Sidney Myer
Mondays at Pangea

In music, the term “double entendre” generally refers to an item in a lyric that has a second meaning, and usually it alludes to something sexual or risque. In the Great American Songbook, the masters of the concept were Andy Razaf, in songs like “My Handy Man,” and Cole Porter, in many tunes including “But In the Morning, No.”

One of the great strengths of singer Sidney Myer, who has just launched a month of Mondays at Pangea, is how he can inject a string of multiple meanings into a song that had been previously devoid of them. His most stunning example of this is his interpretation of “I’m a Bad, Bad Man” from “Annie Get Your Gun.”  

Mr. Myer doesn’t change a word, but with his delivery, his stance, his body language, his facial expressions, and the specific inflection he gives each word, he imbues the song with a whole other set of meanings than the ones Irving Berlin intended in 1946. Frank Butler, soon to be Annie Oakley’s romantic opposite, boasts of his prowess as a ladies’ man, but Mr. Myer, an impish glint in his eye, communicates that no woman who ever lived has reason to fear him.  

Mr. Myer also interjects a spoken monologue in the middle of this Western-themed show tune, a paean to the cowboy culture of old school Hollywood, that incorporates an homage to the King of the Cowboys, Roy Rogers. Staying consistent, not a word in this speech is funny as written, but humor derives from Mr. Myer’s delivery — the timing, and the nuances, especially in lines like, “Dale Evans, affectionately known as the Queen of the West. Many have followed in her footsteps.”  

Sidney Myer is unique in that he’s both incredibly subtle and over-the-top outrageous at the same time. He is a unique entertainer who has time-warped from the tradition of the larger-than-life clowns and personalities — the likes of Eddie Cantor, Ed Wynn, Fannie Brice, and Bert Williams — who dominated Broadway and showbiz before the modern musical theater made them obsolete. As did those legendary figures, he projects a character that stays consistent from show to show and song to song, and each number is like a chapter in an ongoing story.   

Mr. Myer makes full use of a distinct visual style, with expressive eyes and a hound-dog face that suggests a commedia dell’arte harlequin, as if he were simultaneously Pierrot and Pierrette; one also can’t help thinking of Anthony Newley wearing whiteface in “Stop the World (I Want to Get Off).” He’s also assisted by a first-rate trio: Tracy Stark, piano and musical director; Tom Hubband, bass; and Ray Marchica, drums.

“Bad, Bad Man” is Mr. Myer’s signature work of interjected irony, and is the lead off number on his DVD, “Sidney Myer Live at the Laurie Beechman Theatre.” Throughout both that 2018 performance and the current Pangea show, he also finds very funny numbers — such as “Nothing Ventured,” “Nothing For You” and Allan Sherman’s “Good Advice” — and delivers them in a dry, restrained fashion, letting the words speak for themselves.  

He does so with Joshua Cohen’s “A New Year’s Eve Love Song,” a long and inventive patter song that — spoiler alert — spoken like a true New Yorker, delineates the necessity of avoiding Times Square on December 31. “I’ll go to Poland or Thailand or even Long Island,” he tells us, but not to you-know-where on you-know-when. Another “song of the season,” “Santa Baby” is an exceptional example of Mr. Myer altering vintage lyrics; he removes all the baubles and bangles from Eartha Kitt’s iconic Christmas list and replaces them with samples of kosher cuisine. 

Mr. Myer constantly proves and reproves that the line between sincerity and sarcasm is wafer-thin. He takes some old songs (“It’s So Nice To Have A Man Around The House”) and camps them up just through the force of his personality, and he delivers others at face value; this has got to be the first time in a hundred years or so a crowd was so moved by “(Back Home Again in) Indiana” — played completely straight (perhaps not the best adjective in this context). Other songs like “You Meet the Nicest People in Your Dreams,” which most of us know from Fats Waller and a WFUV radio host who used it as his theme song for 35 years, Rich Conaty, have him taking a silly, whimsical song and making it even funnier.

The show is interspersed with almost epic comedy set-pieces like “Mary Cohen,” a play on maricón, Spanish slang for homosexual. Yet many of the most successful numbers are the heartbreakers, like “Dance With Me” and his closer, Peggy Lee’s “Angels on Your Pillow.” Sidney Myer can make you laugh and he can make you cry, and he does it all with the combination of a wicked sense of humor and miles and miles of heart.