Review: BEHIND THE SPOTLIGHT Lecture Series at AMT Theater

The new “Behind the Spotlight” series of three events as part of J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company’s season was a fine idea for fans who are eager to drink in fun facts and interesting info about Broadway and its songs, personalities, and history. These programs were scheduled for Thursday afternoons at 3 pm, a great time for people whose schedules allow them to go out for a mid-afternoon lecture.

THE MAY 7 EVENT: JIM JIMIRRO

J2 gets its name from the initials of its own co-founder and executive producer, Jim Jimirro, and he handled one of the events himself, titled Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley: The Fountainhead of the Great American Songbook.  The amiable gentleman is a longtime theatre enthusiast (to put it mildly) who has seen many, many shows over the decades and also enjoys tracking tracks of albums by vocalists who cover show tunes. And he’s logged frequent flyer miles to attend programs by performers handling such material their own way, divorced from the musicals and characters for which they were written. During his enjoyably informative May 7th event he told us that he’d gone to more than 100 Frank Sinatra concerts!   

There was much detail about shadings and choices in the star’s phrasing and the work of his arrangers (as well as the architectures of the songs themselves) when Mr. Jimirro put certain Sinatra recordings in J2 Spotlight’s spotlight — or should I say under its microscope, playing some recordings and commenting on many specific elements, such as syncopation, and their impact. Helpfully, he alerted us as to what to listen to BEFORE a track began, so we’d be prepped and primed and positioned to notice and appreciate nuance after nuance. The recording of “Without a Song” from his album of the 1960s recalling his time and repertoire with the Tommy Dorsey band in the 1940s was a prime example. As he previewed the recordings or as we listened to samples, he’d use body language, movements and gestures, or pointing to words on a giant pad to emphasize how a singer or instrumental phrase brought a certain oomph or color to a moment. He is very convincing, convivial, and connected to the context.

Multiple rhymes within a small section of a lyric can be exhilarating, with “The Trolley Song” by Hugh Martin as a delightful illustration:

“And it was grand just to stand with his hand holding mine …. “ And who wouldn’t get a kick out of  “I Get a Kick Out of You” and its similarly neat feat, writing “flying too high with some guy in the sky is my i-dea of…” And, speaking of ideas, how about his alliteration with the consonant D in “It’s De-Lovely”? Some info in the lecture/demo contained oft-told facts that many song mavens likely knew: Porter’s crippling horseriding accident, a letter sent to Johnny Mercer from a fan suggesting a song’s line which he used and let her share the credit and royalties, his lyrics that were never set to music until his widow gave them to Barry Manilow for that task and honor. 

He also talked about: how Irving Berlin opined that a songwriter’s frequent challenge was “finding a new way to say ‘I love you’”; the “artfulness” of “perfect songs” that requires both “craft” and “art”; top-drawer presenters of classic songs (Mabel Mercer and singer-pianists such as Bobby Short and Steve Ross); and songs of different eras and genres with similar messages (the 1965 Motown hit “My World Is Empty Without You” echoing the mindset of the 1935 “If I Should Lose You” about “living in vain”).

The spunky speaker’s respect and admiration are apparent when it comes to “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “Come Blow Your Horn,” his love for the depths of love expressed in “How Deep Is the Ocean (How High Is the Sky)” and his eyes glowed when mentioning “Glow Worm.”    

Peter Filichia: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN THEATER (MAY 21)

Author, critic, and all-around theater expert Peter Filichia’s personal experiences, personal opinions, and distinctive personality make for a remarkable repository of showbiz incidents and insights. And the way he tells a story makes them more memorable, even though we know he’s related some of them for years in print, shared his views in interviews, or delivered them as a speaker/host/raconteur. His shifts in tone of voice, rolling his eyes or pleasing the audience by talking about what displeased him when it comes to the more ridiculous or unpleasant episodes all make hearing the shared memories a memorable experience. His memory itself is startling. In discussing one of the many shows he’s seen (over 13,000 over the last half-century, and he’s still not over his love for it all), for many of them he can rattle off details galore, the year it opened on Broadway, the date he attended (often in previews), even his seat number and the number of performances it ran. (He organizes his cast album collection based on that last-mentioned figure.) And, oh, what stories he has!

Filichia's flair for fun facts made the afternoon fly. He recalled his early fascination with musicals as a teenager, collecting cast albums (when some classmates saw his new prized purchase of the original cast recording of the operetta parody Little Mary Sunshine, its title became the sobriquet his bullies branded him with throughout school. After saving his money to see as many shows as he could, the opportunity to become a reviewer for his school paper and thus get complimentary tickets was the best gift (or job) imaginable.

Soon he was a professional critic, with a voracious appetite for seeing plays, stunning his boss when he mentioned that on his annual vacation from attending shows he’d be going on a trip — to see more shows. Of course, some were underwhelming and mind-boggling, even painful, but those experiences can seem funny in retrospect. Corralled into attending one production that conflicted with a big baseball game (he’s a big sports fan, too), he surreptitiously listened to its broadcast on an earpiece, fearing that the famous person he was sitting next to – composer Mary Rodgers —would notice and be irritated. Instead, at intermission, she asked, “What’s the score?” And, speaking of scores, the music and lyrics of hundreds of musicals are vivid in his mind –the good, the bad, and the “what were they thinking?”  

One longer story deserves its place in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not: Someone who ran across his writing finds him, phones him, flies him (to another state), feeds him (a multi-course, mega-expensive meal), and furnishes with with a hotel room overnight, so he can see and review an extravagant vanity theatre production starring the caller. And he never figured out if that person was a man or a woman. 

This is just a small percentage of the Filichia autobiography shared on May 21 at the AMT Theater, which was just a small percentage of the plethora of perspectives and “Peterisms” you can find in the numerous books he’s written. See some of them here.

The trio of programs in this “Lecture Series,” with veteran press agent Josh Ellis was covered in a separate column here.

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