Hershey Felder tells the inimitable immigrant success story of iconic songwriter Irving Berlin
If there was a presidential cabinet post for songwriters, Irving Berlin (1888-1989) would surely have been the first appointment. He wrote about 1,500 songs and not only did many of them sell phenomenally well, but they included some of the best advertisements for America ever devised: “God Bless America,” an alternate national anthem, and “White Christmas” still touch something deep — either real or imagined — within the American breast.
Berlin wrote the first song ever used in a sound motion picture, “Blue Skies” (from “The Jazz Singer” in 1929) and songs for 19 Broadway shows and 18 movies. He’s widely considered to be the most successful songwriters of all time; “White Christmas” is said to be the biggest-grossing song ever. Berlin love songs like “Cheek to Cheek,” “How Deep Is the Ocean” and “They Say It’s Wonderful” still speak plainly yet eloquently about affairs of the heart. Not bad for an unlettered immigrant for whom English was a second language.
Though his music serves as a solid, if recessed, bedrock of American popular song, as a man Berlin was known to the public chiefly through his songs. “Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin,” the one-man show, opens Thursday at the Pasadena Playhouse (through Aug. 7). The critically acclaimed production illuminates the writer and the man through text and some of the best-known songs of 20th-century America.
His birth name was Israel Isadore Baline. He was born in the first Russian settlement in Siberia, the son of a rabbi and cantor. A Cossack pogrom wiped out his village and his family made its way to New York City. Baline’s hardscrabble life on the Lower East Side saw him drop out of school after two years, and run away from home at 14. Leading a blind singer around, selling newspapers and acting as a plant in a vaudeville house were some of the ways he survived. Baline’s entry into show business was crafting dialect songs for the pianist in a Chinatown saloon. The sheet music to “Marie From Sunny Italy” mangled the composer credit into “I. Berlin.”
Canadian-born Felder is a concert pianist, composer and actor who has essayed several one-man productions about great men of music, including composers Franz Liszt and George Gershwin and composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein.
On the phone for a very short time from parts unknown, Felder recently spoke about Berlin and his production. Asked about the formidable contributions of Russian Jews (Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw among them) to American popular music, Felder says: “I don’t think there was anything special about their origins. Poles and Hungarians and Litvak Jews were just as musical, and they were all good storytellers. Berlin’s songs all tell stories, and his time on the Lower East Side developed a sharp ear for immigrant languages and speech.”
“Berlin was not only brilliant,” Felder continues, “his story is much more remarkable than I could originally imagine. He saw his village burned to the ground at age 5 and in 1909 he had the biggest song in America—’Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’ And that was just his first big success.”
“God Bless America,” was written for a forgotten 1918 show and Berlin withdrew it. Twenty years later he handed it to the popular young singer Kate Smith. The song cut through the prevailing American mood of isolationism and stirred hearts. Though it may sound square to 21st-century ears, Felder admonishes, “She was a great singer and it’s a great song; it connected with people as it still does.” In a grand gesture, Berlin signed over all of the song’s royalties to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America.
What animated Berlin? “He was profoundly grateful to this country,” Felder asserts. “America gave him everything — opportunity, a great career and a family, and his response was to thank it generously.”
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What: ‘Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin’
Where: Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena
When: July 21 through Aug. 7
Contact: (626) 792-8672, www.pasadenaplayhouse.org/
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KIRK SILSBEE writes about jazz and culture for Marquee.