Michael Feinstein Presents <em>B.J. Ward Sings Marshall Barer </em>

What care I who cares 
For the world’s affairs 
As long as I can sing its popular songs? 
—Irving Berlin (1929)

abaret singers perform an important service by preserving songs which once expressed not only “popular” emotions but personal ones: our own emotions, expressed at times more directly by these songs than in any other way. Popular songs are simultaneously a mirror of the past and an entrance-way into our own hearts.

Unfortunately, singers too often present the same popular songs over and over again. Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine” is a brilliant, marvelous song but it has been sung so often that its tenderness begins to seem false or easy. On the other hand, there are thousands of songs which no one sings. Cole Porter’s work is terrific throughout his career, but are there more than, say, six or seven of his most famous songs in any given singer’s repertoire? Part of the problem here is audience expectations—we want to hear the same old same old—but part is also the singer’s fear that the audience won’t accept something it hasn’t heard before, something it already knows is “good”—largely because it has heard it so often.

Cheers to B.J. Ward (and to Michael Feinstein, who initiated the project) for her new CD, B.J. Ward Sings Marshall Barer. Almost no one has heard of Marshall Barer at all, and he was a lyricist, not a composer. He lived from 1923 to1998 and wrote songs with a dizzying number of different composers. His one hit musical, Once Upon a Mattress (1959), written with Mary Rodgers, kept him in spending money for many years, but although he certainly tried, he was never able to produce another such hit. “The Hills are Alive,” Barer complained, “with the sound of Unpublished Music…mostly from Unproduced Musicals….” Only one other show—Pousse-Café (1966), which the lyricist wrote with the great Duke Ellington—managed to make it into production, but it was a dismal failure, lasting only three days. If B.J. Ward’s CD sells, it will not be because of the fame of its subject or even, I’m sorry to say, the fame of its excellent singer: it will be because of the quality of Marshall Barer’s work.

That quality is very high, and Ward’s CD is a marvelous introduction to this enigmatic, vital writer / singer / visual artist. Barer’s comic songs are side-splittingly funny and his tender songs wonderfully tender. Here are a few lines from one of the comic pieces, “Shall We Join the Ladies”—sung by Ward in full Noël Coward:

At a quarter to seven we sat down to dine 
The porter was heaven, the filet was fine 
The mere fact that you thought it a quarter to nine 
When it was twenty past ten is an excellent sign 
And a clear corroboration that whenever you combine 
A little sparkling conversation with an educated wine 
You bring about a combination you could rightfully define 
As frightfully, delightfully divine… 
Shall we join the ladies?

Note the abundance of rhymes and the fact that the wine is “educated” while the conversation is “sparkling.” The song proposes madly to join the ladies to each other and goes on,

enormous lady} 
With two tremendous—eyes 
Than twenty with forty 
Of ordin’ry size 



I move we join those darling daughters 
I mean join them to each other 
And make one huge mother. 
You maintain that if she’s big she’ll be ungainly 
I maintain that you’re a prig who spouts inanely 
My cousin Clarissa weighed four hundred pounds 
And wasn’t fat at all 
She was in fact quite slender 
Of course she was tall, terribly tall….

Here Barer is being tender:

Shall I, my love, compare thee to 
Baba au rhum or summer’s day 
Handel chorale or Malibu 
Ruebens, Ravel or Mel Tormé… 
Racking my brain for fitting praise 
Seeking in vain the perfect phrase 
Combing through piles of poems and plays 
Haunting the aisles at Doubleday’s….

Or, from another song,

Something known but never spoken 
Something natural yet set apart 
Sweet and swift, a glimpse of something shining 
Seen from the corner of your heart….

There are many, many highlights on this CD—including Ward’s charming duet with Mary Rodgers’ son, Adam Guettel—but perhaps the one track that will stay longest in my memory is the concluding number, “Wasn’t It Romantic? / Isn’t It Romantic?” The music to this song was written by Hugh Martin, who with Ralph Blane wrote the songs for the enchanting forties’ musical, Meet Me in Saint Louis. The Barer / Martin piece was originally written for Jeanette MacDonald. As the title suggests, “Wasn’t It Romantic?” was conceived as a counterpoint to Rodgers and Hart’s great song, “Isn’t It Romantic?” The Barer / Martin song is an assertion that the past remains vivid, present:

Though the world has grown cold, we can banish the chill 
We can order the present to vanish at will 
We can darken the room 
We can start the machine 
And from here in the gloom 
As we gaze at the screen 
We can step into yesterday still 
We can step into yesterday still

The entranceway Barer has in mind is obviously film (“We can start the machine…we gaze at the screen”). But in fact the entranceway is not so much film as it is the human imagination spurred on by the promptings of an extraordinary moment—a conjunction of past and present. The song is a brilliant evocation of a “lost” time—of “lost” songs, “lost” people, “lost” things. (Not for nothing does Barer jokingly compare himself to Marcel Proust.)

In the original conception, “Wasn’t It Romantic?” was to have been sung by Jeanette MacDonald as a duet with her own screen image singing “Isn’t It Romantic?,” which she sang in the 1932 film, Love Me Tonight. Unfortunately, MacDonald died before the show could be mounted, and so Barer had one more notch in his belt of unproduced musicals. Some of the Barer / Martin songs, however, have found their way into the repertoire of cabaret singers. A few years ago, Michael Feinstein came out with a superb CD, Michael Feinstein Sings the Hugh Martin Songbook. On that CD Feinstein performs a beautiful version of the Barer / Martin song, “Here Come the Dreamers.” On the B.J. Ward CD, Feinstein joins Ward to sing “Wasn’t It Romantic? / Isn’t It Romantic?” It is one of those rare moments in which two singers’ voices mesh so perfectly that you get lost in the beautiful interplay of their sounds—“you are the music while the music lasts,” T.S. Eliot wrote. This Barer / Martin song is perhaps the most exquisite piece Marshall Barer ever wrote—but the Ward / Feinstein rendition matches it perfectly. After playing the three-and-a-half minute track some fifteen or sixteen consecutive times on my car stereo, I realized that there was nothing that could follow such an experience and I turned the contraption off. The song was literally “enchanting” me; I wished to stay in its “spell.” Note the “white willows” and the “bright silver”: Barer is thinking of a black and white film. Ward and Feinstein capture the “glow” perfectly:

How lovely the glow that I recall 
How lovely to know that love was all 
White willows in the moonlight 
Bright silver in the stream 
Oh, did it really happen 
Or was it just a dream? 
No matter, I still await the moment when 
I will know romance again.

You can see Marshall Barer perform one of his songs in the Henry Jaglom film, Venice / Venice (1992). (The film also shows you Barer’s home.) But if you want something like “the essence of Marshall Barer,” you would do well to pick up B.J. Ward Sings Marshall Barer. The CD is a loving tribute to this extraordinary writer and performer. (Through the magic of recording, Ward is able to sing a duet with Barer—another of the delightful Barer / Martin songs, “On Such a Night As This.”) But B.J. Ward’s CD is more than merely a tribute. It is a great joy, an enchantment. It enables Marshall Barer—in the words of one of his lyrics—to “be here now.”

Michael Feinstein Presents B.J. Ward Sings Marshall Barer is available from the Concord Music Group, Inc., 100 N. Crescent Drive, Ste. 275, Beverley Hills, CA 90210. You can also find it at the website: www.concordmusicgroup.com.