speaking, came down with “Thanks for the Memories.” But preceding that was a peppy reminder by Jerry Herman, creator of Hello, Dolly and Mame:
“When your life seems a bit lean,
Just let some shadows appear on the screen.
Whenever you are down in the dumps,
Just go to a marvelous movie and smile!”
The rousing finale and a toe-tapping, truly super “Supercalifragilistic” were energizing enough even to re-start a pacemaker.