Review: Songbook Sundays Dives Into Cole Porter's Oeuvre at Dizzy's

More than an hour of material from the Great American Songbook by the great Cole Porter?  Without question, “it’s all right with me,” to borrow the title line of one of his evergreens.  The every-other-month program Songbook Sundays, each dedicated to a major composer or lyricist of standards, ended its calendar year on December 8 with another winner of a show.  Turning to someone who fashioned both words and melodies gives one twice as much to be impressed by writing talent. Titled Happen to Like Cole Porter, I expected to hear the referenced “I Happen to Like New York” from the 1930 musical The New Yorkers, but it wasn’t included. That’s OK; I happened to like all the choices.  It was a fine mix of examples of two sides of Porter that are as different as night and day: balladry such as “Night and Day” and clever swirls of winking humor and rhymes, as in the finale “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love).”  

The unpretentious series, held at Dizzy’s at Jazz at Lincoln Center, has been following a kind of formula and structure in the several presentations I’ve attended there. Keeping things simple with no elaborate introduction, the shows begin with a performer who is not introduced by name.  In this case, it was Broadway star Karen Ziemba, ready to bring zing to start us off in a positive mood with the appropriately titled “From This Moment On.”  The moment after a set’s opening song is the customary cue for sunny, down-to-earth host/curator/author Deborah Grace Winer.  She enters and greets the audience, identifies the person who just sang, and talks a bit about the songwriter du jour, with more bits of biography and observations by her sprinkled in later, between numbers. There’s a small jazz band on stage, with veteran musicians and perhaps one rising star rising to the occasion of playing with those who have frequent flyer miles in the jazz skies.  This instrumental ensemble gets one showcase number on its own. Sometimes a band member who also sings is on hand and will handle a lyric. That was the happy situation this time, with bassist Jay Leonhart, charming with “Just One of Those Things.” Otherwise, the singing gets evenly divided (three vocalists, each usually getting three solos) and then ending with a group number.  Another tradition is to present entertaining folks with contrasting styles, sensibilities, and energies: one definitely coming with a jazz approach (who might be young and fairly new on the scene); another more from the musical theatre world to offer more “straightforward” renditions favoring acting/characterization; and the third may lean in either direction or somewhere inbetween. So, we might have the dazzle of scat-singing and liberties taken with melody lines with a jazzbird and emphasis on lyric interpretation with the next soloist. 

Margo Siebert was second at bat, having some fun with the playful “Give Him the Ooh-La-La,” the least famous item on the show, which otherwise consisted of much more well-known tunes. Her acting skills had a better opportunity to shine on the bittersweet “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” which was emotionally involving.  The jazz flavorings came courtesy of rich-voiced Milton Suggs who approximated a few lines of lyrics, inserting or substituting a word here and there as Frank Sinatra sometimes did (singing “I do decline” instead of “decline” in “I Concentrate on You”). However, his ballad style was smooth and elegant, making “Night and Day” an attention-grabber.  One reason for that was the inclusion of the introductory verse.  Porter wrote some marvelous verses, so I was especially glad that some of them were heard.  An especially delightful one is the one to “It’s De-Lovely” which acknowledges that the character raising her voice in song is vexed by the verse as it’s being sung and wants to jump to the main body of the song (“So to spare you all the pain, I’ll skip the darn thing and sing the refrain”). Margo Siebert did well with verse and refrain, but was spared the pain of having to memorize and perform the avalanche of the many extra choruses that were written for this audience-pleaser.  

In addition to the aforementioned Jay Leonhart, the top-drawer musicians were Ted Rosenthal (music director/ piano with some especially engaging passages with fingers dancing across the keys), Jerome Jennings (drums), and Peter Anderson (sweet-toned saxophone). 

Deborah Grace Winer’s commentary emphasized the special Porter writing style and lifestyle: we know him as the sophisticated, wealthy, witty, world-traveling wit who had his own way with words.  She does, too, coining the adjective “Cole Porter-y.” The program made me appreciate and reflect on how delicious, flexible, and ubiquitous his material still is. When it comes to cabaret shows, concerts, jazz sets, and recordings featuring enduring material by the great composers and lyricists of the Great American Songbook, there’s a great big chance that something by Cole Porter will be included.  Although 2024 marked 60 years since he passed away, his standards are still standard fare. A song-filled movie biography of the composer-lyricist, De-Lovely, came out in 2004, starring Kevin Kline as the writer.  And Porter’s songs keep showing up on theatre stages, keeping Porter’s gems in the air and on audiences’ minds.  There were revivals of Anything Goes on Broadway and in London (the latter mounting was filmed and showed up here as a PBS broadcast) and Broadway saw two returns of Kiss Me, Kate and the recent mounting in England was filmed, too, screened here in New York this fall. The Great White Way boasted seven other productions that incorporated one or more Cole classics, plus a stage version of High Society (the musical film with his songs) added ten other old Porter pieces and Harry Connick, Jr. took over the Nederlander Theatre for half of December in 2019 to present a cluster of the classics, following the release of the material as a recording. Other such sets have continued to be recorded, including one pairing cabaret favorites KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler and then there was Tony Bennett’s last album – featuring duets with Lady Gaga — called Love for Sale, which was for sale in 2021 in stores and online.  Shoppers could also buy cast albums of the aforementioned Broadway revivals and the 2027 presentation of The New Yorkers by Encores!, bringing back yet another Porter score and there was also a recording of the one-woman stage musical Love, Linda that put the spotlight on Cole’s wife (with a generous sampling of material by guess-who).

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Songbook Sundays will return on February 2 with melodies by Jule Styne, whose music is back on Broadway currently with the revival of Gypsy. Tickets are available here.

You can visit Jazz at Lincoln Center's website for more upcoming shows at Dizzy's and their other venues.

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