"I call the show a revue-sical - half revue, half musical," says LeFevre, the music director who conducts a nine-piece Dixieland ensemble as well as playing the piano - "upstage, center" - throughout the show. "It's a revue, but it has a storyline and characters you care about. We cram an awful lot into two hours."
The show is structured around the metaphor of a piano, a prop that offers an ironic note, since Berlin - the iconic creator of so many classic American hits - barely knew how to read music and taught himself to play the piano. "He could only play in one key, which is F-sharp major, all the black keys," LeFevre says. "He had a piano and if you moved a lever, it would transpose all the keys."
This musical revue was launched in a Denver workshop five years ago and performed at several regional theaters before being transformed this year into a touring show by director and choreographer Ray Roderick. "Piano," with a cast of six singers/actors, opened in Boston in September and will play Tuesday through Nov. 18 at Salt Lake City's Capitol Theatre. During a phone interview from a bus in southeast Iowa, LeFevre, a classically trained pianist, explained why bringing to life classic American pop songs is rocking his world.
Berlin's songs are such classics, particularly to the World War II generation. What's it like to perform them?
That I get to play these songs every night is such an honor. I get chills every night.
Do you have a favorite song in the show?
For me, the end of the first act is a really powerful moment. You have a soldier off at war, writing a letter back home, and he sings "White Christmas." Then there's a big victory kiss between the soldier and his girl back home. There are so many times I look out into the audience and I see older women holding onto their husbands' hands - it's a moment that resonates.
And how do these songs play to a younger audience?
I was rehearsing this show and playing the score this summer at a summer stock theater in Forestburgh, N.Y. And the teenagers in the chorus would rush up to me and say: "Could you play that song again? That was great. I want to dance to it." It's scary how much these songs hit home, especially since we're at war right now. This show is so appropriate for today to have songs of joy, that take sadness and turn them upside down.
What sets this show apart from other revues?
This show makes a difference for people. I get to play this music every night, and it's absolutely gorgeous. It's not done so much anymore, it's not in people's songbooks, they don't audition with it. And the audience leaps to their feet every night. You just see them jumping out of their chairs, and that's unlike anything I've ever seen before in the theater.
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* ELLEN FAGG can be contacted at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
* "I LOVE A PIANO," a new musical revue of the Irving Berlin songbook, plays Tuesday through Nov. 18 at the Capitol Theatre, 50 W. 200 South, Salt Lake City. Curtain is at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; and 2 and 7 p.m. Nov. 18.
* TICKETS ARE $27.50 to $47.50 (plus $2-$5 facility and service fees); call 801-355-ARTS or visit www.ArtTix.org.
