October 22 through 25, 2008
Reviewed by Steve Callahan
Fran Landesman is back in town!!! Under the aegis of Cabaret St. Louis she gave four performances at the Gaslight Theatre to utterly adoring audiences. For our younger listeners who may need an introduction, Ms. Landesman and her husband Jay were the central figures in that astonishing cultural phenomenon called Gaslight Square some forty years ago. They were proprietors of the Crystal Palace, a theatre bar where many of America's brightest young talents made fledgling appearances--Barbra Streisand, the Smothers Brothers, Phyllis Diller, Miles Davis, Nichols and May, Woody Allen, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce, Oscar Peterson and others. Their improv group, the Compass Players, later went on to Chicago to become the Second City company.
Fran is a very significant song-writer. She penned the lyrics to that curious Beatnik musical,The Nervous Set. It went on to Broadway and two of the songs--"Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" and "Ballad of the Sad Young Men"--have become solid jazz standards. (New Line revived The Nervous Set four years ago.)
Fran Landesman is a ravishingly unregenerate eighty-one-year-old Beatnik chick. Slightly stooped and appearing a little frail but wearing a raucous Iron Maiden T-shirt she held us in the palm of her hand as she treated us to rich helpings of her poetry and song. Fran never claimed to be a singer. When, after writing so many songs, she was finally urged to sing she was worried; she had so often heard musicians criticize singers who weren't technically up to par. But musicians loved Fran's singing. Their attitude was, "Hell, Fran, you're not a singer; you're a song-writer." Well her voice may never have been trained, and it has accumulated some years, but she can still hit the pitch, her phrasing is perfect, and can she ever convey a lyric! She is often accompanied on guitar by her son, Miles Davis Landesman.
But Fran sticks mostly to her poetry; much of the actual singing is done by our own Anna Blair, who does indeed have a lovely voice. Ms. Blair, with a natural glow and deeply engaging eyes, can be beautifully warm, as shown in "Tomorrow Never Came", or delightfully playful, as in "Feet, Do Your Stuff". She did a gorgeous "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most".
At the piano Joe Dreyer is elegant perfection itself. We have become so familiar with the ubiquitous Mr. Dreyer that we often tend to ignore his really superb talent. Perhaps that is yet another facet of his talent: as an accompanist he so gracefully manages never to distract from our focus on the singer.
Ms.Landesman frequently checks with her son as to what is next on the program, but once she begins a poem she gives it all flawlessly from memory--or, as we used to say (and which is here surely true), "by heart".
Fran Landesman's poetry covers a range from intimate personal vulnerabilities to biting social satire. It is exquisitely sensitive to life's ironies, and it unvaryingly maintains a most rare and beautiful quality: that is, it expresses at once both a deep engagement in life and a sardonic objectivity towards it. There's more than a little of Dorothy Parker, there's a hint of Judith Viorst. She addresses the battle of the sexes in pieces like "I Like Men". She skewers meddlesome government in a delightful one about the "last smoker" in the "land of the banned and the home of the scared". There are hurtfully insightful poems on love and loss. There is a pervasive, philosophically accepted gentle despair. There are lovely, outrageous things like "Is God a Jew?" and the one about that "Big Black Drag Queen in the Sky". She, like Bob Dylan, is a song-writer who is also a real poet; but Fran's poetry is less opaque than Dylan's. (And frankly, even at eighty-one, her voice is better.)
For me, one of the most profound and touching pieces was one called "Scars". We all have our scars--some physical, many emotional; each a record of life experience. In this poem there is the invitation to absolute intimacy: "You show me yours; I'll show you mine".
One perhaps unplanned but very poignant aspect of the evening is merely seeing the lovely young Anna Blair and the tough, spirited old Fran Landesman performing together. Fran's songs on the lips of a singer two generations younger are the embodiment of the immortality of Fran's talent; at the same time we can sense the inspiration that Anna drinks from the presence and example of that undaunted older spirit.
Fran Landesman showcasing her poetry and song at the Gaslight is another triumph for Cabaret St. Louis.
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