SAMMY CAHN: WORDS AND MUSIC
at the Halsted Theatre Centre
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Cahn’s show, nimbly staged by Paul Blake, is full of wonderful anecdotes about show business before, during, and after World War II. Though the stories are obviously shaped to suit his own self-image, he treats himself and his work as irreverently as anything else: his stories about taming temperamental composers playfully acknowledge Cahn’s own idiosyncratic personality as well. He assumes the pose of the innocent savant observer–sort of Huck Finn in Hollywood–as he recalls director Michael Curtiz physically pushing band singer Doris Day around a room to get her to loosen up for her first screen test, or Frank Sinatra showing up for a “breakfast” meeting in his bathrobe at five in the afternoon. Dropped names are part of the attraction in a show like this; at the matinee I attended, the mostly middle-aged audience nodded approvingly at mentions of Sinatra, Harry James, Jimmie Lunceford, Harry Cohn, and Ann Miller, but saved their loudest “oooh” for Mario Lanza.
Cahn isn’t shy about singing his own songs. Though he doesn’t have much of a voice, he does have a terrific way of phrasing a lyric simply, directly, and honestly. These are virtues in his writing as well; if tunes such as “Come Fly With Me,” “All the Way,” “High Hopes,” “Pocketful of Miracles,” “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is),” and “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” don’t have the rich sense of imagery the best work of Hammerstein or Hart does, they do display intelligence, narrative clarity, and a very fine sense of fitting the right words to the right musical rhythms–as well as Cahn’s unique gift for using repetition to sound simple but not simpleminded. Only the best lyricists, such as Cahn, really know how to underwrite a lyric in order to leave room for the music to do its job. Take, for example, “Three Coins in the Fountain,” with its six-word bridge (“Which one will the fountain bless?”) stated twice without variation while the melody varies just enough to drive home an idea without beating it to death.
Well, more than one corporation has used promotional gimmickry to try to save a bad product. But Different Drummer, I suspect, doesn’t really have the funds or personnel to squander on hype. From what I saw on the stage of the Edgewater Theater Center last week, director Kristin Overn and her troupe should have focused on making the material work, not on trying to sell it.
