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Noel Coward At Las Vegas

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Noel Coward

 
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Noel Coward At Las Vegas
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How a Coward got his courage back.

  • We Say...

    Review by Michael Azerrad

    There are few images more iconic than the cover photo of Noel Coward at Las Vegas: the lone gentleman impeccably turned out in evening clothes and black tie, elegantly toting a teacup amidst a vast expanse of Nevada desert. He is, as his own song put it, truly an Englishman in the midday sun. But it wasn't just the parched landscape that set off everything that was great about Noel Coward — this splendidly effete man was equally exotic in Las Vegas, that gilded palace of sin, a tacky middle-class playground run by rapacious mobsters. There, as in that photograph, Coward was an oasis of Old World sophistication in the land of TV dinners and Howdy Doody. Ever the astute showman, he rose to the occasion with one of his greatest recordings.

    Having had a spectacular run on the British stage in the '20s and '30s as a playwright, actor and songwriter, Coward's star had been on a slow wane for years; he was also in serious financial trouble. But now, in his mid 50s, he was about to commence a rare second act. It all started when Louis Armstrong's manager Joe Glaser caught Coward's cabaret show at London's swank Café de Paris and invited him to play the Strip. It was an unlikely call — as Coward famously quipped about Las Vegas, "It was not café society. It was Nescafé society." But, lured by the siren call of a then-astronomical $15,000 a week, Coward brought his show to the Desert Inn in the white-hot summer of '55.

    On opening night of his four-week run the audience included luminaries like Humphrey Bogart, Sammy Davis, Jr., David Niven, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Merle Oberon, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. In fact, Ol' Blue Eyes soon raved about Coward's show on national radio: "If you want to hear how songs should be sung, get the hell over to the Desert Inn!" And that's exactly what legendary Columbia Records chief Goddard Lieberson did, along with a recording crew.

    Vegas glitz extends right into the arrangements — arranger Peter Matz usually introduces the songs with a florid full-band flourish, then, swing established, subsides into his solitary piano, foregrounding Coward's soliloquies. Then, at the close of the number, the band invariably strikes up again, making an overblown frame that cannily highlights Coward's preternatural refinement.

    Coward famously noted, "I can't sing, but I know how to, which is quite different." And sure enough, his crisp, clipped delivery is not only essential to his wordplay but manages to range from occasional currents of melancholy and ennui (the blithely suicidal "World Weary") to debauched bemusement ("Nina"). Besides, to sing well would be to stoop to the declassé station of the musician; this way, Coward maintained the veneer of the slumming sophisticate dashing off droll sketches for the amusement of his peers. The rest of us are just getting a peek at how the other half giggles and pines.

    Hailing back at least as far as Gilbert & Sullivan and on through his peer Cole Porter, the way Coward triangulates rhyme scheme, melody and narrative has the elegant inevitability of a geometry proof. Like Saki and P.G. Wodehouse, his tales often exude a faint but elegant whiff of decadence that nonetheless speaks of a more civilized, discreet time, when excesses certainly occurred but nobody was crass enough to mention them. It's as escapist as it gets, his urbane sophistication a refuge from the philistines at the gates.

    And yet for all his class, this is Vegas, after all, and things get racy almost immediately. After an opening medley, it's right into "Uncle Harry" — the misadventures of a randy missionary who concludes, "In all those languid latitudes/ the atmosphere's exotic/ To take up moral attitudes/ would be too… idiotic." Later, there's "Alice Is at It Again," Coward's droll tale of a young country lass who apparently enjoys the, um, company of animals. Coward had always kept his sexuality private — no one was gay in the '50s, you see — but along comes a spirited version of the traditional Scottish ballad "Loch Lomond," no less, of which he offers "my own personal version." He begins with a very straight (sorry) reading of the venerable chestnut, but eventually his "true love" turns out to be "my bonnie laddie/ in his wee bittie kilt of Caledonian plaidie." No one seems shocked, though. How does he get away with it? Well, he's a posh middle-aged Englishman, and also this is the temporary autonomous zone of Las Vegas, where hidebound morals are loosened like a necktie.

    By the fourth number, "A Bar on the Piccola Marina," they're eating out of his hand, laughing after virtually every line, even ones that weren't intended to be funny. He makes 'em cry with "World Weary," he makes 'em laugh with "Nina," and then he blows 'em away with a romping sprint through his immortal "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," his plummy diction hitting every mark with fastidious panache.

    The tender "Matelot," written for his partner of 30 years, Graham Payn, is perhaps Coward's prettiest melody and most poignant lyric; here, his lilting tenor harks back vividly to his between-the-wars heyday. The ballads are exquisite, even heartbreaking, but here they're just a way of setting up the comic numbers. The wistful "A Room with a View," a song he wrote 30 years before, in the midst of severe mental and physical exhaustion, about a carefree, and clearly impossible, romantic idyll, Coward gently rolling his r's like a purring cat, his gracefully elastic phrasing expanding and compressing the lines like an accordion.

    But the reverie is shortly erased by Coward's risqué reworking of Cole Porter's "Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)," name-checking notables of the day like Ernest Hemingway, the Gabor sisters, the recently disgraced Joe McCarthy and many others, even the club's owner Wilbur Clark. He also slyly outs a few of his peers: Tennessee Williams, Somerset Maugham, and Porter himself, not to mention "nice young men who sell antiques." His parting shot: "Even Liberace, we assume, does it," which brings gales of knowing applause. He bids a bittersweet adieu with his signature closing number, "The Party's over Now": "The thrill has gone/ To linger on/ Might spoil it anyhow/ Let's creep away from the day/ For the party's over now." (And just admire the rhyme scheme of those lines — mwuh!)

    But Coward had actually restarted the party: After the Vegas run was over, he was a star all over again. The run at the Desert Inn, he noted in his diary, was "one of the most sensational successes of my career." He went on to do a handful of television specials and experienced a renaissance that continued right up to his death in 1973. Coward's suave wit and style lives on in the Pet Shop Boys, Morrissey and Magnetic Fields, all of whom feature frontmen who can't sing — but know how to. Which one of them will be the first to play a Vegas casino? My bet's on Morrissey.

  • They Say...

    Review by John Bush, All Music Guide

    During the summer of 1955, Noel Coward, that doyen of English style, made a splash in Las Vegas, that flashiest of resort towns. Coward's one-month engagement at Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn sparked a mass exodus from Hollywood to his standing-room-only performances, by celebrities ranging from Humphrey Bogart to Frank Sinatra. Columbia head Goddard Lieberson soon headed to Nevada as well (with recording equipment in tow), and Coward, while fighting a touch of flu in the 116-degree heat, delivered one of his finest performances in front of the microphones. What amazes about Coward's show is his ability to convey with no detectable effort all of the nimble diction and convivial grace necessary to perform these intricate songs in a live setting -- not a syllable out of place, not a line delivered but with ease and precision. And contrary to assumption, Coward did in fact share much with his audience; he leaves his audience absolutely cackling in glee at the English stuffed shirts who populate his comic pieces "Uncle Harry," "A Bar on the Piccola Marina" (written quite recently), and, of course, his classic "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." A vocal masterpiece, Noel Coward at Las Vegas is without doubt the master's finest appearance on record.

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