Theatre in Review: Life is for Living: Conversations with Coward (59E59)

	David Shrubsole (at the piano), Simon Green. Photo: Heidi Bohnenkamp.

It's the season for glad tidings and eggnog, I know, but why not treat yourself to this champagne cocktail of an entertainment, celebrating a rather different Noël -- aka Destiny's Tot, and, later, The Master -- whose plays, musicals, revues, novels, and films constitute one of the 20th century's most capacious storehouses of civilized entertainment. Simon Green, a noted cabaret artist and musical theatre performer in the UK, and David Shrubsole, a composer and musical director, have assembled this delightful portrait of the artist from his own memoirs, letters, and songs. This is not a conventional and-then-he-wrote retrospective; also included are contributions by some of his contemporaries, Coward poems set to music by Shrubsole, and a few amusing outliers.

Tall (his bearing is almost military), with close-cropped gray hair, eyes that surely can penetrate any social façade, and a smile that seems to take in all three theatres at 59E59, Green is the most gracious and welcoming of hosts. He wins us over immediately with a trio of numbers from the musical Sail Away -- "Something Very Strange," "Don't Turn Away From Love," and "Go Slow, Johnny" -- paying tribute to Elaine Stritch, that show's star, along the way. All three songs demonstrate his precise diction and elegant phrasing, which are worthy of Coward himself. Indeed, he treats the lyrics like the silken goods they are, discreetly polishing such carefully wrought phrases as "Every single leaf on every tree/Seems to be aware/Of something in the air/And I know that tired old nightingale still sings in Berkeley Square."

Green also expertly handles such non-Coward offerings as "The Little Old Bar at the Ritz" (a Cole Porter lyric set to music by Shrubsole, who also provides fine piano accompaniment), "Waltz of My Heart" (by Ivor Novello, Coward's only real competitor in the West End), and "Place Settings," a school-of-Coward bit of social satire by Jeremy Nicholas, in which an increasingly frantic hostess draws up the seating plan for her fractious, neurotic dinner guests, a task only slightly less onerous than hosting the Congress of Vienna. The biggest surprise guest at the party is none other than Maya Angelou, whose poem "Human Family," with its curious mix of compassion and detachment, might have been written by Coward himself.

Of course, the evening's real glories are by the Master himself: My personal favorite is "What's Going to Happen to the Tots?," in which he notes, "Having been injected with some rather peculiar glands/Darling Mum's gone platinum and dances to all the rhumba bands." He also offers a delightfully deadpan reading of "I Went to a Marvellous Party," best described as a socialite's stream of semi-consciousness ("If you've any mind at all/Gibbon's divine Decline and Fall"), and delicately handles the tender revelations of midlife passion in "Later Than Spring."

The last number reveals Green's most Coward-like quality: his ability to suggest a vein of deep feeling hidden beneath his clipped, civilized façade. The spoken passages emphasize the fact that Coward, despite his love affairs and close maternal bond, essentially traveled alone -- he even wrote a song about it -- and behind the elegant mockery lies a persistent melancholy, an awareness of how quickly and thoroughly time has its way with youth, romance, and life itself. This is especially evident in "I Saw No Shadow," which is interspersed with tidbits about Coward's long-time affair with the American Jack Wilson. The poem "Do I Believe?" strikes a surprisingly metaphysical mood, musing on religion and the universe.

Most affecting of all is "London Pride," an ode to the city written during the darkest days of the London Blitz. The words are simple, but elegantly wrought ("London Pride has been handed down to us/London Pride is a flower that's free/London Pride means our own dear town to us/And our pride it forever will be"), and they are set to a quietly stirring melody. Appropriately, Green closes out the evening with "Sail Away," an ode to reinventing one's life by an artist who was his own creation as well as one of his century's most indelible characters. As Kenneth Tynan wrote in 1964, "Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years' time, exactly what we mean by 'a very Noël Coward sort of person'." It is now 2016 and I can say without fear of contradiction that Simon Green is a very Noël Coward sort of person -- and the perfect antidote to more tinsel-covered holiday entertainments. -- David Barbour