|
REVISIONS;
An Echo of Merman:
Nothing to Hit but the Heights
April 19, 2001
By Margo Jefferson
The New York Times
When I watch a performer who recreates
-- pays tribute to, works in the styles of -- the past, I
don't want to float into a ''Where are the snows of yesteryear?''
reverie. Nor do I want to think, ''Aren't you the smart one?,''
poised on the fence between benign mockery and benign reverence.
Noncommittal irony and bland nostalgia will be the death of
us.
But is there such a thing as passionate
nostalgia? Yes, when it takes the form of active, intricate
longing. It should make demands on us. Think of great impersonators
and drag performers; of musicians, actors or dancers who resist
any new approach however interesting and valuable. They offer
truculent denunciations of the new, but some perform the old
with such penetrating knowledge that it becomes noble. They
give it the grandeur of classicism.
When we love something, we bestow meaning
and beauty on it. And if we're artists, our job is to make
the audience love what we love. Maybe the best way to test
performers who live for and on a particular past is to put
them in front of audiences who have no allegiance to that
past. Especially in small spaces. Call it cabaret for the
uncoverted.
Which brings us to Ethel Merman, and
to an improbably terrific young performer named Klea Blackhurst,
who devotes an entire show to her. It isn't that I don't care
about Merman, it's just that, like so many, I haven't given
her much thought for quite a while. I grew up loving ''Annie
Get Your Gun''; I've always enjoyed hearing Merman do the
songs Berlin, Gershwin and Porter wrote for her. I trembled
before her when I saw that fabulous (and fabulist) Jule Styne-Stephen
Sondheim musical ''Gypsy.'' But she doesn't get reinvented
and worshiped over and over. She doesn't have the cachet of
a suavely decadent androgyne like Dietrich or an emotional
martyr and suicide like Garland. Her looks and style feel
much more bound to a time (the 1930's through the mid-1960's)
and a place (Broadway). She wasn't made for the movies, because
she didn't know (or care) how to play down anything. She never
had a physical glamour that enhanced or transcended each role.
She wasn't sexy, she wasn't mysterious and she wasn't vulnerable.
Here's what she was and remains: invincible
and completely individual, like some machine made according
to no textbook rules by an inventor everyone thought was a
bit cracked. Steel-wire voice, brazen, guilt-free aggression.
She could go on singing and belting and belting and singing,
kick out consonants, land on vowels, swallow the stage, the
audience and the theater, spit out what she didn't want and
stride off without losing a note.
Merman was not seductive in any way.
Flirtation is a great trick of impersonators, and Merman doesn't
flirt. Reverence doesn't work either, for her style was pragmatic,
not shaped by acute emotional need or cult-of-self ambitions.
Parody is what she usually gets from mimics, but it's rarely
successful. She's harder to do than people think.
I still remember a ''Twilight Zone''
kind of takeoff on ''Saturday Night Live'' years ago; once
you entered ''The Merman Zone'' you had to start belting out
semideranged imitations of her signature tunes. It didn't
really work. It was kind of fun to see smart young comics
trying to get this creature from another age. But she was
beyond them. Or they didn't try hard enough. Parody doesn't
work unless you're engaged enough to get inside what you're
playing with.
Klea Blackhurst is engaged, trained and
talented enough to give us wonderful intimations of Merman
the performer without being crushed by her. And she is smart
enough and a good enough writer to turn the story of Merman's
star power into a kind of folk tale. Who is Ms. Blackhurst
in the tale, which she calls ''Everything the Traffic Will
Allow: The Songs and Sass of Ethel Merman?'' The narrator
of course, but a heroine, too, on a quest, the daughter of
a woman who did a U.S.O. tour of ''Annie Get Your Gun'' and
never forgot it; a girl who grew up in Salt Lake City and
went around the house with her sisters singing like Ethel
Merman; a child so cloistered in the Morman Merman zone that,
she says, ''I never knew that all girls didn't sound like
that.''
The show had too short a run last month
at Danny's Skylight Room on 46th Street. Ms. Blackhurst has
a very good musical-theater voice. She can do those steel-wire
notes, but she prefers suggesting them. Her voice has a more
flexible timbre than Merman's, and her phrasing is more varied
and more artful. (She does a wicked imitation of Merman's
approximation of scat singing in Cole Porter's ''Blow, Gabriel
Blow.'')
Young singers need more varied phrasing
these days, having grown up with the blues, country and gospel
derivatives of a rock-ruled popular music. But I've noticed
that too many of them throw in little pseudo-rock or soul
phrasings that don't work. (Either they don't suit the material
or they don't suit the singers.) Ms. Blackhurst has good taste,
and she never does that. Her arrangements draw more on jazz
than Merman's did (she was backed by the very good, very cohesive
Pocket Change), and that means she wasn't unduly tempted to
copy.
Let's recall some of the songs Merman
introduced in her shows: ''I Got Rhythm,'' ''Everything's
Coming Up Roses'' and, of course, ''There's No Business Like
Show Business.'' And let's acknowledge that you'd better be
full of noncloying charm and sass yourself to do them while
paying tribute to her. That's what made this show so much
fun.
Ms. Blackhurst reminded us that Merman
did very well when she quieted down and sang ballads like
''I Got Lost in His Arms'' and ''Just a Moment Ago.'' Nice
to be reminded, but nicer still to watch and listen as this
young Merman devotee sang them. She has curly red hair, freckles
and great comic timing. We were watching a real talent, a
performer we knew could delight us without ever singing a
note that had once been commandeered by Ethel Merman. We were
not in thrall to the past: we were watching an interpretation
of it that turned into something new. If a performer can't
do that, what's the point of the whole thing?
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
|
