Cabaret Review by Myra Chanin . . . .
- “OLD FRIENDS” is back by popular demand on February 27th. A return engagement of these Cabaret Darlings.
I am overwhelmed with the endless talent displayed by the always more or less disheveled Austin Pendleton. The man’s a dynamo. I try to see every show he’s in because his artistry is outstanding. He’s so into whatever role he’s playing that even when he’s dozing through most of the second act, as in Tracy Lett’s The Committee, you can’t take your eyes off of him. He steals every scene he’s in and always ends up owning the stage. He’s spent most of his life as a character actor, and has appeared in over 250 moves, won a Tony for directing Liz Taylor in The Little Foxes and, after December 17, 2023, he will be playing a 107-year-old dying man in The Night of Iguana by Tennessee Williams at the Signature Theatre.
Austin knew he wanted to be an actor at the age of eight but he also became a director, playwright, teacher, and a person who really knows how to hold on to his pals. Among his oldest friends are Richard Maltby Jr. and Gretchen Cryer. They met in 1959 when Auston and Richard were students at Yale, the year Richard (libretto and lyrics) and David Shire (music) created Cyrano, their first and very ambitious musical which was performed by the Yale Dramatic Society with Auston Pendleton enumerated on the playbill’s “with” list. It didn’t do well because of Yale’s dearth of pulchritude. Yale did not admit female undergraduates then—and as for the local wannabees, the pickings were lean.
Their next musical, Grand Tour, was less highfalutin. At those auditions, a monologue recited by a young woman doing secretarial work to support her husband through Yale Divinity School had Maltby and Shire both roaring with laughter from the get-go. She was the 24-year-old Gretchen Cryer. She played the lead in Grand Tour and Auston Pendleton leaped from the with listing into the starring category for his definitive performance as Monroe Feeney.
They soon learned that Cryer was also a storyteller and poet and that she and Nancy Ford, a friend at DePauw University, were the feminist equivalent of Maltby/Shire. They became the first professional female composer/libretto/lyrics team in New York Theater. Cryer/Ford’s first effort was panned, but their next, a rock opera, The Last Sweet Days of Isaac (1970), won Outer Critics and Obie awards for best Off-Broadway musical and both a Drama Desk and Obie for Austin, the star, for his outstanding/distinguished performance. I remember being completely wowed by one of their later efforts when Cryer performed in her feminist masterpiece, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road after taking it on the road to Philadelphia.
Lest anyone think I haven’t given Richard Maltby, Jr. his due, here it is: he may be the most astounding of them all. He’s a brilliant lyricist, director, book and screenplay writer, producer, creative consultant, and all-round theatrical idea-man. He conceived and directed the only two musical revues ever to win a Tony for Best Musical: Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Fosse. He wrote the lyrics and directed the musical Baby. Closer than Ever came next. He also collaborated with Alain Boublil on lyrics for a revival of Miss Saigon— and that only takes him up to 1991. To see what this artistic whirling dervish has done since then, type his name into a search engine and see how strong he’s still going. All three of the above are in their mid-eighties and have the zest and vigor of considerably younger folk.
The glamorous, ageless Barbara Bleier is the newbie in this quartet. I call her ageless because not even Siri could dig up her date of birth on the information superhighway. Barbara was a musical prodigy who played Carnegie Hall at age four, and read music before she could read English, which she learned to do by the time she was six. She nourished her attraction to musical studies at the former Music and Arts high school, now LaGuardia, where she discovered singing, became the vocalist for the school jazz band and played clubs, weddings, and Bar Mitzvahs, paying her way through college and graduate school where she earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and could have opened her own office. But after singing at a benefit she returned to the arts, left her fate to the winds, and ended up in Romania.
Back in the States, about 20 years ago, she also returned to cabaret. She enrolled in Austin’s acting class to facilitate her delivery of the story songs that appealed to her. There was a witty Maltby/Shire duet—probably “There,” about a man who isn’t where he should be—that tickled her fancy. There was just one hitch. She needed a man to sing with. Didn’t Austin begin his Broadway career as Motel the Tailor in the original Fiddler on the Roof? She asked if he’d do a guest spot on her show. He immediately took umbrage: “You’re offering me one song?” he kvetched. Upping the ante to 50% of the show mollified him. They’ve been singing in harmony ever since—four or five times a year, mostly at Pangea, the noirish cabaret room in the East Village that Austin calls his artistic home which welcomes atypical performers. They’ve also played Philadelphia and Chicago, and even London where a critic declared them a “national treasure.”
Watching them perform at Pangea last week was beyond belief. I felt I was at the kind of party I dreamed about being invited to during my youth, at Cole Porter’s Waldorf Penthouse, where the cream of Manhattan sang inspired songs and exchanged ingenious quips. Of the 16 songs in Old Friends, their cabaret show, eight of the lyrics are by Shire, five are by Cryer, and the final two are by Amanda McBroom, who wrote “The Rose.” I was so moved by the cleverness or the emotion in the lyrics that my notes consisted of scribbled phrases from the songs that were not entirely readable. Thanks to the internet, I managed to locate some of the phrases in the songs that moved me. In this show, the music is merely excellent and secondary to the most extraordinary lyrics. And while the songs may be the same in future presentations of this show, they will be sung and discussed somewhat differently, since at least one of the performers, Austin, is neck-deep in improvisation and never plays the same scene or sings the same song the same way twice.
Cryer’s clarity and comfort in her song “Old Friend” from I’m Putting My Act Together and Taking it on The Road, gave me the same chills at Pangea that I felt when I first heard her sing it in Philadelphia in 1980.
We sit in a bar and talk till two ’bout life and love as old friends do
And tell each other what we’ve been through
That love is rare, life is strange, nothing lasts, people change.
But the most loving words are found in “If I Sing,” Maltby’s love song to his father, also a musician:
If I sing, you are the music. If I love, you taught me how.
Every day your heart is beating in the man that I am now.
Every time I look at those words, I just melt. In a time when very few children feel that way about either of their parents, the sincerity of Richard’s feelings is a bigger miracle of miracles than Motel the Tailor standing his ground and winning the right to marry Tzeltal from Tevye.
Spoiler Alert!! Don’t beat yourself up for having missed this show. Old Friends will return to Pangea on February 27, 2024. For reservations send an email to info@pangeanyc.com. I intend to fly in from Florida and see it again.
Old Friends – with Barbara Bleier and Austin Pendleton was performed on November 28 at Pangea (178 Second Avenue, between East 11th and 12th Streets). www.pangeanyc.com
Photos: Susan Bockenhauer
Cover Photo: Barbara Bleier, Austin Pendleton
