Andrew MacDonald-Smith with Irving Berin, My First Hundred Years. Image by Ryan Parker

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

That Andrew MacDonald-Smith sure gets around.

Crazy, the people he’s known! Those great times in New York with Irving Berlin and the Gershwin brothers. The fun of Berlin in the ‘20s, yes, he happened to be there too, hanging out with Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Uncanny how often he happens to be in the right place at the right time.

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In My First Hundred Years, a new “biographical cabaret retrospective” he and playwright Stewart Lemoine have created for Edmonton Opera, MacDonald-Smith shares stories and sings songs from a century of great connections, from the 20s to the ‘70s of Dolly Parton.

The idea of “a musical event” outside the Edmonton Opera’s usual programming came from the company’s enterprising new artistic director Joel Ivany. He was keen to reach out to different audiences in different venues, with smaller-scale shows. And he approached Teatro Live! co-artistic director MacDonald-Smith, who told him “the way I’d enjoy that most is with my best friend as a collaborator.” That would be Teatro resident playwright Stewart Lemoine, opera fan extraordinaire who often includes classical music in the fabric and storytelling of his plays.

And as Lemoine points out, it’s not as if instances of opera stars devising cabarets to demonstrate their versatility beyond the usual repertoire — “and show they can sing Leaving On A Jet Plane” — are not unknown.

The inspiration for the show, topening Thursday in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre, isn’t opera, though. It comes from the basic structure of cabarets, explains MacDonald-Smith. What is a cabaret, after all, but “someone singing a selection of songs and tying them together with stories from their life….?”

“Wouldn’t it be fun if my life could be anything we want it to be since we’re making it all up?” beams MacDonald-Smith. “Wouldn’t be fun if you could get the historical context of songs from someone who was there, as opposed to facts from Wikipedia?” says Lemoine.

Was MacDonald-Smith a player in these events, or did he just happen to be there as a witness? “A bit of both!” declare the collaborators together. “Observation and experience!” grins MacDonald-Smith, who plays … himself, Andrew MacDonald-Smith, a veritable Zelig of a guy, in the show. In Edmonton Opera’s resident pianist Frances Thielmann — “she’s a wonder!” says Lemoine emphatically — they acquired a third collaborator.

“We started with the title,” he says. Which gave them a century of music to choose from, starting with the Jazz Age, and moving right through the ‘30s and ‘40s and onward. Most of the 15 numbers in My First Hundred Years aren’t from musical theatre, a repertoire in which MacDonald-Smith excels and has a long and stellar resumé. Most, says Lemoine, are stand-alone — cabaret, vaudeville, parlour songs, pop songs. “Only two songs of the whole night I’ve sung before,” says MacDonald-Smith. “Which is fun!”

What has particularly intrigued Lemoine, he says, is to revisit songs that everyone has heard, and rediscover “the tempo and the tone with which they were originally conceived … to know what a song was before Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald got hold of it.” Ah, or in the case of Mack The Knife from Threepenny Opera, the pop ministrations of Bobby Darrin who yanked it out of its context and took it to the mainstream as a jaunty lounge-y ditty. “Suddenly you listen to the words, and you realize, hey, this is actually an interesting, violent song,” says MacDonald. “You get to think again what the song is, and was originally intended to be about.”

An inspiring source has been the cabaret oeuvre of the American composer/pianist William Bolcam, who wrote for and recorded with his cabaret singer wife Joan Morris. Their Vaudeville compilation from the mid-‘70s, which Lemoine has had since he was a teenager, is a compilation that includes such novelty ditties as The Bird on Nellie’s Hat. “After that they did Blue Skies, an all-Irving Berlin album, a Jerome Kern album, a Leiber and Stoller album. In Morris’s performance of Is That All There Is? on the latter, “you get to hear it with the Peggy Lee totally taken out of it,” as Lemoine puts it.

Since MacDonald-Smith, most recently in the Citadel’s Jersey Boys (“well, I did know Frankie Valli!” he laughs), is a time-traveller in his cabaret retrospective, you’ll be returned to songs you think you know, back in their original form. With Jay Gorney and Yip Harburg’s  Depression era hit Brother Can You Spare A Dime?, as he points out, most people know the beginning and the chorus. But “it’s a very different song when you hear all the lyrics” in the verses, including the telling “they used to tell me I was building a dream.”

The hardest song to pull off, he thinks, is Bolcom’s Black Max, “a satisfyingly difficult song to sing.” Says Lemoine, “it’s unexpected, a challenge because it never settles….” And there’s this plus: “even the most seasoned musical ear will not know it!”

There are two Gershwin songs in the show. “One of them, Ask Me Again, is rarely performed,” says Lemoine. “And we explain why.” He’s undoubtedly the first on his block to discover it by listening to the Berlin Philharmonic’s streaming service during their 2003 New Year’s Concert. The Broadway star Audra McDonald sang it on that occasion, tucked between two better known Gershwin songs.

Ah, and perhaps unexpectedly in a cabaret devised by theatre company collaborators for an opera company, there’s Dolly. MacDonald-Smith appeared in the Citadel production of her musical 9 to 5 a season ago. Says Lemoine “her world view is interesting and positive.” The song they picked was her catchy, bouncy 1978 hit Here You Come Again, “an interesting little monologue about being preoccupied with a person, not miserably but in a singular, positive way …. Someone comes into your life, and you should not engage but you do.”

It is entirely typical of the trio of collaborators that when they experimented with taking out the pop-y bounce of Dolly’s accompaniment, they made a discovery. “It sounds like Schubert,” says Lemoine. “Specifically, Schubert’s Im Furling (In Spring),” in which, lo and behold, the same thought as Dolly’s emerges.

Says Lemoine, “the singer is remembering the person they used to be in love with.”  Thielmann wondered “should I incorporate some Schubert into Dolly?” Lemoine laughs. “You can imagine what I said!”

PREVIEW

My First Hundred Years

Theatre: Edmonton Opera

Created by: Andrew MacDonald-Smith and Stewart Lemoine, in collaboration with Frances Thielmann

Starring: Andrew MacDonald-Smith

Where: Citadel Rice Theatre

Running: Thursday through Sunday

Tickets: edmontonopera.com