Emily Bergl Bends, But Doesn’t Break, the Great American Songbook

One of the great strengths of the songs in what we, by common consensus, refer to as the Great American Songbook is that they bend but they don’t break. That’s more true than ever, even as a classic song like Rodgers and Hart’s “Manhattan” passes its centennial. Over the decades, numerous interpreters have made a point to try and bend these songs as far as they can possibly go without reaching the breaking point. Emily Bergl, who appeared last Monday in a one-woman cabaret show at Joe’s Pub titled “Off Night” — the title refers to her ongoing, eight-performance-a-week role in the Broadway hit “Just in Time” — was probably the last big star to emerge out of the old Oak Room at the Hotel Algonquin. Ms. Bergl has since become known for impressive roles in TV — “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” was a particular fave — and Broadway in “Good Night, Oscar” and the ongoing “Just in Time.” This is her first new solo cabaret show in much too long. In that Algonquin debut, titled “Kidding on the Square,” she found her own way to push the Songbook to the breaking point. We’ve seen musicians and singers who play the songs faster or slower, play deliberately wrong notes, alter the harmonies, and obfuscate or completely trash the lyric, wreak havoc with the time signature, and, to paraphrase that great music critic, Richard III, transform delightful measures into dreadful marches. But Ms. Bergl, in her own way, was, and is, far more radical.What she did in 2011 — which places her in the rarified category of a master musical subversive, such as Spike Jones, Weird Al Yankovic, or Richard Cheese — is to mash up, as the kids say, classic songbook standards with contemporary pop numbers, often of a vapid and trendy sort. “Off Night” opened with “Manhattan” and then more Richard Rodgers, “People Will Say We’re In Love,” before she shifted gears abruptly to “Please, Please, Please” by the 27-year-old pop princess Sabrina Carpenter: “And please, pleasе, please / Don’t bring me to tеars when I just did my makeup so nice.” Perhaps there’s a clue in the line “I beg you, don’t embarrass me mother trucker” — and yes, she sang the actual epithet. Is Ms. Bergl trying to embarrass us? More likely, she’s trying to jar us out of the comfort zone that we automatically slide into whenever we go out to a cabaret show featuring the music of Richard Rodgers.There are moments when she’s making a more obvious and agreeable point, as when she delivers a poignant, funny, and heartbreaking rendition of Tom Waits “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” and then familiar songs by Billy Joel, “You May Be Right,” which she delivers with something like the lilt of an Irish jig, and “Always a Woman,” which becomes a highly personal, almost autobiographical manifesto. In the case of recognized living greats like Mr. Waits and Mr. Joel, the message might be that their songs are no less worthy of reinterpretation than, say, those by Cy Coleman. The latter’s first notable number, “Why Try to Change Me Now?,” was introduced by Frank Sinatra as a directly and explicitly specific statement about who he was at that point in his journey, and was revamped by Ms. Bergl following that same mandate. But then you have to wonder, is she elevating the better relatively recent songs to the point where they can be counted amongst the classics, or is she taking rarified songbook standards and dragging them down to the level of low-rent rap doggerel like “Kill Bill?” One thing that’s consistent, whether she’s doing Dave Frishberg (“Peel Me a Grape”) or Blondie (“Heart of Glass”), is that she sings them both with equal commitment — even if the mere act of singing much of this material in a cabaret context is in itself a provocative statement. Emily Bergl at Joe’s Pub. Andy KropaThroughout, she consistently combined total irreverence with total sincerity, as if there’s no distinction between the two, for instance, when she segued from the vintage torch song, “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” to the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man,” using Snow White’s archetypal “I want” song, “Someday My Prince Will Come,” for a transition. She also made time for “Something Cool,” which, even more than June Christy who introduced it in a masterpiece 1954 album of that title, she rendered in a Henry Higgins parlando, in the same general groove as Mr. Waits’s “Christmas Card,” turning it into a devastating, semi-musical monologue.I’ve seen shows, such as that by the fine Washington D.C.-based jazz singer Sharón Clark, that juxtapose songbook standards with newer songs that have a comparable message. Ms. Bergl, however, frequently interspersed songs from different generations with deliberately inapposite meanings. She intoned “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” with the seriousness of a pop anthem, and then steered it back into waltz time for a reprise of “When Someday My Prince Will Come.” You’re never quite sure if she’s being sincere or ironic. Perhaps that’s the point.Likewise, Ms. Bergl was being arch and playful when she addressed her musical director and accompanist, Jonathan Mastro, who also contributed new lyrics to an update of “Manhattan” and a worthwhile new song, “The Only True Companion (Is a Book),” as “Johnny Piano.” The only moment in the show when we could reasonably be certain that she was being completely on the level, without a coded underside of additional meaning, is when she closed the show with a winning and straightforward rendition of the 1952 hit “You Belong to Me,” dedicated to her young daughter. For the encore she turned to Lieber and Stoller’s semi-spoken art song, “Is That All There Is,” which she realized was arch enough as it is and didn’t require any additional levels of irony.Ultimately, Emily Bergl has great faith in the traditional songbook, demonstrating that the great songs are resilient enough to withstand anything she can throw at them. Bend them though she might, still they stand tall and unbroken.

Emily Bergl Bends, But Doesn’t Break, the Great American Songbook

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