|
A Model Modern Musical Marriage
Music Review | John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey
An actual reference to a couple pooling their resources occurs in “Small World” (from “Gypsy”), which Ms. Molaskey sings with a little-girl sweetness inflected with anxiety: “We could pool our resources by joining forces from now on.” Those combined forces encompass an enormous slice of the American songbook, some of it tinged with a Brazilian accent. Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, Paul Simon, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joni Mitchell find equal footing. There is no then and now. Everything is of the moment, freshly reimagined, alive and breathing. This brilliant show mixes and matches songs in medleys and sequences that flow like a continuing dialogue about life, relationships and popular culture itself. The common denominator is a playful sense of humor. Mr. Pizzarelli and Ms. Molaskey are masters of off-the-cuff repartee, both musical and conversational. You may remember “The Old Musical Marriage.” Its standard bearers, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, played a softened version of the smoothie and his long-suffering “little woman” exchanging affectionately barbed gibes. In “The New Musical Marriage” the hostilities have subsided. The husband and wife are equal partners in a shared adventure in which each gives the other the courage to leap to the next rock as they cross the river. A giant leap is made by Ms. Molaskey with her inside-out version of “A Wonderful Guy,” which takes it cue from the words, “no more a smart little girl with no heart.” Instead of a crow of triumph, she turns it into a former cynic’s stumbling, shamefaced confession of blind adoration. If she invests it with enough humor to make you smile, she also makes it ring as a serious postfeminist examination of old-fashioned hero worship. What Mr. Pizzarelli called the show’s “marriage trilogy” goes even deeper. It begins with a dazzling fusion of the jazz standard “Cloudburst” with “Getting Married Today” (from “Company”), delivered as a his-hers, push-pull, tongue-twisting verbal torrent. After segueing into a quiet “Sorry-Grateful” (also from “Company”) murmured by Mr. Pizzarelli, it ends with “Hearts and Bones,” Paul Simon’s story of a couple (“one and one-half wandering Jews”) who can’t live with (or without) each other. This complicated, private song is rendered by Ms. Molaskey with extraordinary lucidity. Deepest of all is a fusion of “The Circle Game,” arranged as a bossa nova riding on off-kilter jazz-guitar chords and sung by Ms. Molaskey with a feverish sense of peril, with Mr. Jobim’s hymn to the elements, “Waters of March,” sung by Mr. Pizzarelli in a tone of quiet reassurance; eventually the songs mesh. This is it: two people “captive on the carousel of time,” whirling unsteadily into the future but grounded by the earth, the totality of life tossed off in a song.
|
This is what Mr. Pizzarelli, the friendly Nat King Cole of jazz
guitar, and his wife, Ms. Molaskey, a high-strung singing actress who swings
hard while giving song lyrics a post-Freudian once-over filtered through