Today's Sanity Check

This is how it's done.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Mr. America

There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Camp." ... 

Not only is Camp not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be 

approached as Camp merits the most serious admiration and study. 

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Let's have this wonderful moment, from 1975, stand as a birthday tribute to the song's creator, dear Mr. Irving Berlin.  If, over his long life, he became something of an American institution, this lady is part of the reason why.  Ethel Merman sang the work of all the greats of her day, of course, and while she did proud by Gershwin and Porter, and later on the likes of Sondheim and Herman, something about an Irving Berlin song fits her like a glove.

And never more, really, than this song, both her trademark and, on its own, a monumental summing up of the show-biz culture that was passing even as the show it's from, Annie Get Your Gun, took the stage.  Seeing the Merm here, fronting a band that can really challenge her, is like watching a racehorse test its mettle.  Within a few bars, she's abandoned even the minimal concessions of scale and gesture she usually made for TV and lets us see, if in an autumnal way, the sheer unbridled staginess of her performing style, her stand-and-delivery way of putting over a song.  Some singers (Peggy Lee, Julie London) seduce you.  Some (Minnelli and her mother, Streisand) sell it to you.  Merman simply puts it out there, look at what I can do (and anything you can do, I can do better - that's more Berlin, actually).

What makes it Camp, though, isn't the song, or the singer - despite the chiffon muu-muu and the hair out to there, Merman is, I think, too good to be Camp.  It's the whole package - the Boston Pops, Arthur Fiedler, the countless genteel households tuning in across the country on PBS, the adoration of the audience, even the hushed tones of Miss Bernadette Peters setting the scene.  It's a tinsel setting for a voice of brass, but the voice cuts through the nonsense to deliver, once more, the goods: the costumes, the scenery, the makeup the props - all there, in front of you.  When she sings it, what Irving Berlin knew as a fact is conjured up again, and it really is like no business you know.

Everything the Traffic will Allow

In honor of the great lady's 105th, and just because nothing perks up a drab Wednesday like a little Irving Berlin, I thought it might be fun to survey a few off-the-beaten-track versions of one of the Merm's signature tunes.  Sadly, there's no video evidence for my personal favorite, which is Tyne Daly singing a slow, slow, sad version of the song that, as she herself has said, "makes strong men weep."  Still, there's a surprising variety of takes on the old chestnut.  Sit back and enjoy.

First off, to get thing going on a truly surreal note, here we have the good Damen und Herren of the German Army's Heeresmusikkorps 4 in a swinging instrumental rendition filmed in a garden in Regensburg.  One can only wonder what the erstwhile Israel Beilin would have made of it...

Next up, Welsh songbird Mary "Those were the Days" Hopkin warbles her way through a rather solemn version of the song, as arranged by Beatles' producer George Martin.  Pretty.

Sister 'Retha's unexpected version is sadly truncated, but entirely creditable.  Of any version, hers perhaps approaches the original in terms of sheer lung power.

That said, this magisterial version by tragic UK thrush Lena Zavaroni comes close.  Unfortunately, it segues into one of those uncomfortable "End of Benefit Gala Finale" sway-n-sings, to "That's Entertainment," which rather undercuts the impact.

The lovely and talented Mr. Nathan Lane leads the ensemble through a spirited rendition from Kenneth Branagh's moderately awful go at Love's Labour's Lost.  It's fun, but kind of lumbering.

Here's a version that competes head-to-head in terms of sheer show-biz professionalism.  Rosemary Clooney had the musical chops to give it more swing than the Merm ever tried, and by 1985, when this was taped, she had the backstory to make the lyric work, too.  Terrific.

Still, there's nothing like the real thing.  This one's familiar, I know, but I never fail to marvel at how, for whatever reason, the Muppets bring out something tender and rather magical in the old girl, a rare occasion in her later career in which she backed off from being "Miss Birdseye," unfroze her set-in-stone arrangements, and did something a little different.  The moment she gets to "the closing, when the customers don't come..." is indescribable.

Merman was a warhorse, a trouper, a star virtually from the first moment she set foot on Broadway.  Few performers have ever had a clearer vision of who they are and what they do, and if the price of that, in the long run, was that moments of spontaneity and vulnerability like the above were few and far between, it meant that she had the stamina to delight audiences, night after night, in halls around the world, for decades, live and in person and generally with nothing so vulgar as a microphone in sight.  It's almost impossible to imagine, in a world of spoiled divas and post-teen has-beens, the discipline and dedication it took, being Ethel Merman.  Brava to her, on her birthday and always.

New York Nightlife

Wouldn't you love to know what Irving had just said to get that expression out of the Merm?

I'm glad to see that, even at the Stork Club, she stuck with beer, and apparently straight out of the bottle. You can take the stenographer out of Astoria...