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A Swell Party - RSVP Cole Porter
Reviews
They Skip the Bio and Cut To the Cole Porter Chase
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
In the language of Cole Porter: oo-la-la-la! C'est magnifique!
That burst of Gallic joie describes the ebullience of "A Swell Party — R.S.V.P. Cole Porter," the truly fabulous Porter tribute winked, smirked, crooned and shouted by K T Sullivan and Mark Nadler at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel. A departure from the team's zany tutorials on luminaries of the great American songbook, "A Swell Party" skips the biographical part to deliver songs both famous and obscure, in a delirious whoosh of lubricious exuberance.
Imparting the composer's live-for-the-moment-of-passion philosophy, Ms. Sullivan and Mr. Nadler suggest a very ripened Botticelli Venus squired by Danny Kaye, freshly reincarnated as a hyperkinetic piano man visiting from vaudeville heaven. A valuable new addition to their act, the saxophonist Loren Schoenberg injects instrumental comedy into "Let's Do It," by deflating the phrase sung as "let's fall in love" by inflecting it with a corny vibrato; no, the song is definitely not about love. Later he returns for a husky insinuating solo of "Begin the Beguine" in which the singers and the bassist John Loehrke join him to evoke an image of an ocean liner swimming in Champagne at 4 a.m.
Beneath the brilliantine surface of Porter's lyrics, everything is sexual. The only times his double-entendres fade into the background is during sighs of besotted yearning and cries of rapture. Only then does lust turn into the kind of love that's "too hot not to cool down."
"A Swell Party" probably has more showstoppers than any other cabaret show this season. Here are two: After taking "Kate the Great," an editorial brief for nymphomania that offers Catherine the Great as a role model ("she made the butler/ she made the groom/ she made the maid who made the room"), Mr. Nadler astutely observes that the song describes how Porter might have ruled Russia.
The giddiest of Ms. Sullivan's several turns as erotic philosopher is a swiveling, eye-rolling "Most Gentlemen Don't Like Love," which warns all gals: "So just remember when you get that glance/ A romp and a quickie/ Is all little Dickie/ Means/ When he mentions romance."
There's more, much more where that came from in a show that reminds you that half the pleasure of excess is finding the perfect words to describe it.
by Rex Reed
All's Swell
I can think of no better way to usher in the badly needed first embrace of spring than a splash of Cole Porter, and KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler have both faucets wide open. In their delightful new cabaret act at the Algonquin's Oak Room, they've got the subject well covered. They call it "A Swell Party!" and you've still got until April 1 to RSVP.
One thing this show does is remind us what a devil Mr. Porter was. The lyrics are often quite naughty ("Let's Do It" never sounded so double-entendre). When the mischievous pianist-singer-arranger-comic Mark Nadler tackles them, every line is a punch line. Then he does an about face and sings "You've Got That Thing" in a slow, sensual and suggestive tempo that is almost lascivious. Versatility is the key. KT Sullivan, usually a bubbly cross between Lillian Russell and Lorelei Lee, manages, in this outing, to blend the emotional content of "So in Love" with the arc of theme and melody on "Get Out of Town," giving happiness new meaning.
Some other subtle changes in their patter, delivery and timing pay handsome dividends: Though never less than entertaining, they have in past performances sometimes been verbose and overly descriptive with the biographical material, talking at the same time like the maddening sound track from a Robert Altman movie. This time, they wisely dissolve the segues between songs and dispense with the unnecessary details of Cole Porter's life. It's the songs that count. Without sacrificing an iota of subtlety or imagination, less chatter leaves more time for music, and there is plenty of it, with the excellent bass player John Loehrke and the dreamy saxophone of Loren Schoenberg lending vibrant support.
From the insatiable lusts of "Kate the Great" to a Paris medley with "After You, Who?" in French, this duo is out to dazzle. She has joie de vivre; he has verve and sheen. I like the antic Danny Kaye side of Mr. Nadler, but when he explores the minor keys of songs like "I Love Paris," or idealistically feels his way through an obscure Porter masterpiece like "Wake Up and Dream," the softer, warmer side of his voice becomes a most appealing counterpart to his usual antics.
