Andrea Marcovicci in So in Love – The Love Songs of Cole Porter

Grandel Theatre Cabaret Series

When Andrea Marcovicci played the Grandel Theatre in last year’s cabaret series, she presented a program of songs associated with the late Gertrude Lawrence. This year she’s giving us an evening of the songs of Cole Porter, and the result is a kind of Act II to last year’s Act I. Porter was, after all, America’s version of Noel Coward. Both he and Coward were erudite, sophisticated, and highly literate songwriters. They were world travelers, bon vivants and the toast of café society. They were great friends and admirers of both each other and Gertrude Lawrence. And when they wrote love songs, they invariably hinted at the sadness that’s always part of the risk of opening yourself up to love.

So in Love – The Love Songs of Cole Porter is an evening crammed full of songs – nearly three dozen in the space of a little over two hours. From early obscurities like “Wait for the Moon” from 1924 to popular standards like “You Do Something to Me” and “Anything Goes”, Marcovicci has assembled a uniformly entertaining evening of Porter’s work. The mood ranges from the sparkling wit of “Let’s Not Talk About Love” (introduced by Eve Arden in Let’s Face It) to the unabashed sentimentality of “As On Through the Seasons We Sail” (the big Act II wedding number for Don Ameche and Hildegarde Neff from Silk Stockings) to the knowing sadness of “Down in the Depths” (from Red, Hot and Blue, where it was belted out by Porter’s favorite singer, Ethel Merman). The highlight of the evening is a ten-song medley that chronicles a love affair from initial rapture (“I Get a Kick Out of You” from Anything Goes) through parting and resentment (“Goodbye Little Dream” from the London production of O Mistress Mine and “How’s Your Romance” from Gay Divorce) to wisdom and regret (the searing “Weren’t We Fools” – a song written for but rarely sung by Fanny Brice, possibly because it described her relationship with gambler Nicky Arnstein all too well).

Amid the songs, Marcovicci sprinkles anecdotes and tidbits about Porter’s life and times, and wraps the whole business up in her trademark charisma. As usual she plays off the audience with great abandon, singing to and flirting with those close enough to be easily reached – an approach made that much easier now that an anonymous donor has given the Grandel a wireless microphone system. As I noted last year, while Marcovicci is not a technically strong singer she is a very strong actress, which makes concerns of pure vocal technique largely irrelevant. What Marcovicci gives you isn’t a song recital so much as an evening of dramatic scenes that just happen to be musical. She is, to a certain extent, sui generis; I find it hard to imagine anyone else doing what she does as well as she does it.

That goes for her pianist Shelly Markham as well. The art of the accompanist is considerably more difficult than it might at first appear, and Markham is clearly one of its more skilled practitioners. He’s always in synch with Marcovicci, even when she takes some dramatic liberties with the meter of a song. As a team they’re well nigh perfect.

In fact “well nigh perfect” pretty well sums up the entire evening. Andrea Marcovicci in So in Love – The Love Songs of Cole Porter runs through this Sunday [November 16, 2003] at the Grandel Theatre as the penultimate offering of the 2003 Cabaret Series. Call 314-533-8825 for ticket information.

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