Review: Hershey Felder: The Piano and Me, a Musical Memoir

Suitcases surround a beautiful Steinway grand in Hershey Felder: The Piano and Me, written by and starring the maestro of the title (the scenic design is also by the indefatigable performer). One could view these little piles of luggage as evidence of success. Global liberalism makes nomads of us all, especially those who have managed to eke out a career in theater or classical music (Felder does both). They chase opportunity around the world, ever ready to pack up and move on to the next gig. It’s a glamorous, exhausting lifestyle.

But the luggage has a darker meaning. Felder vividly recalls discovering a suitcase packed with Jewish ritual items for Shabbat (candlesticks, a Kiddush cup) in the Montreal home of his Hungarian immigrant grandparents, who explained that the items needed to stay packed in case anyone came to suddenly take them away—a perfectly reasonable fear from people who had survived the Holocaust. Things change slowly and then all at once, even in Canada.

That generational trauma rumbles beneath this solo memoir from the actor-pianist, a bassline underscoring each wordless car ride and pitiless piano lesson, occasionally overtaking the main theme, like when Felder reunites with a distant cousin, long presumed dead, while interviewing survivors for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. It’s a miracle, just one of many in Felder’s extraordinary life.

Audiences around the world have witnessed Felder portray the great composers (Frédéric Chopin, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Irving Berlin to name a few) in a series of biographical plays with music. Seated at the piano, he tells the story of their lives while performing their greatest hits.

The setup for The Piano and Me is no different, but the story is about Felder, and how an early appreciation for classical music and a dubiously procured upright piano revealed a talent for reading and internalizing music with remarkable speed. Felder lingers on those early lessons and the measures he took to study with the best teachers.

For three years he would make a weekly car trip from Montreal to New York just to take a lesson with the head of the Juilliard piano department. One quickly gets the sense that his teachers’ gargantuan homework assignments and impossible-to-satisfy standards were meant to prepare him for life in an industry with hundreds of applicants for every job, in which rejection is far more common than applause.

Less clear is the path that Felder took from being a student toiling in obscurity to a globe-trotting luminary. We understand it has something to do with director Joel Zwick, who helmed Felder’s first show, George Gershwin Alone (and is also apparently a distant cousin). Almost as an aside he mentions that acting was another big part of his childhood, leaving us to wonder where he found the time between all those piano lessons.

Having painstakingly established the work ethic it requires to pursue a life in the arts, Felder dazzles us with a barrage of bold names and connections, telling us that the rest (that is, three decades writing and performing) is history. Perhaps a career in show business also develops slowly, and then all at once.

What is indisputable is Felder’s unique gift. Unrestrained by the dramaturgical need to stick to the work of one composer, Felder treats us to his beautiful renditions of Liszt’s “Liebesträume,” Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and Williams’s “Flying Theme” from E.T., a film that meant so much to the strange little boy whose indoor interests so wildly diverged from his schoolmates.

We can still sense that inner child in Felder’s interpretations, his fingers treading across the keyboard gingerly, almost hesitantly, as if afraid of offending. And yet each note arrives, building courage from the success of the last. Felder’s command of dynamics is wonderous, ranging from the softest pianissimo to the most jarring fortissimo. Ever the thespian, Felder draws out the drama in this music. It builds slowly, and then all at once.