By Susie Rosenbluth, TheJewishVoiceAndOpinion.com, in Englewood, New Jersey
Walking out of Going Bacharach, the musical revue now playing in Manhattan, any members of the audience who are not die-hard devotees of the eminent American-Jewish songwriter, Burt Bachrach, and his long-time lyricist, Hal David (also Jewish), would realize more could be learned about them from Wikipedia than from this production.
The problem with the show, presented as a cabaret well-suited to the small, 145-seat Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, has nothing to do with the performers. Vocalists Hilary Kole, John Pagano, and especially Ta-Tynisa Wilson are superb, and the musical director, 29-year-old Adrian Galante, a breathtakingly good pianist, accompanist, and clarinetist, responsible for the orchestrations and arrangements, is as much a cast member as any of the featured singers. The band—Patrick Firth on keyboard, Nate Francis on Bass, and Jakubu Griffin on drums—is terrific.
What the show lacks might be best described as context. Every successful performance—play, musical, concert, or cabaret—tells a story, takes the audience from one place to another, a journey of discovery. Going Bacharach improves greatly when a cast member reveals something about the composer’s style, i.e. his striking syncopated rhythmic patterns (“mixed meter”), or motivation behind a song, such as the anti-war “Windows of the Word,” written in 1967, in the middle of the Vietnam War. Going Bacharach intimates that “Windows of the World” was inspired by the composer’s fear for his son—but, although the show says nothing about it, from 1965-1981, Bacharach was married to his second wife, the actress Angie Dickinson, and had only a daughter. It was the lyricist, Hal David, who had two young sons at the time, one of them almost eligible for the draft.
In 2005, Bacharach wrote “Who Are These People?” with Tonio K. In his 2013 autobiography, Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music, he says it was for those affected by what happened on September 11, 2001, and “all the young men and women who were getting killed in a useless war in Iraq.”
Going Bacharach offers virtually none of the interesting details of the composer’s life, spending more time on the factoid that his and David’s “Don’t Make Me Over,” was born after singer Dionne Warwick may have snapped the line at the song’s creators in the middle of their critique of one of her recording sessions. How much more poignant might the show have been with something about Bacharach’s flight from Judaism (“I was Jewish, but I didn’t want anybody to know about it,” he wrote in his autobiography); the suicide of his and Dickinson’s premature daughter, Lea Nikki, at the age of 40 in 2007; or anything about his four marriages, three surviving children, or what he considered the tragedy of his breakup with Mr. David.
The performers’ paths that led them to this production reveal some nice details about how they got where they are: Mr. Galante, as a musical prodigy growing up in Perth, Australia, first heard Bacharach in concert at the age of 14; Ms. Kole, who studied classical composition, provides insights on some details of Bacharach’s musical style; and Ms. Wilson, who admits having only one Bacharach song in her repertoire when she auditioned for this show, declares he will forever more be one of her go-to composers.
Mr. Pagano, who discovered Bacharach’s music while still a child living at home, toured with the composer as a singer for more than 20 years. According to the website for Mr. Pagano’s own concert-show, Back to Bacharach & John Pagano, the singer included stories about the composer and their experiences, thus helping audiences better appreciate Bacharach’s music and why Mr. Pagano feels so strongly connected to it. But in the current production of Going Bacharach, all Mr. Pagano discloses about their personal relationship is that before he sang the ballad, “A House Is Not a Home,” the composer would whisper, “Make me cry.”
All nice, and the songs everyone remembers—“Close to You,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” “Alfie,” and even “What’s New Pussycat”—can provoke the nostalgic pull of “where were you when you first heard it.” But for the purposes of a show, it would have been wonderful to learn where Mr. Bacharach was when he wrote them.
For more information about Going Bacharach, which will play at 10 West 64th Street in New York until February 22, call 212-912-2618.
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Susan L. Rosenbluth is the editor and publisher of The Jewish Voice and Opinion in Englewood, New Jersey. Her forthcoming novel, Blurred Vision, will be launched this year by Red Adept Publishing