If
you want to transfer a hit movie to Broadway, they’re your songwriting team. Hairspray was a huge hit for them. Catch Me If You Can maybe not so much,
but it wasn’t a total Lestat level
disaster—and now they have Willy Wonka chugging
right along in London. Years from now, they could very well be considered part
of the Songbook canon, so NJPAC brought them in when they happened to have a
free evening. Marc Shaiman sings and accompanies guest performers, while Scott Wittman provides the reminiscences in this season’s final installment of American Songbook at NJPAC, which
premieres this Wednesday on NJTV.
Knowing
how to construct a show, they kick off their set with “Good Morning Baltimore,”
the rousing opener to Hairspray, featuring
vocalist Annie Golden, who recorded their original demos for the musical stage
transfer. Appropriately enough, Shaiman then performs two of his Oscar
nominated songs (penned without Wittman). Frankly, both “A Wink and a Smile”
from Sleepless in Seattle and “Blame
Canada” from the South Park movie are
considerable superior to all of this year’s nominated songs, except the poignantly
on-the-nose “I’m Not Gonna Miss You” from Glen Campbell I’ll Be Me. For reasons that hardly need belaboring, Shaiman had
to abridge his South Park anthem for
PBS, updating the lyrics with Justin Bieber and Rob Ford references in the
process.
To
their credit, Shaiman & Wittman do a good deal of master-classing and
mentoring, which is how they found the young but poised Alex Stone and Micailah
Lockhart, who both show remarkable range on their selections from the aforementioned
Catch Me if You Can and the Broadway
themed television show Smash, which
apparently started out all well and good, but got progressively less fun and
rewarding as it went along. “Goodbye,” from their Tony nominated but underperforming
Broadway show particularly lends itself to dramatic interpretations, suggesting
it deserves a songbook life outside the book musical.
Frankly,
the same is true of the Marilyn Monroe-inspired “Second Hand White Baby Grand,”
also written for Smash, featuring
Golden again. However, the highlight of the set has to be Marilyn Maye’s old
school cabaret rendition of “Butter Outta Cream,” a quirky novelty-esque number
from Catch Me. She totally takes
charge of the songwriting partners, but they love it, even though she is obviously
winging it.
There
is more talking during Wittman & Shaiman’s set than in prior NJPAC Songbook
concerts, but their anecdotes and needling are all part of the act. It is also
a timely reminder: sometimes the best nominated song wins the Oscar (“The Theme
from Shaft” in 1971), but more often than not, it doesn’t (like “Blame Canada”
losing to Phil Collins’ Tarzan tune).
Some of Wittman & Shaiman’s selected songs are far more likely to become
time-tested standards than others, but they fit together into a rather
entertaining program, nicely varying the tone and tempo. Recommended for
Broadway and movie music fans, the Wittman and Shaiman concerts concludes the
current season of American Songbook at
NJPAC this Wednesday (2/25) on NJTV, with a later broadcast scheduled for
April 18th on WNET Thirteen.
