Musical Director/Pianist/Composer Barry Levitt and Director/Lyricist Peter Napolitano possess more than 70 years experience in the music, theater, and cabaret biz between them, but only started writing songs as a team in spring 2010. As the audience discovered at a presentation of their rapidly building songbook at the Urban Stages’ 11-day Winter Rhythms music festival in early December, it hasn’t been a moment too soon. The Levitt/Napolitano partnership has become one of cabaret’s more impressive collaborations.

Napolitano’s lyrics are sophisticated, subtle, and accessible, and range from poignant to playful. Levitt’s composing sensibility is a hybrid of Broadway, jazz and pop. Together, this new Rodgers and Hart of cabaret reveal a great ear for the form and the singers they write for, including Helena Grenot, Janice Hall, Deb Berman and Barbara Porteus, all of whom were among a group of solid cabaret performers delivering some of the duo’s cooler compositions. (The set list was augmented by a few numbers Napolitano has written with composers Mark Janas, Matthew Martin Ward and Scott Evan Davis.)

The set launched with an appropriately bouncy audience welcoming song “Make Yourself at Home,” delivered by the sleek and sexy jazz singer Kat Gang, followed by Levitt’s swinging arrangement of “Damn’d If I Know,” written for Grenot about a woman’s frustrating history with men and her inability to either get or give good advice about it. “The game of hearts is way too hard/You can lose any way you play that card/So, when’s the right time to discard?/Damn’d if I know.” Janice Hall then delivered a lovely almost operatic interpretation of a ballad also written for Grenot, “The Things I Know I Missed,” an intensely introspective Napolitano lyric about anger and regret.

Napolitano related going to three different composers before finally collaborating with Levitt on the languid “Looking,” a song written for and lovingly delivered by Barbara Porteus about searching for a soul mate. The lyric is Napolitano’s love letter to New York and sounded as if it came from a Woody Allen film score. Later in the show, real-life couple Rob Langeder and Stacie Perlman teamed up for the Broadway show-style love ballad “Sometimes I Wonder,” about a couple musing about the state of their relationship, and Napolitano joined Deborah Tranelli and Nina Hennessey for the jaunty “No Chestnuts” (written for a 2010 Adam Shapiro holiday show of the same name), a cheeky lyric decrying some famous Christmas songs, including the one about a certain reindeer named Rudolph:  “I don’t mean to be nasty, but he’s having rhinoplasty.”

The next section highlighted some Napolitano pieces written with other composers and each one is a winner. Musical Director Mark Janas played his beautiful melody on the ballad “All I Can Give” (sung by Susan Winter and originally written for Raissa Katona Bennett), a Christmas song about the truly valuable gifts one can give that don’t cost money. Matthew Martin Ward then took to the piano for another lovely Christmas-themed number, “In Tina’s Room”— touchingly sung by Julie Reyburn (about to have her second child)—about a mom musing lovingly about her daughter and the meaning of the holiday as she prepares her house on Christmas Eve. Hall returned and mounted the piano for a fun and sophisticated new Napolitano/Ward song written for her, “I’d Rather Be Doing This,” where she pulled off being seductive even as she was singing about not being interested in sex while on a date. “Whenever I land in certain situations/That offer a chance for conjugal relations/I’m on the brink, I start to think/I’d rather be reading Goethe in German/I’d rather be listening to Ethel Merman . . .” Well, you get the idea. Then Napolitano’s newest and youngest collaborator Scott Evan Davis premiered “This Land I Love” (sung by Joshua Dixon), a patriotic ballad that could have been in the score of 1776.

Levitt returned and told a fascinating story about lobbying the widow of lyricist Johnny Burke (“Pennies from Heaven” and “Swingin’ on a Star”) for the chance to compose a song from lyrics never set to music. After she resisted for years, Mrs. Burke finally relented and the result was a lush melody on the Sinatra-esque “Now That We’re Sure,” sung by promising newcomer Gary Crawford. The penultimate number of the night is probably the songwriting duo’s biggest, most often sung cabaret tune, the swinging and sassy “All in Good Time” (written for and sung by Deb Berman), their proclamation about how being patient might eventually get you items on your bucket list—including a MAC Award.

For the finale, veteran Broadway performer Robert Cuccioli (Les Misérables and Jekyll and Hyde) introduced the recently written “Here I Am,” the only song yet composed for Levitt and Napolitano’s first musical Nicky’s Wedding. Levitt’s dramatic melody and Napolitano’s cinematic lyric is about memories, bitterness, longing and regret from the perspective of a gay man at his son’s wedding, though still being estranged from his family. If this is an example of what the team comes up with for the rest of the score, they could have a hit on their hands. I, for one, am anxious to hear it, but all in good time.

Stephen Hanks
Cabaret Scenes
December 9, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org