There’s Even More to Oscar Levant Than Seen in the Excellent ‘Good Night, Oscar’

The playwright S.N. Behrman once famously described Oscar Levant as “a character who, if he did not exist, could not be imagined.” Perhaps the aspect of Levant that was most difficult to imagine was the sheer diversity of his talents. He was the highest-paid classical musician of his day, in an era when symphonic conductors and virtuosos were superstars, and also a composer of that music. Completely unrelated to that, Levant was a popular songwriter, with a number of Great American Songbook standards and several full-length musical comedies to his credit; he also had a side career playing in dance bands as well as studio orchestras. Quite apart from those other careers, he was a featured actor and comedian in movies, radio, and television, and a perennial talk show guest and sometimes host who could be depended upon to spontaneously create memorable barbs laced with caustic wit.It’s that last aspect of Levant’s legacy that is the focus of playwright Doug Wright’s excellent “Good Night, Oscar,” featuring a Tony-winning performance by Sean Hayes as Levant and an equally riveting one by Emily Berg, who, as June Levant, gives a whole new meaning to the term “long-suffering wife.” As Elysa Gardner pointed out in these pages, “Good Night, Oscar” is eminently worth catching before it closes on August 27. Still, no one-act “dramedy” can do justice to all the aspects of the remarkable Oscar Levant (1906-72). We experience Levant’s humor and hear some of his most quoted lines; like Dorothy Parker only a generation older, Levant would endlessly spin incredibly compact, razor-sharp one-liners that are infinitely more prescient than anything ever uttered via so-called social media these days. They were laced with cynicism and often even cruelty, the latter more often than not directed inwardly.Apart from Levant the TV pundit and unstoppable wisecracker and Levant the concert headliner — who probably did more than anyone, as Michael Feinstein observes, to promote the music of his friend George Gershwin as a part of the symphonic repertoire — perhaps the least celebrated aspect of his career is his songs. As Mr. Feinstein points out in an interview with The New York Sun, Levant was a first-rate composer, but was only rarely given the chance to work with the upper echelon of lyricists. He wrote only one film score with the celebrated Dorothy Fields, for instance, but those songs — written for Ginger Rogers in the 1935 “In Person” — included one of his best-known, “Don’t Mention Love to Me.” Another lyricist, Yip Harburg, of “Wizard of Oz” and “Finian’s Rainbow” fame, learned the hard way that Levant’s crippling insecurities and other psychological peccadillos invariably sabotaged his collaborations. “Yip told me that it was very hard to finish a song with Oscar,” Mr. Feinstein says, “because they’d work on something and then when Yip would go back to finish it the next day, Oscar would say, ‘Oh, no, I threw it away. It was no good!’” Jack Lawrence, best known for “Tenderly” and “Beyond the Sea,” described working with Levant as “unpleasant.”Yet at least one of the dozens of songs Levant wrote and published, the 1934 “Blame it On My Youth,” became a major standard in 1956 when both Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole (as well as Mabel Mercer and Chris Connor) recorded it within a few months of each other. Levant also flourished during the early talking pictures boom of 1929, though he denigrated himself by saying that anyone who could even play a chord was summoned to Hollywood to write songs for the new medium of movie musicals. He wrote excellent songs for “Tanned Legs,” “Street Girl,” and other films, as well as for the Broadway shows “Ripples” and “Sweet and Low.” In 1932, Levant composed some of his best numbers for a British musical called “Out of the Bottle,” though he later said that the only reason he got the job was because a music publisher, Max Dreyfuss, was trying to keep him away from a certain showgirl. Levant married her anyway; they were together for less than a year, but the songs, especially “Put That Down in Writing” and “We’ve Got the Moon and Sixpence,” still endure. As many different things as Levant could do, the second half of his 65 years found his prospects diminishing due to changing times and his rapidly increasing neuroses. He stopped writing songs by 1940 or so, and ceased giving live concerts after 1958 — becoming subsumed by a frightful mix of superstitions, stage fright, and general obsessive-compulsive behavior. The age of movie musicals, like “An American in Paris” and “The Band Wagon,” was also over; all that was left for Levant was for him to “carve himself up for public consumption,” as the Robert Sarnoff character states in “Good Night, Oscar.” As Mr. Feinstein says, “He was what he was, warts and all. He saw the humor of it, and that’s what made it bearable. That was the saving grace for him and for the people around him. In the midst of the worst pain that he ever had, he still could find humor.” Note: On August 19 at 1 p.m. EDT, KSDS radio presents “The Oscar Levant Songbook,” with special guest Michael Feinstein and host Will Friedwald. You can listen live or stream afterward here.

There’s Even More to Oscar Levant Than Seen in the Excellent ‘Good Night, Oscar’

There’s Even More to Oscar Levant Than Seen in the Excellent ‘Good Night, Oscar’

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