The American Theatre Wing threw a jolly bash Monday night honoring Andrew Lloyd Webber, who’s endowed a program to bring arts into schools.
Lloyd Webber had the best line of the night when he pointed out that Amy Winehouse and Adele attended the same publicly funded performing arts school in London. Those two careers, he added, have generated enough money for the music industry to justify government support for arts in schools.
Katrina Lenk, Tony winner for “The Band’s Visit,” held the black-tie crowd rapt with her rendition of “Tell Me on a Sunday” from Lloyd Webber’s “Song and Dance.”
I have no idea what Lenk plans to do when she leaves “The Band’s Visit,” but her performance stirred talk about a possible revival of “Song and Dance.” The musical, which opened on Broadway in 1985, was nominated for eight Tony Awards. Its star, Bernadette Peters, won Best Actress in a Musical.
True to its title, the show is a hybrid of song and dance. The first act tells the story of an English woman making her way in New York and Hollywood. The second, told through dance, centers on a young man who can’t commit to any of the women flitting through his life.
The score has some pretty tunes — including the haunting “Nothing Like You’ve Ever Known” — and a few problems. It was choreographed by Peter Martins, who retired from New York City Ballet this year amid allegations of sexual misconduct (which weren’t corroborated after an investigation), so might be wise to let someone else have a go. A good choice might be Justin Peck, who won the Tony this year for his work on “Carousel.”
Emma, the English woman in the show, is a cipher, floating from one unhappy love affair to the next. Lines such as “I’m a girl who lets men take advantage of me” would have to be tweaked for today. But Lenk’s performance showed the songs have strength.
A revival of “Song and Dance,” by the way, is touring China, where it’s proving extremely popular. If a Broadway revival isn’t viable right now, how about a run at City Center’s Encores!, starring Lenk? That would be a hot ticket.
Speaking of the American Theatre Wing: Patrick Pacheco has put together a nifty oral history of the organization to celebrate its centennial. Pacheco interviewed dozens of Broadway personalities who have benefited from and supported the Wing, which holds the copyright on the Tony Award.
Angela Lansbury, a British war refugee who attended drama school in New York in 1939 on a Wing scholarship, wrote the introduction.
The book abounds with memorable anecdotes. My favorite involves a playwright named Arnold Schulman, who was surviving on coffee and day-old bread while taking a class at the Wing taught by “Tea and Sympathy” author Robert Anderson. During one class, Schulman nearly fainted from hunger.
Around midnight, there was a knock on his door.
“There was Bob … with two enormous paper bags of groceries,” Schulman recalled. “In the morning, I found an envelope he had stuck into my mailbox. In the envelope were five $100 dollar bills.”
You can hear Michael Riedel weekdays on “Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning” on WOR radio 710.
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