The best audience for Broadway Heroes will recognize all the tunes in this warm cabaret show, unless they stopped listening to the music—spanning roughly 85 years—just as Andrew Lloyd Webber was enthroned. Assembling such a show would mean determining what to exclude, and this show’s pivotal jam-packed medleys suggest that the process must have been onerous.
David Rogers, a young triple-threat performer (accompanied by an able David Warrack on piano and occasional vocal accompaniment), who boasts an impressive résumé with Broadway north, has a significant tenor/light-baritone range that was improved, on opening night, by the eventual failure of a sound system that, until then, hissed and crackled to distraction. The ubiquitous head mike allows for mobility, but in such an intimate show as this, a smoothie belter—and Rogers has the chops—should use a charming old hand mike (for effect) or none at all. I preferred his unfiltered voice.
Medleys are acceptable if there’s a list to deliver, and if the audience is content with cropped snapshots of familiar tunes, but too many fine songs were merely called to attention, only to be buried beneath the next snippet. Rogers also sang a few numbers that were left unfinished, the equivalent to listening to the radio and having a favourite song fade too soon. Heck, I grew up on most of this music, and the best of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley have a lyricism and a wit that warrant completion.
Broadway tunes are generally part of a firm story line, sometimes with their own complete tale, and context and character combined best deliver the goods. Mr. Rogers is more an interpreter than a character actor-singer, though I’d prefer to hear him deliver “My Boy Bill,” from Carousel, one of the chewiest musicals ever, in its intended setting. Such a composition makes “Music of the Night,” from Phantom of the Opera, seem comparatively insubstantial and merely sleek. But then, comparing the two is like comparing John Raitt with Michael Bublé.
David Rogers loves what he thinks Broadway is, and loves to sing. A rich voice can work wonders, even with crimped medleys. If his closing number for each half—”The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha, and that aforesaid Phantom show-stopper—are his favourites (he’s actually played the Phantom), it’s because this is the show music that speaks most directly to his own generation and its sensibilities. That said, our hero has great and reverent fun with the Al Jolson and Danny Kaye legacies, and with that corniest of old Broadway delights, Oklahoma!
They hummed along, they laughed, they applauded. Broadway aficionados on PEI have rarely had it so swell.
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