The last solo number on “All the Girls,” the new duo album
from sopranos Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert, is a piece of specialty material
for Luker called “Not Funny.”
اضافة اعلان
It’s funny.
In the song, by Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid, Luker twits
her image as a “spoonful of saccharine” but also punctures it. The gist is that
lower-voiced belters get all the laugh lines, possibly because it’s so “hard to
land a joke up here” — in the soprano stratosphere. Playing Laurey in
“Oklahoma!,” Luker complains, “I’ll sing … but Ado Annie steals the show.” Then
she disproves it by ripping a thrilling high C.
Luker was 58 when she last performed the number live, during
a concert with Wilfert at Merkin Hall in Manhattan. That was in September 2019,
15 months before she died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS
or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
As yet undiagnosed that night, she had some trouble climbing
onto the de rigueur stool, but she sounded as beautiful as ever, clearly
enjoying the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with someone who was in fact
as close as a sister. They met, Wilfert recalls, at a reading in 2005; when
Wilfert said “I’m going to the bathroom,” Luker said, “I’m going, too” and they
sat “in adjacent johns,” yakking.
Despite Luker’s unshakable ingénue rep — built on
Broadway roles including Lily in “The Secret Garden” (1991), Magnolia in “Showboat”
(1994), Maria in “The Sound of Music” (1998), and Marian in “The Music Man”
(2000) — she was by the time of the Merkin Hall concert a sophisticated
Broadway veteran and a complex actor, even taking over the crushing role of
Helen in “Fun Home” in 2016. Though her voice remained infallibly lustrous,
with classical size and control yet zero operatic fussiness, it was her
intelligence in deploying it that kept her in demand well past the industry
sell-by date for most stars of that repertoire.
Nor did her intelligence let up as “All the Girls” was put
together. Her husband, Broadway performer Danny Burstein, said her notes for
the producers were “meticulous”, despite her suffering. Tommy Krasker, the head
of PS Classics, her longtime label, said she listened to mixes with the
“clarity of mind and healthy self-criticism” she’d always displayed in their 20
years of working together. When she thought a joke in “Not Funny” wasn’t
landing as well as it might, she asked that the piano part, performed by her
music director, Joseph Thalken, be rerecorded. The joke now lands like a
gymnast after a handspring.
What’s remarkable about this is not only that Luker’s health
was quickly deteriorating, but that such a fond, full-smile, no-dud album got
produced at all, let alone in the middle of a pandemic. How it happened is the
kind of story that Luker, whose death came just two days before the digital
release of “All the Girls” on Christmas — and in whose honor an ALS fundraising
concert titled “Becca” will be streamed Tuesday — would have loved for its
unlikeliness and bittersweet ending.
Recording dates had been set for March 2020. The lockdown
delayed that plan, but by the time PS Classics could safely book a studio
again, in August, Luker could no longer sing. Her final performances, in “An
Evening With Sheldon Harnick … and Friends” at the
York Theater in March and in
a three-song concert streamed from home in June, had been achieved with
mounting difficulty as she gripped the arms on her wheelchair to make the notes
emerge. By autumn she could not make them at all.
Although it might have been sensible to abandon the album at
that point, Krasker and producer Bart Migal decided to try an experiment,
attempting what Krasker calls “the first studio album made without ever
stepping in the studio.” Thalken, the music director, was able to weave new
orchestrations around surprisingly good recordings of the Merkin Hall rehearsal
and concert; musicians recorded the new parts in their homes; the producers
mixed the result; and by some miracle what emerged sounded pristine.
But not just pristine: rich and compelling. Though Luker and
Wilfert have distinctive voices when singing separately, they can sound nearly
identical when singing together. Listening to playbacks, even they could not
always figure out who was who. In duets like “You Are My Best Friend” and
“Isn’t It Better?” something sublime happens as the two voices, blending so
closely, seem to multiply even as they merge.
That effect is at its height in the album’s finale, an
unexpected pairing of the Patty Griffin song “Be Careful” with “Dear
Theodosia,” a number sung by Aaron Burr to his infant daughter in “
Hamilton.”
As performed by Luker and Wilfert, “Theodosia” feels like a promise from
today’s women to their spiritual daughters to leave them a safer world. “Be
Careful,” whose lyric provides “All the Girls” with its title, is wrenchingly
ambivalent, celebrating women’s strength but also their fragility — and ending,
in this arrangement, on a daringly unresolved harmony.
More than her public voice, what Burstein misses most after
20 years of marriage is her private voice: the one he heard in car rides spent
harmonizing together to 70s hits on the radio.
“Now it’s just me and the radio,” he said.
By comparison, the rest of us are lucky. Listening to “All
the Girls,” in some ways Luker’s funniest and wisest album, we get to keep her
singing next to us forever.
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