Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin Wins Over Boston Audience

Photo Credit: Eighty Eight Entertainment.

Montreal’s Hershey Felder has built an unusual and successful career performing the lives of composers as an actor and musician in his own creations. Previous subjects George Gershwin, Frederick Chopin, Leonard Bernstein, and Franz Liszt were all classical composers, although Gershwin and Bernstein crossed over into musicals. Irving Berlin, who composed more than a thousand songs – many of them standards, but not all published – was celebrated as a tunesmith. Nonetheless, in addition to his single numbers, he wrote scores and lyrics for movies and Broadway. Several of his movies, such as The Jazz Singer, had a significant role in the development of film musicals. Of his seventeen Broadway shows, the seventy year old Annie Get Your Gun is still relevant and widely played.

Felder’s somewhat schmaltzy conceit for his new show was to set it on the Christmas Eve of Irving Berlin’s hundred and first year. The old man is represented by a wheelchair; the younger is played by Felder who narrates Berlin’s life largely through his music. The set, designed by Felder and his director Trevor Hay, is simple and symbolic. A grand piano with a brightly decorated Christmas tree placed beside it, two chairs, and upstage windows showing gently falling snow in the first scene constitute most of the décor, which of course brings to mind Berlin’s Christmas anthem. Carolers are heard outside. Felder, treating the audience as the carolers, invites them to sing “White Christmas” along with him, which they did enthusiastically at the performance I attended. The charming Felder uses this audience-pleasing gimmick several times with old standards like “Always.”

The story of Berlin’s rags to riches life – its hardships, losses, triumphs, and finally his twenty-five year oblivion after he lost his public to new music genres – is unfortunately foreshortened. The narration serves the music, but doesn’t serve Berlin. We get bare facts: Berlin, a Russian Jew, was driven out of the country of his birth together with his family as a young child, grew up in New York’s Lower East Side, dropped out of school at an early age after his father’s death, became a singing waiter, taught himself to write music and had his first hit at twenty-three with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” He married at twenty-four only to lose his wife to typhoid fever five months later. He served in the army gladly during World War I where he authored Yip Yip Yaphank, a military musical revue, remembered for “This Is the Army Mr. Jones.” As his song “God Bless America” tells us, Berlin was in love with the U.S. For Berlin being American meant assimilating. And assimilation meant in part adopting the holidays most practiced in the U.S. as can be heard in “Easter Parade” as well as “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” In 1925, he fell for Ellin Mackay, the daughter of one of America’s richest men. Her anti-Semitic father sent Ellin off to Europe and Berlin penned “What’ll I do?” and “Always.” Eventually, they married and lived together until her death six decades later. Their otherwise happy wedded life was marred by the death of their second child in infancy.

Felder is a performer of great technique and style, particularly as a pianist. His singing voice is very adaptable. One of the show’s funniest moments is his imitation of Ethel Merman belting “There’s No Business like Show Business.” Occasionally, Felder steps out of the narrator role to interact with the unseen Ellin. The use of projections to show Ellin and Irving throughout their marriage is a nice touch as is the film clip of Fred Astaire dancing and singing to Berlin’s music. At the play’s end, an aged Felder sits in the wheelchair and sings “Always” as the lights fade.

Although I would have preferred a more in-depth characterization of Berlin, the show is very entertaining and I look forward to seeing Mr. Felder in his next portrayal.

Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin

Lyrics and music by Irving Berlin.

Book by Hershey Felder.

Directed by Trevor Hay

Set, Felder and Hay. Lights, Richard Norwood. Projections, Andrew Wilder. Sound, Erik Carstensen.

Production by Eighty Eight Entertainment, Eva Price, Samantha F. Voxakis,

and Karen Racanelli

Presented by ArtsEmerson

At: Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston, through Aug. 2