A lot of my creative heroes aren't making new stuff anymore; that's just a function of age and time, and hey, it's an opportunity for me to explore different artists and see what else might inspire me. That said, there's still part of me that wishes for one more Joni Mitchell album, one more Leonard Bernstein piece, one more Stephen Sondheim musical.
So it was with no small amount of excitement that I sat down at the Marjorie Deane Little Theater near Lincoln Center yesterday to see a new revue by David Shire and Richard Maltby, Jr. called ABOUT TIME. I've written before about how their previous collection, 1990's Closer Than Ever, was a formative moment in my creative life – and a huge inspiration for Songs for a New World. All these years later, I am honored and somewhat amazed that they consider me their colleague.
These fellas have written in pretty much every style in every theatrical vocabulary over the past seventy years, but the three revues for which they're best known (including their first, Starting Here, Starting Now, from 1977) are founded on their faith in the cabaret song, a milieu that is much harder to pull off than it looks, and which these two have mastered and transcended for decades. The classic cabaret song, of which there are four or five in About Time, stands alone; any context is delivered in the text of the song itself, so the audience plunges in without any setup, just their own trust in the performer. And when a cabaret song works, it is a series of discoveries, both for the character and the audience. Richard and David's work in particular relies on a very tricky balance – while the actor has to be able to deliver Richard's lyric with utter clarity and guide the audience through the storytelling, David is expert at filling the music with life and complexity and color. Their songs never feel like two writers in competition. It feels more accurate to say they're dancing together.
Of course if a cabaret song is designed to stand alone, it's a devilish challenge to gather a bunch of them into an evening that still feels cohesive, that isn't repetitive, that ebbs and flows and still builds towards a strong ending. To pull this off, Richard and David surround the cabaret gems with comedy songs, duos, trios, quartets, instrumental features, some hoary gags, dances, a hint of a storyline. The Maltby and Shire revues are deliberately modest in scale – not only aren't they designed for big theaters, they really wouldn't translate to a venue that didn't allow for an intimate connection between the performers and the audience – but that modesty is deceptive; that these boys have created three full-length evenings like these with such confidence and élan is an immense achievement.
Richard and David are both 88 years old, and About Time is not the brash, thundering work of young people out to change the world. It's a gentle show, reflective if not resigned, sometimes quite sad and other times wonderfully joyous. The cast is full of gorgeous voices, able to navigate David's rangy melodies and unexpected harmonies, but they are also clear and crisp actors who take exquisite care with Richard's lyrics and fill every song with specificity and empathy. It's a very rare pleasure to go to the theater and hear six singers breathing together, making vibrant, soaring music with an elegant trio of two pianos and bass.
That's the word I've been looking for, "elegant." There's a grace and an elegance to About Time that filled me with such a sense of gratitude – for these songs, for these shows, for witty and erudite and kind and brilliant people who inspire me to be a better person, a better artist, a better member of my community. At the end of the show, I got to hug Richard and David, and I told them both something I so rarely get to say: I am so happy I got to hear more.
