The show, for example, does not include the huge hit song “White Christmas” from the 1942 film “Holiday Inn” (the only one of Berlin’s nine Academy Award nominations that resulted in a win) but rather three lesser known songs from the 1954 movie “White Christmas” ditto “Easter Parade”īut that doesn’t mean it completely avoids familiar tunes. The song choices are probably the most sophisticated aspect of the show. The cast performs one of the songs from that never-produced movie, “They Used to Play It By Ear” “The new regime declares that movie musicals are a thing of the past” – a common refrain over the decades, until they periodically change their minds.
In 1963, MGM was planning a musical of Berlin’s songs called “Say It With Music.” Berlin worked on the score for six years, but a new studio head came aboard and killed the project.
(“Easter Parade” was going to star Gene Kelly, but, we’re told, he broke his ankle playing touch football, so producer Arthur Freed convinced Astaire to come out of retirement.)
A song Berlin wrote in 1917 with the title “Smile and Show Your Dimple” was a flop, until it was given new lyrics and repurposed for the movies it became “Easter Parade,” the title song of the 1948 movie musical starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. In between the singing and dancing, the cast cheerfully relates sometimes-memorable anecdotes about Berlin’s time in Hollywood, in a script by Barry Kleinbort. He has been nominated for four Tony Awards as a choreographer, including for “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas.” His six dancers, singly, in pairs and as an ensemble, make the most of the relatively small stage, smoothly offering tap-dance, ballroom, those old dance crazes, aided by a lively five-piece band. It’s in Hollywood that Berlin started writing dance music for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers – including two numbers, we’re told, that became dance crazes in the 1930s: The Piccolino from “Top Hat,” and The Yam from “Carefree.” And dancing is obviously “Cheek to Cheek” director and choreographer Randy Skinner’s first love. All are in fine voice, with elegant and agile moves…and perhaps a bit too much cheer. How could it? This is the man who composed “God Bless America,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and some 1,500 other songs, including the scores for twenty Broadway musicals, such as “Annie Get Your Gun.”īut Hollywood is a smart focus for “Cheek to Cheek,” which York Theater is bringing back, after an initial run last December, to its temporary home in the basement of St Jean Baptiste Church, with four of the six cast members new. “Cheek to Cheek,” an intelligent, entertaining musical revue that showcases two dozen of the songs that Irving Berlin wrote for movie musicals, makes no claims that his work in Hollywood eclipsed everything else he did.
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