What a swellegant, elegant party this is, and KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler are the perfect hosts. They may end the show with "Just One of Those Things," but don't believe it. You're in for much, much more.
What a swell party it is
by Jerry Tallmer
All's Swell Cole the Great resided — make that presided — at the intersection of homosexual sensibility and heterosexual hungers. His marriage of scorching wit and fearless passion puts to snoring shame what are these days known as jukebox Broadway musicals, and if you would like a wake-up powder, it's being gloriously dispensed seven times a week in this town by the nonpareil team of Miss K.T. Sullivan and Mr. Mark Nadler.
"A Swell Party: RSVP Cole Porter" the invitation reads, and the party they're throwing is at the Algonquin — "It's de-lovely, it's de-licious, it's de-Oak Room" — Tuesdays through Saturdays through April 1. You will, if you are me, ache with pleasure and with longing.
Mark Nadler, at the piano, plays, sings, talks, informs, arranges, does everything. Blonde, bountiful K.T. Sullivan, at one or another microphone, sings, swanks, seduces, enlightens, circulates the premises, fences with Nadler. Their range, separately or together, is from light as angel dust to full-throttle takeoff. That is also the range of emotions of the show.
Backing both are the invaluable saxophone of Loren Schoenberg, the indispensable bass of big John Loehrke — "our hippopotamus," as Nadler interjects at the moment at which Cole Porter's most undisguisedly daring of all songs comes to: "I'm sure giraffes on the sly do it / Heavy hippopotami do it / Let's do it, let's fall in love … "
That's the jesting in, as I say, endlessly ingenious homosexual byplay.
Here, from "King Lear," the heterosexual translation of birds do it, bees do it...:
"The wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive …
The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to't
With a more riotous appetite …
But to the girdle do the gods inherit
Beneath is all the fiend's … "
When Mark and K.T. hit Porter's "Let's fall in love … Let's fall in love … Let's fall in love," you know that what they and Cole Porter really wish to celebrate, without any leering (Learing?) whatsoever, is copulation — let it thrive! — with love coming along for the canter, if it wishes. Same when Mark sings to K.T., and all of girdled womankind: "You've got that THING, that makes birds refuse to sing …"
That's serious enough, but then their show, and its import, goes deep, deep, and deeper — well, bittersweet deeper — with the broken-heart classics or wry regrets of "I've Got You Under My Skin," "Get Out of Town Before It's Too Late, My Dear" (I see a black-and-white 1940s B-film Main Street as they do this one), "Every Time We Say Goodbye" (my heart breaks a little), and then, oh God, a Paris medley.
Makes me want to rush out and jump on an Air France jet — a flight, if not to Paris, then to the moon on gossamer wings. What a line! What a song! What a man! What a wonderful pair, these two are, Sullivan the golden schicksa, Nadler the, shall we say, non-schicksa who's beginning to look more and more like Groucho Marx every day, only better.
Nadler turns a "Kate the Great" into ragtime, Sullivan lights a torch under "Get Out of Town." Nadler educates us as to the minor keys, major keys of Cole Porter, small-town boy from Peru, Indiana, where my mother's envelopes came from. Porter wrote a lot in minor key because he saw all around him successful Jewish composers who wrote in minor keys. But most of those songs had a way of ending up in major key — "it's funny how truth will come out."
Back from Paris, back from the moon, down on the ground: "Most gentlemen don't like love, they just like to kick it around … As Gertrude Stein put it, in some weighty tome, A man is a man is a man is a man — oh, Alice, send them all home!" I don't know if those last six words are Porter's or Nadler's, but they got a laugh out of me.
And then, wham, the Big One. " … In the roaring traffic's boom / In the silence of my lonely room / I think of you … "
Many a night and day, in his lonely room, did my father play the record of that song. Fred Astaire. Cole Porter. Mark Nadler. K.T. Sullivan. Come again. Oh please, come again.