Singer Marcovicci restores the classics

 

Singer Marcovicci restores the classics

 

Singer Marcovicci restores the classics
Pittsburgh Tribune Review Singer Andrea Marcovicci says her Saturday night show in Carnegie is an example of her musical handiwork. "I'm really into restoring anything," she says. "I like to do work to restore old buildings in the same way I work to restore old song." That makes Saturday's show classic Marcovicci. She has some old material, the love songs of Cole Porter, and she's using the show to support the restoration of the Music Hall at the Andrew...By Bob Karlovits
TRIBUNE-REVIEW MUSIC WRITER
Thursday, October 19, 2006

Singer Andrea Marcovicci says her Saturday night show in Carnegie is an example of her musical handiwork.

"I'm really into restoring anything," she says. "I like to do work to restore old buildings in the same way I work to restore old song."

That makes Saturday's show classic Marcovicci. She has some old material, the love songs of Cole Porter, and she's using the show to support the restoration of the Music Hall at the Andrew Carnegie Free Library in the borough that bears the philanthropist's name.

The show, with its clear-cut theme, is classic in another way

When she is told she seems to have a knack for putting together shows with themes, she says with a laugh: "That's because I do. And that's because I would feel just so uncomfortable doing a show without a theme."

That outlook has produced her most popular show, "I'll Be Seeing You . . . Love Songs of WWII" as well as tributes to Kurt Weill and Frank Loesser. In November, she will be opening a show on the work of Hildegarde, the cabaret singer who died in 2005 at age 99.

But the Cole Porter show is her second most-popular show and she says she always is enthusiastic to perform it.

"I used to think he was too brittle," she says of Porter. "I thought he was so sophisticated, and I thought that sophisticated meant heartless."

By concentrating on Porter's love songs, "not his patter pieces," she says she was able to present a different side of the composer.

The show is popular, she says, because everybody knows the songwriter's work. She performs the show accompanied only by her pianist, Shelly Markham.

Marcovicci, 57, will be is celebrating her 20th anniversary as a singer this year with the Hildegarde show that will open at New York City's famed Algonquin Hotel. When she started her singing career in 1985, she realized she needed to have a theme for her shows.

She had made herself well known on TV's "Love is a Many Splendored Thing" and the musical themes created something of a show for concerts, she says.

"If I only had a bunch of songs, boy, would I feel awkward," she says.

She says when she is asked to sing for a short time at a party or small show, she tries to assemble some sort of theme around which she can assemble a group of songs.

She says she would like to put together a show on Lorenz Hart, the lyricist who formed a great pairing with Richard Rodgers. She suggests his problems with alcoholism and homosexuality are issues that can be dealt with now, as opposed to 15 years ago.

She says she even has a title for her show, whenever it might come about: "The Hart of Manhattan."

Whether it is Porter, Hildegarde or Hart, though, Marcovicci says her goal is the same.

"I want to do whatever I can to help the cause of the great American popular songbook," she says. "It is out gift to Western culture."