03/29/04

Donald Rosenberg
Plain Dealer Music Critic

The Cleveland Pops Orchestra is often at its snazzy best when paying tribute to the Great White Way. Music director and conductor Carl Topilow has a real affinity for theater music, and perhaps no other maestro plays as mean a clarinet.

Topilow and his ensemble took to the Severance Hall stage Friday to demonstrate how show music should sing and dance, even when instruments are doing all of the performing. Not that the concert stinted on vocalism. Dubbed "The Broadway Baritones," it had a healthy helping of selections with at least two baritones, Gregg M. Busch and Douglas Webster, and Sal Viviano.

All three singers made appealing contact with the material, one another and the orchestra. Busch claims the most sonorous of baritones, which proved a delight in the mock-operatic antics of "Where is the Life" (from Cole Porter's "Kiss Me, Kate"). He also excelled in "Mariah" (Lerner and Loewe's "Paint Your Wagon") and led the stalwart way in the night's encore, "The Impossible Dream," in which each guest had a rapturous go with Don Quixote's idealistic ode.

Webster's lighter baritone was especially tender in the falsetto flights of "Bring Him Home" (Boublil and Schonberg's "Les Miserables"), and he joined Viviano in an impassioned performance of "Lily's Eyes" (Lucy Simon and Marsha Norman's "The Secret Garden"). Viviano, full of good humor and apple-pie enthusiasm, did the honors in "On the Street Where You Live" and conveyed the sensuous verve in Porter's "Begin the Beguine."

The Pops Orchestra had many chances to shine, and it did, even if the performances sometimes could have used a hair more polish. But Topilow and players handsomely revealed the riches in the overture to that most presidential of musicals, Gershwin's "Of Thee I Sing," and jazzed it up neatly in a medley from Kander and Ebb's "Chicago," complete with growling trumpet, thanks to Geoffrey Hardcastle.

To reach this Plain Dealer critic:

drosenberg@plaind.com, 216-999-4269