Opinion: Kitty Sings Greats
Kitty Carlisle Hart took the stage at the Bay Street Theatre Saturday night and for one delicious hour talked and sang and thoroughly charmed a packed house. She entertained and educated as well, in a personal chronicle of the American musical theater drawn from a long and intimate association.
The wife of the playwright Moss Hart, the actress was both friend and confidant to almost every composer and lyricist from the 1930s - when "there were 70 New York theaters and as many as 50 musicals running simultaneously" - until the early '60s.
We're talking serious greats here: Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers.
A Polished Act
Ms. Hart also included in her narrative and reminiscences such ordinary greats as George Abbott, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan J. Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Lorenz Hart (no relation), Florenz Ziegfeld, Ira Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Stephen Sondheim, and, naturally, Moss Hart ("Why does that name keep cropping up?" she wondered).
It is a polished act, and one that is easy to follow because Ms. Hart, in a strong, comforting, and cultivated speaking voice, keeps things simple. Her sense of humor and self-deprecating manner captivated. Asked, for example, to audition for the Moss Hart-Cole Porter musical "Jubilee" by singing "Just One of Those Things," she confided, "I didn't get the part, but I got the man!"
Ms. Hart showed on Saturday she still can reach the high notes, with not too much less effort than in her Metropolitan Opera roles ("Die Fledermaus" and "The Rape of Lucretia") or on Broadway ("Champagne Sec," "On Your Toes"), or the movies (she was in the Marx Brothers classic, "A Night at the Opera").
Famous Legs
Gracefully, she punctuated her anecdotes with songs, accompanied on the piano by Alex Rybeck, himself a veteran of Broadway musicals. Among other favorites, the audience appreciated "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," "My Ship," "Always," "September Song," and the closing number, sung in lovely voice, Rogers and Hammerstein's "Something Wonderful."
Though she concentrated on her own theatrical career, Ms. Hart did not neglect stage history from other periods - ragtime, vaudeville, the advent of "naked people on stage."
"Tin Pan Alley," she explained, was a leg of West 28th Street "where all the composers worked, and so named because of all the noise they made."
Kitty Carlisle Hart is somewhere in her 80s now, yet trim, slim, fit of figure, stylish - elegant, even - energetic, gracious, and ramrod-straight. She mentioned "legs" a number of times. She was famous for hers, and they are still among the best gams struttin' a stage - octogenarian or otherwise.
It's no coincidence that her knee-length, midnight-blue dress showed them off!
She is, it seems, always on the move, as tireless offstage as on. She served for 25 years on the New York State Council on the Arts, 20 of them - from 1976 until she stepped down earlier this year - as chairwoman. In 1991, President Bush awarded her the National Medal of Arts.
If the warm and frequent applause and a standing ovation were any indication, Ms. Hart disappointed only those who waited too long to buy tickets to her show, the offspring of a series born at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is to travel to New York and several other cities.
She could have filled the house all over again with just the people who were turned away at the door and on the telephone.