| Love is important, but can it hold a candle to food? Thursday at the Kaye Playhouse, tenor Hal Cazalet beseeched soprano Christianne Tisdale, "Think how sad an egg would feel if ham should disappear." (She raised her eyebrows, but came around by the time he sang of steak's grief at finding itself sans onion.) The lyrics were courtesy of Cazalet's great-grandfather, P.G. (Plum) Wodehouse, better known for his peerless comic prose than his pioneering work in musical theater, despite a fruitful collaboration with Jerome Kern; in 1917, Wodehouse and librettist Guy Bolton had five shows running concurrently on Broadway. Joining Cazalet and Tisdale for "P.G.'s Other Profession" (part of the New York Festival of Song season) were soprano Sylvia McNair and baritone David Costabile. In tails and gowns, they went about the laudable task of burnishing Plum's lyrical legacy, with 23 songs ranging from pleasant sentiment ("The Enchanted Train") to more frenetic fare (the tuneful anarchy of "Nonstop Dancing"). Tisdale and Costabile shone, respectively, in the solo hysterical-historicals "Cleopatterer" and "Napoleon" (who "weighed a hundred in his BVD's"). Joint ventures such as "Sir Galahad," a paean to chivalry, were wonders of four-way comic timing and articulation. (Only Wodehouse could imagine a knight throwing down the gauntlet with "I will smite thee one upon the beezer.") "The Land Where the Good Songs Go" took wistfulness to the brink of melancholy�a meta-song that effectively situated the evening's music in a distant Eden. But the history of this Plum number cracks the hermeticism with a smile: It surfaced in Miss 1917, an ill-fated revue featuring not only a trained seal (prophetically named Bertie) but also, at rehearsal, a young pianist by the name of George Gershwin. �Ed Park |
