POP MUSIC REVIEW : Grey’s Mixed Results From America’s Past at Bowl

Joel Grey’s Hollywood Bowl appearance Saturday night featured a curiously antiquarian look at the rapidly receding entertainment world past.

As the star performer at the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra’s Great American Concert, Grey’s quirky impressions of George M. Cohan, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante and Al Jolson had a kind of appropriately patriotic charm--especially in the Cohan medley of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “It’s a Grand Old Flag.”

But the tepid applause from the capacity crowd suggested that their familiarity with the objects of Grey’s mimicry may have ranged from mild to none. Worse, the Jolson impression--”Rock-a-bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody,” complete with minstrel show white gloves--was an inappropriate reference to an aspect of the entertainment past best left behind, and should be eliminated from his act.

The Bowl Orchestra, under John Mauceri, appears finally to be emerging with a voice of its own. Much of the ensemble’s portion of the program was devoted to such ephemera as Leroy Anderson’s “The Waltzing Cat” and the recently discovered (and eminently forgettable) Max Steiner overture for the 1944 film, “The Adventures of Mark Twain.”

Given a piece of music (Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances From ‘West Side Story’ ”) that demanded both technical skill and stylistic diversity, however, the orchestra revealed its true strengths--a warm textural richness, a powerful rhythmic momentum and the capacity to generate captivating dramatic interpretations.

The Great American Concert was also performed before a capacity crowd at the Bowl on Friday.