FRIDAY, September 10, 1999

                                                   CABARET REVIEW

Early in Mary Cleere Haran’s dazzling new cabaret show, “Crazy Rhythm: Manhattan in the 20’s,” at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, she assures us that the distant decade of jazz, flappers and speak-easies was not a dream. Moments later, as she and her invaluable accompanist and partner, Richard Rodney Bennett, sail into “Crazy Rhythm,” a frantically upbeat Charleston by Joseph Meyer, Roger Wolfe Kahn and Irving Caesar, from the 1928 show “Here’s How,” the essence of what we call the Roaring 20’s is revealed to have been a beat.
            Buoyant and high-stepping, it was a rhythm propelled by a hysterical urge to throw off the chains of the past, live for the moment and if possible become airborne.
           As she has done in earlier cabaret shows, especially last year’s brilliant and moving evocation of the flaming talent that was George Gershwin, Ms. Haran has created an impressionistic mosaic of an era by blending songs, witty quotations and business lore with funny self-explanatory asides. Among the personalities she sketches are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and the brassy speakeasy hostess Texas Guinan.

        Leading “Crazy Rhythm’s” list of musical revelations are its numbers that reveal the friskier, racier side of the young Irving Berlin. “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil,” a comic gem from the 1922 edition of his “Music Box Revue,” is a hilarious pitch for the superior life style of the netherworld, a place awash with jazz and where no “old reformers in heaven” are making you “go to bed at 11.” It is matched in lighthearted subversion by “The Monkey Doodle-Doo,” from the 1925 Marx Brother’s show “The Cocoanuts,” in which Berlin gleefully alludes to the Scopes trial and the fad for injecting monkey glands to restore flagging virility. The song caps a smart monologue in which Ms. Haran suggests how deeply the writings of Freud and Darwin influenced the era’s erotic climate.
        Anyone who thinks that the denunciation of contemporary pop by finger-pointing moralists is relatively recent phenomenon should appreciate Berlin’s “They’re Blaming the Charleston,” an irresistible upbeat retort to 1920’s cultural alarmists. 
        Grounding this merriment are classic ballads that Ms. Haran delivers in her signature style, stripping away the sentimentality to uncover the lyrics’ private, heartfelt truths with an unadorned simplicity. “It Had to Be You,” a number most singers breeze through without much thought is slowed down and delivered as a pensive reflection on romantic destiny. Berlin’s “Harlem on My Mind,” inflected with a period nasality, is a tour de force of restrained belting.
        “Crazy Rhythm,” exemplifies cabaret at its most exalted. Much more than feel-good nostalgia, this classic show is a historical conjuring act.
 

                                                              Copyright 1998 Mary Cleere Haran. All rights reserved.