Spotlight on Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormé

As I was growing up in New York in the 50s, 60s and 70s, my parents were having this intense love affair with Steve and Eydie. They saw their club acts, Broadway shows, TV specials and wore out phonograph needles inviting them into our living room.

So, how could I like them? It wouldn’t have been natural. Really, how could any favorite of my parents be a favorite of mine?

Which explains why I approached this particular Spotlight with something more than curiosity and much less than lusty enthusiasm.

Boy, was I pleasantly surprised.

After a perfectly enthralling two hours in the company of Rebecca K. Campbell and Erik Connolly, a most professional and personable pair of Camelot performers, I can attest to discovering—even this late in my own life—yet more evidence that my parents possessed remarkable and educated artistic palates.

In fact, I enjoyed the show as much as anything I’ve seen during the first year of this new theatre; it’s a good pairing: a class act for a classy venue.

In contrast with the other Spotlights I’ve reviewed here—they’ve been defined to me as narrated concerts where the singers make no real attempt to embody the highlighted artist—this production directed by Presila Quinby presents Campbell and Connolly consistently and convincingly in character throughout as this delightful and endearing dynamic duo.

Working from an animated, well-researched and sharply edited script by the Mail Tribune and Ashland Daily Tidings editor Catherine Noah, they sing and dance their way through nearly two dozen hit numbers that track the married couple’s equally successful careers both as soloists and as a pair. For the most part, the segues between songs were silky and thoughtful.

While Campbell and Connolly’s acting is fine—they really do have chemistry and an ease with one another—what makes this show work so well are their strong, supple, and especially well-matched singing voices supported seamlessly by a stylistically sophisticated five-piece on-stage combo well-tuned to the acoustics of this house. Kudos especially to Peter Spring’s work on the saxophone.

A favorite of mine was “Johnny One Note,” in which Rebecca takes that jazzy note from the Rogers and Hart hit for one sweet soaring ride.

A favorite of mine was “Johnny One Note,” in which Rebecca takes that jazzy note from the Rogers and Hart hit for one sweet soaring ride.

The one obstacle Quinby faced in turning Steve and Eydie into anything approaching compelling theatre is simply that their life stories are white bread and, for the most part, angst- and struggle-free. From their respective starts as entertainers rising from the boroughs of the Big Apple, they found success at nearly every turn; he had hit songs; she had hit songs; they had hit songs. Marrying young after meeting during gigs on Steve Allen’s Tonight Show, they had two children and, in fact, will soon be celebrating their 55th wedding anniversary in retirement.

Quimby’s production—with Noah’s script—overcomes that built-in biographical blandness cleverly and theatrically. Just often enough, Campbell and Connolly given leave to color their characterizations with scripted patter and witty repartee lifted from recordings of their act. Some of the one-liners are good, some are groaners, but the pay-off from the shtick is a sense of immediacy that’s palpable.

Another convention that works surprisingly well is the recreation of sequences from transcripts of televised interviews with Larry King, who’s played here by the narrator, Bruce Lorange. Sporting the trademark red suspenders, he positively nailed King’s distinctively personable and ease-provoking style. His sensitive questioning of Steve and Eydie in the wake of the sudden death of their 23-year-old son Michael by heart disease, made for a compelling moment on stage as it must have on the small screen.

See this supremely entertaining and seamlessly integrated Spotlight through June 10 at the Camelot Theatre in Talent.