Gershwin Alone

Synopsis

A play with music about the legendary American composer George Gershwin. It features Gershwin sitting at a piano playing several songs, including parts of Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris and Porgy and Bess. Between numbers, he speaks about his childhood, parents and siblings Ira, Arthur and Frances. He also discusses where and when songs were composed and offers a peek into how a composer and lyricist work together.

Our Review:

17 February 2004

No show that features songs like “Fascinating Rhythm”, “‘S Wonderful”, “The Man I Love”, “I Got Rhythm”, “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Embraceable You” can be all bad. But George Gershwin Alone makes a concerted effort to drown them in its self-indulgent path.

The show is more or less exactly what it says on the label, except that a self-styled “actor, playwright, composer and Steinway Concert Artist”, as a programme biography modestly credits Hershey Felder, stands in for Gershwin in a monumental act of vanity and self-promotion that has him ‘channelling’ one of the signature composers – maybe the signature talent – of the first half of the 20th century.

Gershwin, the son of Russian immigrant parents, was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1898 and died in 1937 of an undiagnosed brain tumour, aged just 38, having composed a body of work that includes arguably the greatest indigenous American opera, Porgy and Bess, and one of the most evo...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (170.148.92.53) - 29 March 2004:

Informative, musical, entertaining. The piano playing is more than adequate and real fun if you like Gershwin. The audience sing-a-long was LOVED by the crowd......the audience really liked the whole show so don't believe the nitpicking reviews. ...

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