The humor of the late pianist Oscar Levant was caustic, fresh, original and, today, still very, very funny.
When actress Tallulah Bankhead was outraged that a magazine called her 40, she demanded - of the wrong person - "I don't look 40, do I?" Levant replied, "Not any more, you don't."From the mouth of pianist-composer-actor Stan Freeman, presenting himself as Levant and giving a fascinating evening of music and chat, Levant's ripostes are more witty than mean.
"At Wit's End," by Joel Kimmel, based on Levant's books and other sources, is a two-hour theater piece with an intermission, rather than the one-hour cabaret or jazz act usually at Michael's Pub.
Levant, who died at 65 in 1972, specialized in the music of George Gershwin. His recording of "Rhapsody in Blue" was a classical best seller in the 1940s. During the evening, Freeman plays Gershwin's three piano preludes as well as the better-known "Rhapsody." He also performs "An American in Paris," which Levant played for the movie soundtrack, and "Concerto in F."
Levant was on radio's "Information Please" and had his own radio talk show in Los Angeles, but kept getting fired for saying outrageous things.
He talked incessantly, cleverly and sometimes arrogantly when in his manic moods. In between, there were nervous breakdowns and periods of depressed withdrawal from the world.
He preferred to be called neurasthenic (suffering from chronic fatigue, aches, depression) rather than neurotic, Freeman says, and spells the word for the audience.
Describing 10 years of alternating drug haze with painful withdrawal, he asks, "Are you enjoying this?"
Freeman talks along, assuming that the audience knows those things, but slipping in enough information that anybody who never heard of Oscar Levant can pick up the biography and enjoy the jokes. The concert is meant to be Levant's first after being "away" for a time.
After Levant met Gershwin, he stopped composing, he says, and became a "penthouse beachcomber," hanging around the Gershwin home.
Freeman, a good pianist and ranconteur, also plays and sings some pop songs: "True Blue Lou," which he didn't compose; and "Lady Play Your Mandolin," "Wacky Dust" and "Blame It on My Youth," which he did. He ends the show with the latter, in a tribute to wife June who stuck with him. He makes it work as poignant sincerity, possibly better than Levant would have.
CONCERT