A Look Behind the Name in Lights

Kirby was sitting at the piano in front of a window. It was raining, as it does in the San Fernando Valley, as if it would not stop until water reached the windowsills. There was a fireplace with a soft fire gossiping to itself and the scent of the rain.

Kirby Tepper’s parents weren’t home, and Kirby was entertaining himself and me by playing the piano. He played an insistent melody, with the refrain picking up the counterpoints of the rain and the fire. “What’s that, Kirby?” I asked after awhile. He said, “Oh, nothing. I’m just noodling.”

It was the kind of melody scrap that hurts like a half-forgotten love you thought was safely laid to rest.

I thought to myself that Kirby, then about 16, had a pouch full of gifts. The kid could dance, sing, compose, play the piano like an angel. He is the son of very high-test friends of mine, his father a trial lawyer and his mother a television executive, and I have rejoiced in their friendship for more than 20 years.

Kirby, even at 16, had the effortless style of a seasoned pro, the kind of presentation that is seldom in place until it has been shined and molded by nights without end in front of an audience.

I saw him again the other night at the Cinegrill. When we turned the corner to the parking lot, I saw the name Kirby Tepper in lights on the sign on top of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. I screamed with delight. He has a nightclub act, with songs he has written, tongue-in-cheek songs, love songs.

Since that rainy afternoon when I knew that Kirby was gifted with a large load of talent, he has done the pro forma internship. He made the pilgrimage to New York and landed a job in the revival of “On Your Toes,” directed by its originator, George Abbott, one of the revered names in musical comedy history. It was the year Abbott received the Kennedy Center honors for his body of work. So the show ran for a couple of weeks in Washington, D.C., and then went to Broadway, where it ran for a year and a half.

Then Kirby came back to Los Angeles and continued to study his craft. He wrote and was the linchpin in a show called, “Back Home--A Los Angeles Musical,” at the Cast Theater in Hollywood. Kirby closed the show after six months because he wanted to do other things, and every week of its run, “Back Home” was named Critics’ Choice for Los Angeles.

I asked him the other day what was the toughest material to write. He looked at me as if I were speaking Urdu. “It isn’t hard,” he said. “It all comes easy. I love to do the comic songs and have the people laugh. It’s like doing a comic scene.”

He has been commissioned to write numbers for other performers, which he also likes to do.

Danny Simon, brother of the icon Neil Simon, worked with Kirby on writing comedy.

The act opens with a song called, “Don’t You Just Love It Here,” a paean to Los Angeles.

The pace and feeling change with a song about two people in love who then look at each other and realize there is nothing there but a bittersweet fragrance in the air. He calls it, “What Happened This Time.” Kirby is joined for this and other numbers by singer Kimberlee Baxter.

Kirby does a good-natured send-up of Michael Feinstein, playing the piano thumpingly and hitting some fractured glissandos and vocal clinkers.

One of his songs is, “The Girl With Her Hair in a Bun,” which is a study of every toplofty ballerina who ever looked down her delicate nose at any other kind of dancing.

Kirby does a comedy song on the Santa Fe-Sedona craze, which caused perfectly sane people to do their houses in desert colors with replicas of Indian cliff-dweller ladders reaching up to nowhere.

His accompanist for the evening is a young man named David Holcenberg.

He will appear at the Cinegrill again toward the end of summer, and he will return to the Gardenia, a Hollywood nightclub that has sent forth a number of performers.

When I saw him at the Cinegrill, I thought of that young boy sitting at the piano on a rainy afternoon, “just noodling.” Now his name is in lights.