Review: ATCs 'Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin'

That’s where Arizona Theatre Company opened “Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin” Friday, and the evening of songs by and stories about the master songwriter was full of oohs and aahs and sing-alongs. The audience ate it up, and who can blame them? There are those tunes. And this: Felder does a good Berlin, tickles the ivories beautifully, and has no problem pulling at the heartstrings.

Yup, Felder does it all — plays Berlin young and Berlin old, his wife, an unpleasant secretary who advises that “God Bless America” is just too cloying … heck, he even does a brassy Ethel Merman.

But most of all, he reminds us how great Berlin’s music is. At the piano, and at one point, acapella, Felder crooned songs that defined much of the 20th century but still resonate, such as “White Christmas,” “Always,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and, yes, “God Bless America.”

At times, Felder stretched out his hand and invited the audience to sing along. Oh, and they did — in tune and with the right words. Berlin’s songs may be old, but they have melodies and lyrics that have stuck around. It’s not for nothing that Jerome Kern said “Irving Berlin has no place in American music; he is American music.”

The show opens with Felder standing over a wheelchair and explaining to the invisible person sitting there that the carolers outside singing Berlin’s songs should be invited in and told the stories behind his music. It isn’t long before we realize it’s young Berlin addressing older Berlin.

With that setup, Felder-as-Berlin takes us back to the composer’s early days in Russia as he watched soldiers burn his family’s village to the ground, to a boyhood of poverty on New York’s Lower East Side, to the great loves and losses in his life, and through his meteoric rise as a songwriter, starting with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” written — and a huge hit — in 1911 when Berlin was 23.

He went on to write more than 1,500 songs in his 60-year career, topping the charts with 25 of them. Berlin loved his adopted country, and was a sentimental guy. He was also a curmudgeon. Felder mostly gave us the sentimental Berlin, but there was a taste of that grump, who retreated to his home and became a bitter recluse when the advent of rock and roll and the ‘60s put his patriotic songs and lovely melodies out of fashion.

At two hours with no intermission, the play could use a trim. And there were a few too-schmaltzy moments, such as when Felder says “I wrote for love. I wrote for my country. I wrote for you,” gesturing to the audience. It’s hard not to roll the eyes at the corniness.

But heck, Berlin was corny. And wonderful. Felder does a fine job of reminding us of that.