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What Were the '20s Like? Allow a Piano Man to Paint a Picture
'Runnin' Wild,' Mark Nadler's Show at 54 Below
By STEPHEN HOLDEN MAY 20, 2014
New York City may be crawling with contenders for the coveted imaginary title Mr. Show Business, but my vote would go to Mark Nadler, the hyperkinetic piano man and pop nostalgist who displays such voracious exuberance that it is a wonder he doesn't collapse onstage from exhaustion. In his rambunctious new show, "Runnin' Wild: Songs and Scandals of the Roaring '20s," Mr. Nadler is out to demonstrate that the hedonistic excesses of today's New Gilded Age are a prim little tea party compared with the collective bacchanal of the Prohibition era, when New York was home to 32,000 speakeasies.
In Mr. Nadler's mind, the Roaring Twenties began with Prohibition in 1920, the same year women got the right to vote, and ended with its repeal in 1933. Alcohol ruled in songs like Halsey K. Mohr's "Say It With Liquor," which Mr. Nadler sang with a lubricious zeal on Wednesday evening at 54 Below, where the show had the last of four performances. That song, he noted, which exalted booze as a handy tool for seduction, came decades before the term date rape. Equipped with bottles of gin and vermouth, Mr. Nadler mixed "the perfect martini" onstage, although he admitted that he personally preferred vodka.
Much of the show was devoted to biographical sketches of the period's more notorious celebrities. The antics of Mae West, Texas Guinan, Clara Bow and Aimee Sempel McPherson, were recounted in colorful detail. Special emphasis was given to the scandal-ridden torch singer Libby Holman, and to Jean (a.k.a. Gene) Malin, a six-foot-tall, 200-pound drag performer who was reputed to be the highest-paid nightclub entertainer of 1930. Malin died three years later (at 25) in a freakish automobile accident.
Mr. Nadler has toned down enough in recent years to allow more air into the room, so that his desire to please reads less as desperation than as enthusiasm. It's a qualitative leap for this immensely talented latter-day Al Jolson, who should have nothing left to prove.
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