Eclectic Company: Amateur (In The Best Sense) Nights In Laura’s Company

My best buddy from law school, Laura, has been relocated for work from New York to San Francisco, which is also a wonderful town filled with culture, but not at all the same thing if you’re a theatergoer — Broadway is the only Broadway, after all — or if your primary musical habits are of the operatic and classical persuasions. “There’s just no comparison,” Laura told me, measuring the numbers of productions and performances offered: “The Met puts on more than 24 operas a year over nearly nine months, while the San Francisco Opera may put on nine or 10 operas over as many or fewer weeks.” That means that an opera aficionado can barely whet her appetite for powerful vocals in the foggy city high above the Bay.

Which is why Laura recently visited New York – to attend opera, theatre, and concerts, timed to coincide with her performance in her club’s third annual talent show. She’s a member of Lotos, a literary club whose notable members involved in some aspect of the arts have included Mark Twain (humorist/author), President William Howard Taft, John Kander and Fred Ebb (composers of Broadway shows like Cabaret), Mary Higgins Clark (the mystery writer and mom of Carol Higgins Clark, the mystery writer), Stan Hart (comedy writer for Mad magazine and “The Carol Burnett Show”), and plenty of famous and even infamous others. Laura, who was a professional opera singer before changing careers, was going to be singing mostly show tunes written by past and present club members, and current club members, not necessarily professional performers, were going to share the cabaret-style stage with her. What those of us friends who were invited to “Lotos Got Talent” were promised was that the drinks (before, “come early enough to take your second drink in to the show”) and the food (after, in the Grill Room, where Lotos serves “state” dinners feting famous folk like Hubert Humphrey!) would be well worth our attention. Turns out that Laura was a little too self-deprecating; yes, the drink and food were wonderful, as was the setting — an Upper East Side French Renaissance mansion with marble and gilding and draperies and chandeliers enough to make us gape — but the entertainment was genuinely delightful.

First, the songs and recitations and scenes from famous plays were mostly written by Lotos club members (the operetta composers W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (joined in 1879), playwright Arthur Miller (joined in 1998), modern classical composer Aaron Copland (joined in 1978) and musical theatre composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (joined in 1994) were among them). We were predisposed to love Laura, of course, and in her solo turn (“Love Me Or Leave Me” by Lotos member Sammy Cahn who joined in 1980 and Nicholas Brodszky) and ensemble roles (“You Could Drive A Person Crazy” from Company by Sondheim, and ‘Money, Money” by Kander and Ebb from Cabaret) she shone. There were a few other standouts — Bruce Rabbino (realtor by day) gave us the Gilbert and Sullivan patter song “A Modern Major General” from the Pirates of Penzance, and later knocked our socks off with a boffo “Old Man River” from Show Boat by club member Oscar Hammerstein II (who joined in 1952) and Jerome Kern; Jill Witten, who plays with several chamber groups, offered Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude, Opus 32, No. 9 in A Major” for piano with great sensitivity; and Dorothy Parker’s witty satirical verses “These Much Too Charming People” and “Bohemia” were recited by Carol Robinson in Parker’s persona, sending chills of venom that broke out in laughter, after. When the show ended after barely an hour, we glided down the grand staircase to our dinner, and the wine and witty conversation flowed.

Laura had finely feted us, so I returned the favor and battened on her for a week in San Francisco, lured by the promise of a Richard Thompson all request show, and some fine meals and sightseeing to boot. I arrived late on a Wednesday night, and squeezed into Laura’s minuscule garage with a tiny red rented Ford Fiesta that had a dashboard like a rocketship’s with about a million options for satellite and other radio that I barely learned to play until I was about to return the car. Somehow Laura found SiriusXM’s Country stations, and locked onto a bluegrass show that amused us most of the way down to the Montalvo Art Center in Saratoga for RT’s Friday night show.

This was the first of three such nights, and since Thompson is a major cult favorite, the set lists from the all request shows were soon posted on the web, and circulating among the fans. We’d had a fine time on Friday, during which we heard mostly RT’s songs, along with “The Dark End of The Street,” performed with George Galt on harmonica (the self-effacing musician’s reverberant style was a perfect accompaniment to RT’s acoustic guitar) by Muscle Shoals musicians Dan Penn and Chips Moman (and made famous by dozens of artists, including soul singer Percy Sledge, and the band in the Irish film of Roddy Doyle’s book The Commitments), and a Herman’s Hermits’ medley including “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter,” “I’m Henry The Eighth, I Am,” “(Something Tells Me) I’m Into Something Good” and “Silhouettes.” A fine time, that is, until we saw the set lists for the Saturday night (sold out before we bought our tickets) and Sunday night shows (“why don’t you drive down here again,” our friend and RT’s wife Nancy suggested, but we had previous plans) and contracted bad cases of concert envy. “Damn it,” Laura mock-fumed in her forwarding email with the set lists. “They all had more fun than we did!” Not so, kemosabe. They just had different fun. Okay, it was pretty great to see/hear him make fun of Britney Spears with his version of “Oops! I Did It Again” a few years back, and he did that in our absence on Saturday night. And I wouldn’t have minded hearing either “The Mingulay Boat Song,” a sea chantey (more on this subject next time), or Neil Diamond’s “I’m A Believer,” made famous by Davy Jones, Mike Nesmith, Mickey Dolenz and Peter Tork, collectively known as The Monkees, both performed on Sunday. I guess we really missed out there. Nope. Much delight was had by the SRO audience our night too.