Reviews
Singer a musical historian
By Susie Davidson, Advocate Correspondent
December 5-12, 2002
CAMBRIDGE - Cabaret performer Bobbi Carrey and pianist-singer Tomi Hayashi will debut their new CD, Between the Wars: Music from 1918 to 1941, at 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec 7 at The Blacksmith House, 56 Brattle St., Cambridge.
Carrey and Hayashi founded nowandthen Productions, which produces cabaret performances combining social history with popular song. Other shows include The Evolution of American Pop Music: From Rag to Rock and Roll, Music of the 1930s: From Swing to Swoon, and Irving Berlin: The Voice of Everyman.
In addition, Carrey has performed as Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes, was a soloist with Nick Page’s Mystic Chorale, and sang in a women’s vocal trio called The Mood Elevators. She has performed throughout New England, including CabaretFest! in Newburyport and Provincetown, Playwright’s Platform, The Footlight Club, the Blacksmith House, the Natick Center for the Arts and Tufts University.
Born Roberta Leslie Carrey in Teaneck, N.J., she grew up singing and dancing, imitating Ethel Merman and Sophie Tucker. She played the role of Bloody Mary in South Pacific in seventh grade at the local Jewish Community Center. “I sang my haftorah at my Bas Mitzvah like I was the lead in a Broadway show,” she recalled.
“I went the theatre camp in the summer,” she continued, “and tried to convince my parents to let me go to a college specializing in music and/or theatre. In the 60’s in Teaneck, nice Jewish girls needed to get a liberal arts education first, so off I went to Tufts University to become a Spanish major.”
Carrey began a career as a photographer/filmmaker and became a senior vice president at Fidelity Investments, but quit the corporate world two years ago to sing. Her current show culminates her lifelong passion for this period of American history, its vocal artists and defining events.
“Between the world wars,” she said, “America was on a wild roller-coaster ride and American pop music, like all of society, was dramatically transformed.
Through songs by such writers as Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Sammy Fain and Johnny Mercer, “Between the Wars” explores the events of the times, from the post-war highs of the frenzied 1920s to the lows of the Depression, and back up the long hill to recovery and ultimately WW II.
“The presence of Jewish producers such as Ziegfield; composers such as Fain, Berlin, the Gershwins, Kern, Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Arlen, Harburg etc., singers like Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker and musicians such as Benny Goodman, in Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood during the ’20s and ’30s was paramount.”
The show addresses the musical influence of blacks during the period as well.
At Saturday’s show, CD selections will be performed, recalling an era when Sophie Tucker, Fats Waller, Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Jolson and their contemporaries thrilled the country with their special talents and contributions to the Great American Songbook. “The show traces the evolution of pop music,” said Carrey, “from the square rhythms and jangling player pianos of 1918 to the hot Charleston rhythms of the 20s, and on into the Golden Years of the ’30s, where they discover swing and follow it to the smooth powerful sound of the early ’40s.”
The pair are certain to bring back these golden years in heartfelt authenticity. “Even though I wasn’t born until after World War II,” Carrey observed, “I still feel like these songs tell my story. ‘I’ll Be Seeing You,’ ‘What’ll I Do?,’ ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ - they are truly timeless.”
Tickets are $10. For reservations and information, please call 617-797-5746 or email info@bobbicarrey.com.