November 23–30, 1995

critic pick|cabaret

Mary Cleere Haran

If Hollywood were still making movies that required the likes of Carole Lombard or Irene Dunne — witty, slightly off-kilter beauties with style to spare — singer/ actress/ bon vivant Mary Cleere Haran would have been snapped up for cinema stardom a long time ago.

But they're not, and she wasn't. Still, it made sense somehow that our recent telephone interview played like a scene from a screwball comedy. The thuggish hotel clerk was demanding his phone back, Haran had to retreat to a phone booth, and her next interviewer showed up in the middle of our conversation, apparently late ("Well, I have to do this radio thing next,' Haran told him. "Maybe you can ride along with us in the car?"), and in the midst of all this, we had a very nice chat about the funny, tender, disarming lyrics of maybe the saddest songwriter ever: Lorenz "Larry" Hart. On Nov. 29, Haran brings her all-Hart show to the Hotel Atop the Bellevue as the final show of AMTF's fall cabaret series."

"I'm sure why [Hart] initially appealed to me as a teenager," says Haran, "was because he had a close relationship with pain."

A lonely, closeted gay man with a drinking problem and a taste for rough trade, Hart was clearly "an unhappy guy." But for a girl growing up in California in the '50s, his lyrics, teamed with Richard Rodgers' melodies, rang of everything that was "vital and exciting and noncomplacent — an escape from all that '50s bullshit."

Haran's show at the Bellevue will draw from her new all-Hart CD, This Funny World, a treasure trove of neglected small masterpieces. But it will also reintroduce audiences to Rodgers and Hart classics like "I Didn't Know What Time It Was."

"Everybody knows these songs," says Haran. "Then you listen to the lyrics, and it's 'Oh, my god...'"

Haran is a musical archaeologist: she unearths Hart's little-known verses — the sometimes rueful, sometimes acerbic prologues which no one ever sings — and introduces lyrics to familiar songs which audiences may never have heard. Take "The Lady Is A Tramp," for instance: the song was such a hit in the Broadway show Babes In Arms that Hart had to add encores. "I get too hungry for dinner at 8" was augmented by "Don't know the reason for cocktails at 5,""I don't like flying, I'm glad I'm alive," and my favorite: "I crave affection — but not when I drive."

Imagine the above lyrics recited between the insistent clink-clink of the pay phone, and you get an idea of the nature of our conversation. But she was charming nonetheless, and I can promise you that she'll be even more charming at the Bellevue, where the only competing clinks come from champagne glasses and silverware, and the sound you'll be most aware of is her luminous voice.

Mary Cleere Haran, "This Funny World," AMTF Cabaret, Barrymore Room, Hotel Atop the Bellevue, Broad & Walnut. Wed. Nov. 29-Sat. Dec. 16. Perfs Wed. & Thurs. at 8 & 10 p.m., Fri. & Sat. at 7:30&10 p.m. (893-1145).

— David Warner