Forgetting our medications

The excitement was bouncing off the walls Thursday night as singer-dancer Ben Vereen performed in the National Symphony Orchestra Pops Series at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Presenting a vocal tribute to Sammy Davis, Jr., the sixty-year-old stage veteran captivated his audience as he joked and chatted in between songs punctuated with his spontaneous high-energy choreography.

Vereen came out at the end of the first half of the concert to sing a medley of Frank Sinatra tunes. In the second half, he sang songs made famous by the late Sammy Davis, Jr., with whom Vereen had worked at the height of Davis's career.

David Loeb, Vereen's personal music director and conductor, led the National Symphony Orchestra from both the podium and the piano, supplemented by Vereen's guitarist, bassist, and drummer. Loeb, a tall, slender, handsome man with a mane of salt and pepper hair, was charmingly shy and nervous when speaking to the audience between numbers, fumbling with a sheet of written notes as he talked. His conducting patterns were very straightforward and without the flamboyance and potentially meaningless gyrations of so many conductors, yet the orchestra responded to him well. The orchestra sounded like they were having fun, and for some reason, they always sound better and stay together when they are being led by guest conductors.

One of the great mysteries of "lounge singers" like Mr. Vereen is how they can remain so incredibly engaging to the audience while taking such incredible liberties with the musical melodies that a trained musician might ask if the singers knew the music at all. A lot of the internal and even opening song melody was declamatorily "sung-spoke," while other parts were sung to melody lines never before conceived by the composers, and yet the overall effect was successful. Even with all this casual musical patter, Vereen still had the money notes and he was able to pull out big endings for each of his songs.

His energy and constant excitement, though, were so great I couldn't help but think he'd forgotten to take his lithium. Now, I haven't sung a show like this in five or six years (albeit without a full symphony backup), but he kept pulling me into a yearning desire for my own manic episode once again to take the stage, dance around, sing, and interact with the audience.

Vereen introduced a young black singer by the name of Johnny Manuel who came out to sing one song. Manuel has a lot of potential. He's still young and needs to learn to match his vocal registers from mid-range to head voice; he sang his song in the skitty-skatty jump-around embellished technique so often used these days by black female gospel singers.

In the first half of the concert, the orchestra opened with a medley of songs from West Side Story. Next they played the Scherzo from Grant Still's Symphony No. 1, "Afro-American," that contained the same blues melody as the contemporaneously composed "I've Got Rhythm" by George Gershwin.

You never saw so many white and silver septuagenarian and octagenarian heads bobbing and "rocking out" as when the orchestra played a medley of big band tunes by Duke Ellington!

When Vereen made his first act appearance, he came out in a white suit with a black satin shirt, tie, and scarf. For act two, he wore a black tail coat adorned with a large, jeweled brooch on the lapel and a white scarf around the neck (all of which came off after the first couple of songs), black vest, black satin shirt, black and white four-in-hand tie, and brilliant white spats over his black shoes. The orchestra, alas, had the men in white dinner jackets—don't they know it's not Memorial Day yet?—and Loeb wore a black tuxedo.

All in all, it was an enjoyable and entertaining evening. The only disappointment was that Vereen chatted so long between songs, he ran out the clock and to avoid putting the orchestra into overtime, he had to cut some scheduled songs such as Davis's famous "Candy Man." There was another performance last night, and the final performance is tonight at 8 p.m.