Florida Cabaret Review by Myra Chanin . . . .
For the last month, I’ve been thinking about British playwright/ composer/ lyricist Leslie Bricusse, who reminds me of Oscar Hammerstein III. Hammerstein supplied lyrics to Otto Harbach, Vincent Youmans, Rudolf Friml, and Sigmond Romberg; even George Gershwin and George Bizet – Carmen Jones. Then came eight musicals with melody master Jerome Kern, including their masterpiece, Showboat, before Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers launched The Golden Age of Broadway in 1943 with Oklahoma, with songs that fit the characters and augmented the narrative. By his death at age 65 Hammerstein was credited with supplying words to 850 melodies. Can you imagine his output if he’d been alive and still working—like Leslie Bricusse—until the age of 90?
Hammerstein dropped out of Columbia Law School to pursue a theatrical career. Bricusse graduated from Cambridge, where he developed a sophisticated wit, reading Modern and Medieval Languages. He also found time to initiate Cambridge’s Musical Comedy Club and become President of their Footlights Society which, FYI, was where John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and Eric Idle of Monty Python met. Bricusse also authored/directed/performed in two musical comedies which caught the eye of Beatrice Lillie, then considered “the funniest woman in the world,” who verified her interest in him in 1954 by choosing him as her leading man.
Bricusse created or was involved in the creation of more than forty musical shows and films over the years, working first with Anthony Newley, then Henry Mancini, John Williams, Jule Styne, Quincy Jones, Andre Previn, Frank Wildhorn, and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky whose Nutcracker Suite Bricusse turned into a song score and with John Barr and Jerry Goldsmith, on James Bond and Star Wars themes.
Delray Beach Playhouse’s Best of Broadway Series recently featured South Florida cabaret, concert, and jazz performer John Lariviere—a nominee for Broadway World’s Top Miami Area Vocalist of the Decade—who transported Leslie Bricusse’s versatility to sizzling life. Lariviere has a very smooth voice and an emotional style that makes a listener appreciate the words and the feelings in Bricusse’s songs. He also added interesting facts about Bricusse’s life.
Add his superb support by Phil Hinton, a British pianist, arranger, orchestrator, and conductor, who’d been a former onetime drinking pal of Newley! Oh, to be slugging down pints of Guinness in any pub near any piano where Hinton and Newley might have been doing the same.
What’s a British ivory tickler doing on our strip of the beach? Hinton’s an adjunct professor, teaching commercial piano techniques in the music faculty at the-constantly-going-up-in-the-national-ratings Florida Atlantic University, and heavily in demand all over the world as a commercial arranger and orchestrator with 200 major hit albums for artists like Shirley Bassey, Howard Keel, Engelbert Humperdinck, Vince Hill, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, and Paul McCartney to his credit; he also worked at the Kravis Center with Michael Feinstein.
Hinton’s accompaniment was so exhilarating that I found myself frequently wondering whether he had pre-arranged the charts he played or had simply, as needed, improvised the shimmering diminished chords and curious subtle discords that gave me goosebumps. Hinton had not been an accidental hire. Lariviere had called him personally to ask him to accompany his show. I was delighted to hear him play for the first, but hopefully not the last, time.
Lariviere opened with a Bricusse/Newley contribution “On A Wonderful Day Like Today,” from The Roar of Greasepaint, a perfect Dick Van Dyke introduction to an hour of uplifting entertainment. Next came “Pure Imagination,” probably the most exquisite song ever written from its sentiments to its seductive melody. I find both the words and the melody impossible to cast out of my mind. I hear it constantly. It’s from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which Bricusse also wrote with Newley, and is just gorgeous in every sense, or word, or note, of the song. You may not know what it means, but you feel what it means.
“Candyman,” which was made gloriously famous by Sammy Davis Jr, along with “Feelin’ Good,” and “Gonna Build a Mountain” were a magical trio. Each song sounded written to order for Sammy’s rich, full baritone.
Both Lariviere and Bricusse appreciate every kind of musical style. “My Kind of Girl,” which sounded grown in the Motown Rhythm and Blues farm, to my surprise turned out to be completely, both words and music, written by Bricusse. Other songs in the Bricusse catalog that Lariviere sang were “What Kind Of A Fool Am I?,” “Once In A Lifetime,” “Who Can I Turn To?,” “The Joker,” “If I Ruled The World,” “When I Look In Your Eyes,” “Talk To The Animals,” “Le Jazz Hot,” “This is the Moment,” and “Crazy World.”
I was very touched by Bricusse’s tender lyric to a Henry Mancini melody, which paid homage to Bricusse’s one and only wife:
If you’re feeling fancy-free, come wander through the world with me
And any place we chance to be will be a rendezvous
We’ll travel down the years collecting precious memories
Selecting souvenirs and living life the way we please
And every day that you are mine will be a lovely day
As long as love still wears a smile I know that we’ll be two for the road
And that’s a long, long while.
In contrast, Bricusse’s original songwriting partner, Newleym had three wives. The middle one, Joan Collins, divorced him after seven years when she learned about his adultery with “about 72 women,” including actress Barbra Streisand when he was supposed to be making a movie about his life . . . or so Siri said. I just wondered how long it had taken him to make the biographical film or line up the adulteries, but Siri obviously felt she had revealed enough.
The only negative I had about the show was that so many of the lyrics packed such an emotional wallop that even before the program ends, your emotions feel depleted. I felt that way at an Alice Neel Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which I left after viewing half of her displayed paintings because I had stopped responding to Neel’s images and had to return to finish appreciating her work.
John Lariviere: Pure Imagination played March 20 at Delray Beach Playhouse (950 NW 9th Street, Delray Beach, FLORIDA). https://delraybeachplayhouse.com
