October 15, 2018
On the mainstage of 59E59, the redoubtable virtuoso pianist-actor-writer, whose specialty is one-man-play portraiture of famous composers—last seen here in his Maestro as Leonard Bernstein—stars in Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin.
Not knowing Berlin’s biography terribly well, I can’t say if Mr. Felder has deliberately chosen, with this Russian émigré songwriter so identified with the American spirit, to take a gentler approach than he did with his seemingly warts-and-all (but likewise sympathetic) portrayal of Bernstein; or if, when you get right down to it, Berlin didn’t have as complex and unsettled a psyche (a bit of both, perhaps)? But in any event, Felder’s is an endearing, sweetly human, emotionally layered portrayal of a brilliant man of his time, whose major work would transcend his time, but whose creative reflex, once his time had passed, could not make the transition.
As with his portrayal of Bernstein, the accoutrements with which he presents the physical Berlin profile (the meticulous contour of the hairline-replicating wig, the facial make-up and glasses that define exactitude-to-a-fault) are at once recognizable as theatrical artifice, yet also permission for the audience to make the leap with him into a bygone man in a bygone era. I have no idea if the strategy is intentional or just a by-product of seeming over-meticulousness, but once the beating heart of the Berlin within starts to fill out the 3D silhouette shell, the transformation—in which I also include the audience’s complicity—is nothing short of true-life magic realism.
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