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ON THE RECORD: Errico's "Sadie Thompson" and Brent Barrett's "Lerner"
By Steven Suskin
26 Jan 2003
BRENT BARRETT: The Alan Jay Lerner Album [Fynsworth Alley 302 062 161]
Brent Barrett is one of the finest-singing musical comedy actors around, as was evident in his appearance in last May's Encores! presentation of The Pajama Game. When Barrett sang "There Once Was a Man" with Karen Ziemba, and "Hey There" with himself, you left the theatre thinking they don't make 'em like that anymore. And ruing that unpleasant truth.
Barrett turned to the Alan Jay Lerner catalogue following his performance in an earlier Encores! offering, the 2000 presentation of On a Clear Day. Barrett was playing the wrong role here — Melinda's eighteenth-century lover Edward Moncrief, rather than Daisy Gamble's psychiatrist Mark Bruckner — but he stole the show with his two big solos. Barrett has several links with Lerner; his first featured Broadway role was in Lerner's swan song Dance a Little Closer, and he sang the male lead in the fine John McGlinn recording of Brigadoon. The Barrett-Lerner combination turns out to be a fine matchup.
Barrett and his associates are to be commended, to begin with, for their song selection. What the world doesn't need now, at least in my opinion, is more recordings of the hits from My Fair Lady, Brigadoon and Camelot. Barrett gives us but one song from those three musicals. Instead, they give us two each from Love Life, Lolita, My Love, Dance a Little Closer and Clear Day (including a reprise of his Encores! "She Wasn't You"). There is also a pair from the Lerner/Burton Lane film collaboration Royal Wedding, and solo representations from the Fritz Loewe musicals What's Up?, The Day Before Spring and Paint Your Wagon.
The result is an album of interesting songs, sung exceptionally well by Mr. Barrett — for example, the selections from Dance a Little Closer (which closed on opening night). Barrett doesn't reprise the song he sang back in 1983, which can be heard on that show's original cast album. Instead, he does two of Charlie Strouse's especially fine ballads from that misbegotten musical, "There's Always One You Can't Forget" and "Anyone Who Loves." Even more obscure are the songs from Lolita, which shuttered out-of-town. "In the Broken Promise Land of Fifteen" is a real beauty, while "Tell Me, Tell Me" is a gentle song of insidious seduction. Barrett sings them too well, perhaps; they were written for the character Humbert Humbert, who is somewhat beside himself (to say the least). Barrett even makes "Let's Go Home" from Coco sound good!
The liner note essay by Barry Kleinbort, by the way, provides an extremely good overview of Lerner's career. There is a drawback to this album, unfortunately, in the arrangements and orchestrations for some of the livelier numbers. They seem to have wanted to prevent the songs from sounding old-fashioned, so they modernized them. Kind of, that is; it seems to me that it only hurts to give a 40-year-old song a 20-year-old sound. Speaking of which, Lauren Bacall makes a cameo appearance singing "I Remember It Well." This sounds just like you might expect.
All told, Brent Barrett's singing and the cannily assembled songs make for a worthy "Alan Jay Lerner Album."
—Steven Suskin, author of "Broadway Yearbook 2000-2001," "Broadway Yearbook 1999-2000," "Show Tunes," and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He can be reached by e-mail at Ssuskin@aol.com.
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