George Gershwin Alone

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 evocatively haunting piano pieces, “A Rhapsody in Blue”, in the repertoire. But in this often soporific evening, the thought steals over you that, thank goodness he died young: there’s not much more to go in the biographical stakes.

In the songs stakes, however, there’s more than enough to choose from. Gershwin composed over 1,000 songs in total – and it seems at times that, like Judy Garland, Felder’s going to keep us there all night and do the lot.

While George Gershwin Alone mostly resembles a cabaret biography, it turns into a concert recital towards the end for a fairly rhapsodic “Rhapsody”, performed in full, which provides the most authentic demonstration of Gershwin’s genius (and pushes this show up from a one-star rating to two) than the phoney revelations that precede it.

But the magic is dispelled by a Sing-a-long-a-Gershwin curtain call routine, in which the audience are invited to shout out their favourites for a little karaoke-style medley.

While Felder, breaking free at last of the biographical constraints he’s previously set himself, now comes across far more informally – and smartly sneaks in the one unknown song of the evening, something Gershwin composed for the 1923 Rainbow Revue called “Sunday in London Town” – you can’t help feeling that both this show and its performer would be far more comfortably installed in a cabaret room like Pizza on the Park.

– Mark Shenton