His Heart on His Sleeve
We’ve just come to the end of a crazily busy fall theater season in New York City. I did some checking and found that TheaterMania reviewed 89 shows between Labor Day and December 21, the first day of winter — and though we try to be comprehensive in our coverage, that certainly doesn’t represent every single production that opened during those weeks and months. While this extraordinary level of activity is good in many ways, it’s bad in that some fine shows naturally got lost in the shuffle in terms of public awareness and patronage.
Among the most worthy of these was Listen to My Heart: The Songs of David Friedman, which had an all-too-brief run Upstairs at Studio 54. Happily, the show has yielded a terrific “live” cast album that will bring great pleasure to those who saw the production as well as those who missed it. (Full disclosure: I socialized with David Friedman on a couple of occasions about 10 years ago when I met him through mutual friends.)
As presented on stage and in this 2-CD set, Listen to My Heart demonstrates that Friedman’s range as a composer and lyricist is much greater than he’s often given credit for. His best-known songs were popularized by two late, great singers, Laurie Beechman and Nancy LaMott, and most of them fall into two general categories: life-affirming anthems and heart-on-the sleeve love ballads. Some of Friedman’s lyrics can, indeed, be difficult for the more jaded and cynical among us to take. For example:
When I first met you
I knew that you were the one for me.
I didn’t know how to tell you
But I knew how it would be.
We’d live in a house on a hill
And spend our days making love.
I didn’t know how to get there
All I knew was what I was dreamin’ of.
That sort of expression may threaten to cross the line between sentiment and sentimentality, but Friedman’s utter sincerity keeps his songs honest. I’ve always thought that it would be fun to do a comedy sketch about a composer who specializes in warm, fuzzy love ballads and songs of moral uplift but turns out to be a mean, bitter son of a bitch; David Friedman could never play the lead in such a sketch, however, because he’s the antithesis of those things. And his heart-on-the-sleeve approach to songwriting is balanced by his intelligence and talent, as in the following lines from “We Can Be Kind”:
So many things we can’t control,
So many hurts that happen every day,
So many heartaches that pierce the soul,
So much pain that won’t ever go away.
How do we make it better?
How do we make it through?
What can we do when there’s nothing we can do?
There’s a lot of subtle skill in this excerpt, and the question contained in the final line is really quite profound when you think about it.
As noted above, the great revelation of Listen to My Heart is Friedman’s ability to write in a number of styles and idioms; I thought I had a fairly comprehensive grasp of the man’s work before this show and its cast recording came along, but I was wrong. For example, “Live it Up” is a peppy, catchy, and funny up-tune that’s very different from anything else on the CD. Two country-inflected numbers, the witty “If You Love Me, Please Don’t Feed Me” (written in collaboration with Robin Boudreau and Scott Barnes) and the heartfelt “My White Night” (not to be confused with the song of the same title from The Music Man), are standouts. And given that so many of Friedman’s songs mark him as a paragon of positive thinking, one of the most startling selections in Listen to My Heart is “Catch Me,” a heartbreaking plea for help from a person on the brink of suicide.
And then there are Friedman’s hysterically funny “Jewish humor” songs, performed here by another of his longtime muses, Alix Korey. This unique performer’s rendition of “My Simple Wish” (a.k.a. “My Simple Christmas Wish”) is already the stuff of legend, and it’s nice to have it preserved here along with the sounds of the audience exploding in laughter. Less famous but scarcely less hilarious is “I’m Not My Mother,” also performed with razor-sharp timing by Korey.
Recorded live Upstairs at Studio 54, the cast album has been issued on Friedman’s own label, Midder Music. The excellent sound quality of the disc allows us to fully enjoy the stellar performances of Korey and the rest of the cast: Allison Briner, Joe Cassidy, Michael Hunsaker, Anne Runolfsson, and Friedman himself. Aside from their first-rate ensemble singing, each of these performers is given several solo opportunities: Briner sounds fantastic in “My White Knight,” and anyone with half a heart will be moved by Cassidy’s powerful rendition of “Catch Me” and Hunsaker’s sympathetic response, “I Can Hold You.” (This, by the way, is the closest the show comes to a gay love moment.) As for Anne Runolfsson — one of musical theater’s best-kept secrets — her recorded performances of such songs as “What I Was Dreamin’ Of” and “We Can Be Kind” will demonstrate to listeners that she is one of the finest singing actresses of her generation.
No review of Listen to My Heart would be complete without an acknowledgment of director Mark Waldrop, who skillfully programmed (and staged) Friedman’s wonderful songs in such a way as to show them in the best possible light. Bravo to him, to the superlative cast of Listen to My Heart, and most of all to David Friedman.
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[The Listen to My Heart CD is available at Colony Music and Footlight Records in NYC, at Dress Circle in London, and through the website Listen to My Heart: The Songs of David Friedman www.listentomyheartsite.com]
