A gem of a show for geriatrics

No, the crowd at the foyer of the CCP Little Theater was not attending a convention of senior citizens. The sweet little white-haired dowagers, a few with youngsters in tow, and the doddering old fogeys with the receding hairlines, among them National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin, were queueing to attend Porter on Parade, a concert of Cole Porter’s best-loved songs.

This crowd tonight–this Moonlighter included–expected nothing less than the music of Porter to work its wonders: to make the sand rise again from the bottom of the hourglass. And the wonder-workers who were applying that old black magic were soprano Josephine Roces-Chavez, baritone Eugene Villaluz, pianists Della Gamboa-Besa and Raul Sunico, guitarist Butch Roxas and flutist Antonio Maigue.

When they begin the beguine
It brings back the sound of music so tender,
It brings back a night of tropical splendor,
It brings back a memory ever green.
I’m with you once more under the stars...

Besa and Sunico opened the concert very auspiciously with a rippling reading of Begin the Beguine. (This piece brought back to old timers the memory of MGM’s Broadway Melody of 1940 where it was danced by Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell).

After the first number, Sunico made his exit and left Besa to accompany the singers for the rest of the first half of the concert. She was joined by Maigue whose flute at times, stated in limpid notes the melody of a song and, at other times, embellished it with decorative phrases, and Roxas the tones of whose guitar sounded out of joint in a program of Broadway hits. If they had playedDon’t Fence Me In, which has the character of a cowboy song, Roxas could have simulated the timbre of the banjo to give the tune the sound of the Wild, Wild West. At any rate, his contribution enriched the accompaniment of the selections in which he played a part.

Josephine made her entrance and brought in the heat in a flaming fuschia gown and an impassioned account of What is this Thing Called Love? A singing actress, she could shift from the lyrical to the dramatic with ease, and from the sentimental to the satirical with conviction. Debonair Villaluz made his entrance with Just One of those Things, delivering his lines with perfect phrasing and with manly grace.

Josephine and Villaluz together delivered the hit song from the musical film, Can Can, C’est Magnifique with Gallic grace. The following numbers they sang either solo or in a duet among these–All of You, Easy to Love, I Concentrate on You, I Get a Kick out of You, I Love You, True Love, So in Love and In the Still of the Night.

In the meantime, the audience sat entranced by Cole Porter’s songs. The old timers wrestling with Alzheimer’s disease tested their memory, trying to recall names, titles, dates and what-not from the dim past.

I know too well that I’m
Just wasting precious time
In thinking such a thing could be
That you could ever care for me.
I’m sure you hate to hear
That I adore you, dear...

Who sang this song? In what musical, what film? In what year?

The songs conjured faces from yesteryears–Astaire and Powell, Ethel Merman, Judy Garland, the Andrews Sisters, James Stewart, Nelson Eddy, Bert Lahr, Roy Rogers, Benny Goodman. Who could ever forget Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly singing True Love in the movie, High Society?

Cole Porter (1891-1964) was a precocious boy who composed his first tune at age 10. At 20, when he was a junior at Yale College, he composed the school’s celebrated football song, Bull Dog. The road to fame and fortune was not quite paved with gold. There were ruts and pitfalls on Broadway’s Great White Way but the young lyricist-composer was undaunted in following the great American Dream.

Porter was the most successful American song writer over more than forty-year period, from 1911 to 1953. A partial list of his triumphs includes Hitchy-Koo (1919), Greenwich Village Follies (1924), Gay Divorce (1932), Jubilee (1935), Born to Dance (MGM, 1936), Rosalie (MGM, 1937), Du Barrie was a Lady (1939), Broadway Melody of 1940, Something for the Boys (1943), Seven Lively Arts (1944), Hollywood Canteen (Warner Bros., 1944), and Can-Can, (1953).

An injury sustained from a road accident in 1937 resulted in the amputation of a leg that caused Porter a great deal of pain to the end of his life. He had the pleasure, however, of seeing the generations of two World Wars seeking solace in his songs.

Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom
When the jungle shadows fall,
Like the tick tick tick of the stately clock
As it stands against the wall,
Like the drip drip drip of the raindrops
When the sum’r show’r is through,
So a voice within me keeps repeating
You–You–You.
Night and day...

Duo pianists Besa and Sunico opened the second half of the show with a ravishing rendition of the hit, Night and Day. For the rest of the concert, Sunico, with assisting artists Maigue and Roxas, accompanied Josephine and Villaluz in their time-travel bearing their listeners on wings of song to the Roaring Twenties and beyond.

Love lyrics are usually corn mush but those of Porter have the grit of satire and irony. They are also daring in their references to sex but his witty double-entendres don’t degenerate to vulgarity. Let’s Do It, You Do Something to Me, Mind if I Make Love to You, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, You’re the Top and Anything Goes are naughty but not obscene–and Josephine and Villaluz dished them out without blushing, but only with a meaningful glint in the eye.

The stage direction and lighting design of Dennis Marasigan had a magic of their own–they heightened the mood of romance of Porter on Parade, that’s for sure.

And the greatest wonder of all was that when the white-haired dowagers and old fogeys with thinning hair stepped out of the theater, rejuvenated, they trod with a much lighter tread.

I’ve got you under my skin.
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me,
So deep in my heart, you’re really a part of me...

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