On March 4th, William Bolcom’s cabaret setting of Arnold Weinstein’s Long Lost Loves (And Grey Suede Gloves) was performed at the City Recital Hall. Mezzo-Soprano Anna Dowlsey and pianist Michael Curtain performed a selection of Weinstein’s writings, in what can only be called a tremendous performance marked by vocal talent and beautiful piano playing.
The songs retell the wake of George, a bohemian, kimono-clad opera fan whose many “long lost loves” come in and out of the production, their parts deftly sung by Dowsley’s wide vocal range.
She also plays George’s neighbour, the wake’s long-suffering MC.
Cabaret is one of those genres that has unfairly fallen by the musical wayside in recent years. It deserves more attention because it is an art form imbued with a broad range of emotions and profound characters. Long Lost Loves was a reaffirmation of the power of music to explore the full range of emotions.
Standouts included Places to Live, a 1979 observation of George’s penchant for travel, Love in the Thirties, a beautiful remembrance of George’s old-world manners, and a moment where a child, singing to his father, asks, “Daddy, why aren’t we communist?” Weinstein’s libretto was infused with the strange mixture of glamour and foreboding that marked him out as a cornerstone of the New York School. In Fur (Murray the Furrier) Weinstein’s lyrics juxtapose the elegance of a fur coat with the unavoidable health hazards for the overlooked worker who spent his life handling the materiel.
The music, too, was beautiful. Bolcom is certainly one of our best living composers and his jazzy compositions for voice and piano combined joy and pathos in equal measure. Curtain and Dowsley’s execution of the compositions were first-rate, and they got into the spirit of the material’s alternating comedy and sadness.
In a way, what made Long Lost Loves so interesting was its meta-theatricality. Dowsley’s MC both farewelled George and continued the great cabaret tradition of an MC running a performance. Similarly, the way that the songs were about a person in the music business, albeit one who never quite reached the heights of fame, was a true expression of cabaret’s painful, melancholic undercurrent, in the tradition of Sally Bowles. As traditional as it was, making it so that a single singer performed all the parts meant that there was a great originality. That same authenticity was proved again by having the production open with George already dead: the simmering underbelly of sadness in most cabaret shows gave way to an opportunity to explore a wide array of emotional responses to the death, which let the show bring on plenty of characters. In that way, too, one felt that one knew George.
All in all, Long Lost Loves (And Grey Suede Gloves) was a fascinating evening of singing and piano. It renewed, as Dowsley said, the “power and the rawness” of cabaret: the incredible talent of her singing, and the virtuosity with which Michael Curtain played the piano deserved the encore and ovation at the end. It was an evening that reinforced the value of live vocal performances.
