Hershey Felder shows a unique side of Irving Berlin

Hershey Felder sings!

The acclaimed impersonator of classical composers from Beethoven to Chopin to Debussy doesn’t get much chance to warble in his singular one-man shows. His vocalization is usually limited to telling the life story of the person he’s dressed up as. In character, he speaks of life, love and inspiration. Then he plops down on the piano bench and goes intensely instrumental.

As Irving Berlin, Felder talks more, and sings, in a confident full-throated tenor, every time he sits. The closest he’s come to being a pop songwriter before this was in his first theater/concert show, “George Gershwin Alone,” but while Berlin wrote several musicals (we hear snatches of “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Holiday Inn” and “Mr. President” here), there were no symphonies, operas or rhapsodies on his resumé.

The prolific songcraft of Irving Berlin makes for a very different Felder evening. The musical bits are shorter. You can’t get lost in the moment, go into a listening-room trance, as you can with his other shows (such as his last Hartford Stage visit, two summers ago as “The Great Tchaikovsky”). There were no audience sing-alongs in “The Great Tchaikovsky”; “Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin” has many of them, including some where the audience isn’t actually invited to sing along but just can’t help themselves.

Luckily, Felder’s up to the challenge. (He’s also very comfortable in the role, having had “Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin” in his repertory for five years though this is its Connecticut debut.) He’s penned a script that happily diverges from the usual “And then I wrote…” tropes and actually tries to get under the skin of a composer who came off to many as prickly and defensive, despite having been the most famous songwriter in America for a good chunk of his 101-year lifetime. Felder plumbs Berlin’s identity as a Russian Jewish immigrant who, well into his astonishingly successful career, is still being being dismissed as a former singing waiter and former poverty-stricken immigrant. He’s not considered worthy of marrying into