Hamlisch excels at Hamlisch and more

You think of Marvin Hamlisch and you think: A Chorus Line, Broadway guy, last of the Tin Pan Alley composers. He is all that, but I for one did not quite grasp the big career he had in Hollywood before A Chorus Line ever happened.

At the MSO Pops concert Friday night, Hamlisch told the story of how he got to Hollywood. Fresh out of Juilliard, he landed a job as a rehearsal pianist for the original production of Funny Girl. His name got around a bit, and someone asked him to play for a party. He was feeling important and ready to turn it down.

“After all,” Hamlisch said. “I was fetching donuts for Barbara Streisand.”

Then he heard that Sam Spiegel, a big-time film producer, was the guest of honor. He took the gig, got an appointment with Spiegel, played some music for him. Soon after, he was in Hollywood writing the score for The Swimmer, a Burt Lancaster classic released in 1968.

In this strange film, based on a John Cheever story, Lancaster plays a disintegrating fellow who swims from pool to pool across his upper-crust Connecticut county. He encounters his past sins and crumbling present along the way. It’s a strange, dreamy thing, as is Hamlisch’s music. Hamlisch played the piano part as Stuart Chafetz conducted. This exquisite score, gentle as a summer breeze yet somber as September, floats along on a fleeting, barely perceptible bossa nova beat. It inhabits a completely different sound world than Chorus Line.

Hamlisch and the MSO played selections from some of his other big films, notably The Way We Were and The Sting. Of course, Scott Joplin rags accompany the latter, but Hamlisch fitted them to the film’s story and rhythm so ingeniously. The close encounter with Joplin influenced Hamlisch. It never hit me until I heard the two in close proximity Friday, but One, the main theme of  A Chorus Line, is Hamlisch’s take on ragtime — some of the greatest dance music of all time. Perfect.

Hamlisch was in rare form and a good mood Friday. He zinged jokes at the audience expertly and conducted with better than usual purpose and command. He asked for a song title from the audience, got Email Goddess, and improvised a clever ditty. He was on top of this music, and not just his own stuff. He told a wonderful tale of first encountering Broadway style via the Ed Sullivan Show.

“If a show was a hit by Sunday night, already on Thursday you could see on Ed Sullivan,” he said, still obviously impressed by this feat. “And when I saw this next number, Soliloquy from Carousel on Sullivan, I knew this was it, I had to be in this business.”

J. Mark McVey, a baritone blessed with an extraordinary falsetto that gives him an enormous range, sang that remarkable Rodgers and Hammerstein number. Soliloquy is the real title, but you might know it as My Boy Bill. The song, more extended aria than show tune, takes the protagonist goes through a range of moods and tempos as he ponders how fatherhood might change his life. McVey parsed it out affectingly, and he could not have had a more attuned or sympathetic conductor that Hamlisch.

To his great credit, Hamlisch goes out of his way to proselytize for the music he loves whenever he can. On April 6, he visited the Milwaukee High School of the Arts. Felix Ramsey, a 16-year-old student there, sang Hamlisch’s One Song, his world peace anthem, for the composer. Ramsey so impressed Hamlisch that he engaged the student to sing it at these concerts with the MSO.

Ramsey sang fearlessly, eloquently, and with great poise and conviction. The big audience responded to the performance and the emotional moment with an intense standing ovation. No matter where life takes that young man, he will never forget that night. The rest of us will remember it for a good long time.

This program, complete with young Felix Ramsey, will be repeated at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Call the Marcus box office, 414 273-7206, for tickets.