It sounds ridiculous at first but when Billy Philadelphia and his equally talented wife, Meg Mackay, explain to the audience at one of those cozy niches at the New Conservatory Theatre at 25 Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco that they thought of calling their tribute to composer to Harold Arlen "Harold Who?" it began to make sense. It made sense when they ran through a list of songs that Arlen wrote with about 30 collaborating lyricists and you think, "Oh, he wrote THAT? Is it humanly possible for one man to write all these great songs?"
Well, I don't know where the human departs from the divine in this case but Arlen did write over 400 songs -- more than any popular composer. All the same, he's not the household name that he ought to be. That's not the only disparate, paradoxical thing in Arlen's life.
How could a man who once concluded "So many sorrows, so little time," about his private life, also created songs like Get Happy? "Unlike Gershwin or Cole Porter," someone once observed, "you don’t say 'Oh, that's a Harold Arlen song.'" One reason for that is that Arlen tended to make the singers who sang his songs famous -- so famous that they owned them. That's why singers always clamored for a new Harold Arlen song. Can anyone but Lena Horne call Stormy Weather her own? Is anyone but Judy Garland associated with The Man That Got Away or Over the Rainbow, for that matter? Or Sinatra singing what he called "the greatest saloon song ever written" -- One For My Baby (And One More For the Road).
And furthermore, how could a Jewish kid from Buffalo, New York, named Chaim Arleck, know so much about the blues? I dunno. Ask Cab Calloway. After all, Arlen and Ted Koehler wrote Minnie the Moocher's Wedding Day for him.
I remember getting caught up in Arlen's work by hearing Rosemary Clooney's tribute album to him on the Concord Jazz label, recorded in S.F. about twenty years ago or so. Yeah, or so. Just this handful of songs might make you want to get up and go out and see Billy Philadelphia and Meg Mackay's terrific show, From Blues to Ballads: The Songs of Harold Arlen at the New Conservatory Theatre, now playing through September 17.
Billy and Meg are the perfect hosts in this intimate setting -- and they both provide the right amount of biographical sketches about the composer.
"The biggest challenge, of course, was selecting the songs from the vast repertory," Billy said after the show.
My favorites are the ballads -- the sadder, the better. And Arlen could write ballads. Perhaps it was the tragic quality to his life. His wife, Anya, once a Breck Girl, if you recall the shampoo ads, suffered from mental illness and Arlen was forced to have her institutionalized. He did not do this until Anya had become quite dangerous. Their Beverly Hills house burned to the ground suspiciously. She tried to poison him, and he still resisted her incarceration. Perhaps this is why he worked so hard -- he did try to stay away from her in later years, sneaking away to the golf course at 6:30 in the morning to meet his show biz pals. Including Groucho and Harpo Marx, George Burns, Ira Gershwin, and Danny Kaye.
“Music doesn't argue, discuss, or quarrel ” Arlen said. “It just breathes the air of freedom ”
Billy Philadelphia -- who just got a regular gig at Joe DiMaggio's Italian Chophouse in North Beach -- is a keyboard wizard and a good singer who understand what a song is all about. His Hoagy Carmichael show is evidence of his respect and instinct for a good song. Meg has gotten quite marvelous over the years. Arlen would have liked her, I think. When she takes a song, she owns it. Some of the highlights of the show include her rendition of Come Rain or Come Shine. Right As Rain and her feisty Legalize My Name. You can really hear Judy Garland in her version of The Man That Got Away. It's spooky.
Meg later confessed that she'd been virtually channeling Judy Garland. "When I was a little girl I wanted to be Judy Garland," confesses Meg. "There are times when I can't get her voice out of my head."
Then there's the famous A Sleepin' Bee (with lyrics by Truman Capote), which was written for a show called House of Flowers. John Lahr wrote in the The New Yorker, "The scores proved more memorable than the shows; in the case of House of Flowers which ran for only a hundred and thirty-seven performances, Alec Wilder wrote, the score “was simply too elegant, too subtle, too far beyond the deteriorating taste for an expense-account clientèle."
What an elegant team Philadelphia and McKay are. Their duets are delightful. Their taste in tunes impeccable. This is great stuff. By the time they close the show with Hit The Road To Dreamland, we are already thinking that they "could have done that song, they could have done this song" and so on. They know, they know. Just hit the road before the 17th and go see Billy Philadelphia and Meg McKay in From Ballads to Blues: The Songs of Harold Arlen at the New Conservatory Theatre, 25 Van Ness Avenue at Market Street, the box office number is (415) 861-8972 or check the website: www.nctcsf.org
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Bruce Bellingham is the Arts & Entertainment Editor of Northside and the author of Bellingham by the Bay, a collection of stories about San Francisco and some of her memorable characters.
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