Music Everywhere, feet are pattin’/Puttin’ tempo in old Manhattan/Everybody is out high hattin’/Spreadin ’rhythm around. (Koehler/McHugh) The mercurial Steve Ross is celebrating his 30th year of performance at The Oak Room Supper Club by sharing a magnum of sparkling entertainment.
What appears an enormously ambitious list of songs, slides one into the next as if the authors had intended progressions. Thus, Kander & Ebb’s Married, is followed by We’re Gonna Be Alright (Sondheim/Rodgers), The Folks Who Live on the Hill (Hammerstein/Kern), and My Heart Is So Full of You (Loesser). “Romance is a family of emotions.” Ross covers just about every permutation with a selection of material ranging from familiar standards (the audience sways to his sweet renditions) to more obscure numbers which add color and definition. Jazz age and music hall treatments keep the evening bubbling.
If the dear little sables ever told their husbands fables/Tell me, where would you get your coat? (Porter) and My car will meet her/And her mother comes too!/It’s a two-seater/Still her mother comes too! (Titheradge/ Novello) are unlikely to be melodies you find yourself humming in the shower. These and wry favorites from Flanders and Swann and Noel Coward, whose green velvet smoking jacket Ross wears proudly,* “I sleep in it; it doesn’t show the wrinkles,” are the kind of character songs at which he excels. Every word is enunciated, every arch sentiment projected. “Noel Coward was born into a generation when light music was taken seriously,” he says wistfully.
Genial, effective, accompanying patter is kept to a minimum. Ross tells a few Cole Porter stories, reading one lyric as if a poem. He recites Dorothy Parker and compares Spider Man to Billy Rose’s 1935 Hippodrome production of Jumbo (Rodgers & Hart,) whose opening was delayed five times (and which ran only a few months after.) His patent leather foot taps and we’re off again.
Fanette (Brel/Shuman/Blau), a lovely, anachronistic chanson (in English) few performers could get away with let alone do justice to, prefaces a piano medley of Piaf songs. Visions of Gene Kelly dance in one’s head. Arrangements range from accordion-like café classics to exhilarating anthems. Ross plays with the vigor and focus of a concert artist. The Oak Room piano has never sounded so rich. (It’s probably exhausted this morning.)
Unlike many artists, Ross keeps more or less to himself when he performs. He looks out, but seems not to see or to connect. Wrapped in the pleasure and effort of delivering a great show (his vision,) he leaves us free to concoct our own. The audience is completely still. Not a cough, a scraping chair or a clinking glass and certainly no whispers mar a minute of it. I see hands reach for one another, eyes sometimes close, smiles pop up.
Steve Ross’s swank, pep, and precision are in fine form. Like a memorable meal, the program is crisp, tender, juicy, proud of its traditions, and extremely satisfying.
The way he ends the evening is cinematic.
*Sir Noel’s jacket was gifted to Steve Ross by England’s Noel Coward Society in 2007.
Top photo by Mike Martin
Steve Ross
Rhythm & Romance
Brian Cassier, Bass
The Oak Room at The Algonquin Hotel
59 West 44 Street
Mailto:bcmcgurn@algonquinhotel.com or 212-419-9331
Through February 12, 2011
