Ingenious Production Injects New Life Into the Great Hoagy Carmichael

‘Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust Road’ Through December 31 at the York Theatre Company, Theater at St. Jean’sHoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust Road” has just opened for a one-month run, and to say that it’s a total surprise — in a good way — is an understatement.Consider: Hoagy Carmichael (1899-1981) is one of the great songwriters of all time, and his music — which he started to write about 100 years ago — is still very much with us. The perennial “Stardust” is not just a song but the living icon of an entire era of musical culture, and “Skylark,” which received a boost thanks to all those dreadful TV singing competition shows, is heard everywhere. Thus, you might assume that the idea of a Broadway-style revue built around his songs is a foregone conclusion. It isn’t. That’s because Carmichael, alone among the major composers of what we euphemistically refer to as The Great American Songbook, was not interested in matters theatrical. He was the most jazz-oriented practitioner on Tin Pan Alley, and unlike such colleagues as George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and his frequent partner Johnny Mercer — who were also closely connected to the world of hot, improvised dance music — Carmichael had no “eyes” (as Lester Young would say) for Broadway. What’s more, Carmichael’s songs are a completely different dynamic: Much as he loved the uptown swing of Harlem and the pizazz of the primarily Jewish words-and-music men in the Brill Building, his music had none of that East Coast urban energy. You can’t imagine Ethel Merman belting out “Rockin’ Chair” or Bert Lahr doing his shtick to the tune of “Lazy Bones.” Speaking of which, I dreaded the notion of contemporary theatrical singers, with voices attuned to Lloyd-Webber and Stephen Schwartz, trying to capture the mellow mood of “Moon Country” or “Baltimore Oriole.” Carmichael’s songs are miniature stories and bucolic pictures in themselves; it’s difficult to imagine how one could take 20 or so and tell a larger story with them.The minds behind “Stardust Road” — Susan Schulman (director), Michael Lichtefeld (choreographer), and Lawrence Yurman (musical director and piano) — have come up with an ingenious workaround: to let the notion of dance serve as a bridge: not only between Carmichael’s era and ours, but between the kind of jazzy voices we expect to be singing Carmichael’s songs and the singers who are available to a contemporary theatrical company like the York. “Stardust Road,” essentially, is like totally Twyla. It’s much more about dancing than singing, and has the most in common with Tharpe constructions such as “Come Fly Away” in that it never stops moving throughout its fast-paced, 90-minute, one-act running time. Unlike “Movin’ Out,” there’s not even a semblance of a plot, and unlike the York’s “Cheek to Cheek: Irving Berlin in Hollywood” from last year, there’s no narration, or spoken lines of any kind. The singing is wonderful, but secondary. The primary thing is dance, dance, dance; move, move, move.The proceedings are laid out in four scenes, each of which corresponds to a different phase in Carmichael’s career: a college roadhouse in Indiana, a jazz club in Harlem, the Stage Door Canteen during World War II, and a chi-chi “nite spot” at the height of Hollywood. Yet the songs are not sequenced chronologically. The 40 or so tunes are sometimes heard individually, and sometimes in medleys. Most of the time, the overall organization works, though for those of us who grew up with Sarah Vaughan doing “The Nearness of You,” wonderfully sung here by Kayla Jenerson, it seems like a waste to merge it with a distinctly lesser offering like “Blue Orchids.” There’s a swell trio, during the wartime sequence, of three homesick GIs reading letters from their folks via “Memphis in June” (Markcus Blair), “Can’t Get Indiana Off My Mind” (Cory Lingner), and “Georgia on My Mind” (Dion Simmons Grier). I wish that they had included “New Orleans” in this segment, but that might have been, as they say, too much of a muchness.The Hollywood sequence includes a terrific collage of “How Little We Know” with “Ivy,” the latter mostly performed as an instrumental dance number in the style of old school vaudeville adagio stars like Tony DeMarco. That’s one of many Easter Eggs that pops up, such as a visual reference to the Andrews Sisters and then an auditory recreation of the Boswell Sisters harmonizing on “Charlie Two-Step.” “Lyin’ To Myself” was immortalized by Carmichael’s great friend and hero Louis Armstrong; here it’s heard courtesy Markcus Blair’s high baritone, supported by Pops-ian obligato from trumpeter Les Rogers. “Heart and Soul” time warps several generations forward to the 1961 doo-wop treatment by Jan & Dean, and also incorporates the song’s heritage as a two-finger keyboard exercise via a toy piano. “Swing Me A Sing Song (And Let Me Dance)” — who doesn’t love the Chick Webb / Ella Fitzgerald record? — works in Gene Krupa’s iconic tom-tom solo from Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” The entire enterprise is effectively framed by “Stardust,” which is heard in the first scene essentially as originally written, like something closer to a hot stomp, by a male singer (MIke Schwitter). It’s then reprised in the final scene in the manner that it became most famous, as a ballad, sung now by a gorgeous woman in a glamorous gown (Sara Esty). “Stardust” becomes intertwined with “Skylark,” rendered in comparable fashion by the equally talented Ms. Jenerson; I’d never thought of “Skylark” as a torch song — it’s customarily a song of hopefulness rather than a dirge of loss — but the duo medley, which touches on the template of the iconic Judy Garland-Barbra Streisand teamup, works.The inclusion of three songs from “I Walk With Music” underscores Carmichael’s at-best-tentative relationship with the theater. This was the Hoagmeister’s only full-length Broadway score, and though the show (produced by the Shuberts with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) ran only six weeks, three of the songs — “The Rhumba Jumps,” “Ooh, What You Said,” and the almost too beautiful title song “I Walk With Music” — became widely popular. Not only does “Stardust Road” include all three, I’ll wager that they sound better here, by Cory Lingner and Danielle Herbert, than they did in 1940, though there’s no cast album for comparison. I’m even happier to hear, for the first time, “Don’t Care For the Heck Of It,” written by Hoagy and Johnny for an unproduced 1950 movie musical; as far as I can tell, it’s receiving its long-awaited premiere here, 72 years after the fact. Much of “Stardust Road” seems like a 1930s Vitaphone short or a World War II-era Soundies jukebox film come to vivid life, and, for that reason, the absence of plot, dialog, or narration is a major plus, making this the kind of offering that you’d like to experience more than once. With music this great and a cast this talented, all you have to do is play them a swing song and let them dance.

Ingenious Production Injects New Life Into the Great Hoagy Carmichael

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