VARIETY
Skylark: Marcovicci Sings Mercer
(Oak Room; 85 capacity; $125 top)
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Presented inhouse. Opened, reviewed Nov. 17, 2009. Runs through Dec. 26.
Musical director/piano, Shelly Markham; bass, Jered Egan.
The great Johnny Mercer wasn't in New York to enjoy his 100th birthday Tuesday, but music lovers will celebrate the centennial year here, abroad and wherever they remember their "huckleberry friend." Cabaret queen Andrea Marcovicci kicks off the festivities with "Skylark: Marcovicci Sings Mercer" at the Algonquin, a fine 80-minute tour through two dozen titles.
Mercer was a less well-known lyricist than peers Berlin, Porter, Hart and Hammerstein, but more prolific than any of them, with some 1,400 songs to his credit. And arguably more great ones on his list; he had his pick of composers, and a tendency to repeatedly pull great melodies out of them. By the time Mercer died in 1976 he had amassed four Oscars (with 15 more nominations), plus Grammys and other accolades. But it's not the awards that matter; it's that bounteous songbag bursting with familiar titles and numerous lyric-phrases that have entered the vernacular.
Marcovicci, who shares the Nov. 17 birthdate with Johnny (though some 40 years younger), is an expert practitioner of what Mercer famously termed "that old black magic," with a clear-eyed view of the turmoil beneath life's "charade" but a determination to "accentuate the positive." And accentuate it she does, taking us on a brief tour through Mercer's bumpy biography.
A supremely talented genius with a gift for wordplay and a satiny singing voice, the pixieish charmer had a dark side fueled by liquor. A doomed affair with the teenage Judy Garland recurred intermittently through the decades, torturing and consoling them both with no possibility of happiness at rainbow's end. Hence all those "quarter to 3, nobody in the place except you and me" drinking songs in which he repeatedly faced the "blues in the night."
One evening can't begin to cover all the bases, and Marcovicci and her longtime musical director Shelly Markham wisely don't even try to string together all the song hits. Harold Arlen is well represented, of course, with a song or two from the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Jimmy Van Heusen, Richard Whiting, Harry Warren and more.
Markham does a perfect job at the piano, with an especially shimmering accompaniment to "Autumn Leaves." Ditto bassist Jered Egan, with a standout solo on "Goody, Goody." The act was commissioned by Mercer's Georgia hometown for the Savannah Music Festival.
In her 23rd season at the Algonquin, Marcovicci does a marvelous job. She doesn't just sing the songs, she inhabits the lyrics, serving up the emotions and all those colorful colloquialisms. Her voice is perhaps not what it was when she first stormed Broadway in the 1970s, with strong performances in the ill-fated "Ambassador" and "Nefertiti," but she glides through the songs with every word in place. And, most importantly, she has that Mercer-like twinkle in her eye.
