`I have had several hundred reviews of this show by now,” says Hershey Felder, as his poodle toddles around at his feet. “They tend to fall into one of two categories: People either enjoy themselves. Or they just don’t get what I am trying to do.”
Felder is a lucky fellow, and also a very earnest and pleasant young man with a certain comfort zone that comes from repetition and creative survival. He has managed to find a show with palpable popular appeal that happens to take only himself to perform. Ergo, it doesn’t cost too much to do and he has been able to produce it himself–with some help from friends.
Then again, he has a particular talent. Not only can this young Canadian-born concert pianist act and sing like George Gershwin, but he also is able to play “Rhapsody in Blue.” Live and in full.
Tickets to “George Gershwin Alone” buys you Felder–alone.
Felder has made a living doing this show for more than five years–in New York, London, Boston, Connecticut and, finally, in Chicago at the Royal George Theatre, beginning Monday.
Born and raised in Montreal, Felder has forged an usual career combining concert piano, composition and traditional acting in New York and beyond with the promotion and propagation of Yiddish music. “George Gershwin Alone” is intended to be the first of three shows about composers performed and played by Felder–he already has donned a blond wig for a three-character show about Chopin (which has played in Boston) and he’s working on one about Beethoven.
The narrative device in the Gershwin vehicle–which is not unlike the one employed in Frank Gorshin’s “Say Goodnight Gracie”–is that Gershwin has died and is looking back on his life, with Felder as his spokesman and his musical alter ego.
“There haven’t really been any other shows involving both an acting performance and a piano concert,” Felder says over lunch.
I mention “Two Pianos, Four Hands,” a Richard Greenblatt play that uses two pianists.
“Ah, but they were playing pianists like themselves,” Felder says. “I am playing a very different and distinct character.”
Indeed. Even though Gershwin himself has remained a relatively shadowy figure in the popular consciousness, there’s no disputing that the mere mention of his tunes–“Embraceable You,” “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”–create strong emotional responses from those who believe that great melodies are an endangered species.
Even if peers such as Cole Porter affected a certain show-biz stridency, Gershwin remains unsullied and able to straddle the worlds of opera, classical composition and the unassailable pop standard.
Felder’s show is a performance authorized by the keepers of the Gershwin flame–the surviving members of his family and their lawyers.
“They had never let anyone do anything before with the compositions,” Felder says. “But I was able to persuade them to give me full access … and I pay them royalties on every note.”
Authorized productions, of course, can sometimes be sanitized by an estate that watches every word. Felder insists that was not the case here. “At no point,” he says, “did they tell me what I should say or sing … and my director, Joel Zwick, kept me honest.”
That said, Felder admits that this is an affectionate tribute (it concludes with a Gershwin singalong with the audience), not a biographical tell-all. Felder says he doesn’t find personal gossip interesting.
Felder pretty much lives on the road these days. He prefers self-produced sit-downs to single-week engagements booked by someone else. Chicago has been in his sights for months. It’s now home.
“I hope to be here,” he says, “for as long as people are coming to the show.”
Selling `Spamalot’
Tickets to the Broadway in Chicago engagement of “Spamalot” over the Christmas holidays are selling very heavily. “All performances have side-section seats available,” said a spokesman for the show Monday. “But there are very few seats left.”
Seats are on sale through Jan. 16, but insiders predict a likely one-week extension of the show (which might represent a belated chance to actually get some decent seats). The show will have to move to New York directly thereafter–assuming its Broadway dates hold. And don’t wait for the reviews. As usual in pre-Broadway tryouts, critics won’t be let in until relatively late in the run.
Ergo, if you want to see this show without paying inflated prices through ticket agencies–now is the time to make plans.
News bites
– The Chicago Theatre Co. is in talks with the DuSable Museum of African-American History to make the South Side troupe a resident theater company at the museum.
– The Black Ensemble Theatre continues to negotiate for new space near the intersection of Clark Street and Montrose Avenue.
– The Gospel musical, “Sing Hallelujah,” will try to make a go of it at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, 777 N. Green St., beginning Saturday. The show is an import from Cincinnati, where it was a big hit, which the Chicago Center needs.
