All They Need to Get by? Each Other and Their Fans
“Brick by brick, we’re gonna make it stick,” Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson sang, facing each other and punching out the words of their 1984 anthem, “Solid,” on Thursday evening at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency. The post-disco beat and emphatic tune underlined the song’s message that long-term relationships require steady, hard work. The reward is a joyful partnership that is as “solid as a rock.”
Unless Ashford & Simpson are wizards of fakery, their show (this is their third appearance at Feinstein’s in three years) offered persuasive evidence that for all the choreographed cheerleading, their happy chemistry is real. “Solid” has also acquired a political dimension. When they performed it recently in Los Angeles in a sing-along version with the audience, Ms. Simpson said, the title phrase became “solid as Barack.”
If that chemistry has not essentially changed over more than three decades, it has undergone subtle modification. Ms. Simpson, an upbeat musical pugilist who punches the air as she sings and dances, takes the lead. Mr. Ashford hangs back like a shy lion being coaxed to jump through a ring of fire, then makes the leap. Lean and sinuous, he can still get away with wearing a spangled tank top, although he is in his mid-60s.
Mr. Ashford also told a story about playing the song “You’re All I Need to Get By” for what he described as Motown’s “quality control board,” with Berry Gordy and his committee looking “like Jesus and his disciples.” It passed the audition after two other songs by major Motown composers were given a thumbs-down.
Ashford & Simpson are still working on a musical adaptation of the E. Lynn Harris novel “Invisible Life.” With Ms. Simpson at the piano, Mr. Ashford sang “Bullet,” a ballad in which the show’s bisexual protagonist, Kyle, wonders what will happen to his newest relationship “when the bullet leaves the gun.”
For “Born This Way,” a high-powered dance number from the show, Terry Lavell, the sassy long-legged beanpole who played Kyle in a workshop production, appeared out of nowhere to zigzag across the stage like a bolt of lightning: a positive sign that the show may eventually see the light of day.
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