(Cross-posted at Extra Criticum)
I thought Cole Porter was still pretty well-known among young people (well, at least young gay men), so I was disappointed to discover that my 44-year-old body was younger than all but three or four people at When It's Hot, It's Cole, a revue by members of the American Repertory Theatre up here in Boston/Cambridge. The dozens of cabaret tables were full, but it was a pretty grim crowd. Think of William Howard Taft sitting next to Margaret Dumont, and multiply the image 100 times, and you'll get the idea. I couldn't believe that almost no one under 50 wanted to escape the heat, get mildly drunk, and listen to some of the best songs ever written. (When I went to the bar for the first champagne split, I indignantly told the bartender that I'd need a second glass for my friend. Since I got another split during intermission, it turns out the bartender was a better judge of character than I give him credit for.)
Whether because of the fish-faced audience or the belief that they were slumming after doing Beckett and Chekhov during their regular seasons, the cast seemed to hurry through the songs without much range in emotion. Or maybe the feeling is that Cole Porter is camp, and that his songs should be treated like college fight songs from the 1920s, to be performed with constantly arching eyebrows and sidelong glances at the other performers.
Or maybe I just have my own preconceptions. I always thought of "Miss Otis Regrets," with its outrageously sketchy sense of melodrama, as something to be sung with tongue in cheek (see versions by Kirsty MacColl and Bette Midler), but it was done competely straight here, as if it were "Strange Fruit." Conversely, I've always thought of the prostitute's lament "Love for Sale" as too direct ("Love that's only slightly soiled/Love for sale") to be performed as jauntily -- and cluelessly -- as it was in this production. I was also annoyed that one of Porter's best songs, "Anything Goes," was sung in counterpoint with one of his weakest, "Brush Up Your Shakespeare."
Have cabaret performers just become sick of Cole Porter? And, for that matter, Stephen Sondheim, Kander & Ebb, and Lennon & McCartney? Are there any composers they they'd be excited to build a show around? And would such a show attract people who don't remember The Ed Sullivan Show?
