Hershey Felder brings his ‘Beethoven’ solo show to Mountain View.
For a music lover, there are not enough superlatives in the dictionary to describe the magic Hershey Felder works on stage in his shows about great composers.
Here’s what I wrote in 2016 about one of his productions at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley: “‘Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin’ is a great show that doesn’t just dress up Felder in black glasses and call him the historic songwriter. It’s a brilliantly written and staged biography of one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and every element of the show is excellent.
“It is a tour de force by Felder, who wrote the book, co-designed the surprising set (with Trevor Hay), plays the piano, sings beautifully with an impressive range and is an excellent actor.”
People loved that show. It is the highest grossing production in TheatreWorks history. Felder’s current show, “Hershey Felder, Beethoven” (a rewrite of an earlier show he wrote and performed) already has been extended for an extra week at TheatreWorks, due to ticket demand. It will continue through July 9.
Felder also has written and staged wildly successful shows about George Gershwin, Fryderyk Chopin, Leonard Bernstein, Franz Liszt and Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Felder has made himself into a complete theater artist, writing his shows, designing the sets and costumes and performing them, usually with a piano involved. It’s a lot of work.
“The creative life — that’s what my life is,” he says in a phone interview from his home in New York. “I am constantly working. I get off the phone, then I am off to rehearsal, three hours of rehearsal. It’s not something you do a few months. It requires a tremendous amount of work all the time — a nonstop job, I guess. I treat it as a responsibility. You’ve got to do it.”
Over the phone, he sounds a little tired, but says, “no more tired than I usually am.” He has just gotten back to the New York home he shares with his wife, Kim Campbell, a former prime minister of Canada (and the only woman who has held that post). Felder has flown in from Berkeley, where did a month of performances of the Irving Berlin show at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Felder and Campbell also share a home in Paris, as well as a standard poodle named Leopold. The Paris place is mostly for rest, composing and writing, Felder says. He does not perform in Europe because his American tour schedule is already full.
He points out that “nobody knows what my voice is like” from the stage performances. “I do the character. I tend to invest 1,000 percent in my characters.” In some shows — notably the Beethoven one — “I present the imagining of what they would be like,” he says. But not for the Berlin show. “There’s enough film left of him,” says Felder, to do something like mimic that great composer.
Asked why he decided to do a show on Beethoven, he says, “I think the point is inherent in his greatness. I use a little-known story about what happened after he died, told from the perspective of the boy who was his caretaker when he was 12. I bring to life the little boy’s life. It’s something very charming, very dear.”
Beethoven “is at the top of the pantheon of composers,” Felder continues. “He changed music in many ways. What came out of him was a whole different approach to music — an expression of what is emotional, rather than just descriptive.”
Beethoven’s music, adds Felder, who recently visited the Beethoven Center at San Jose State, “doesn’t just paint pretty pictures. Actually, one experiences a deeper interconnectedness with the human condition…. One of the things that’s wonderful about Beethoven’s music is there is something more on subsequent hearings. It’s important — the depth of this kind of music.”
Felder did the earlier version of this show “seven, eight, three years ago, but I wanted to expand it, make it more theatrical, so to speak. … There is this notion that Beethoven was this firebrand…. But he was very human. He suffered in his relationships, in his life.
“It takes a lifetime to learn about these composers. It‘s very hard, pulling this information together.”
Felder, who uses the words “lovely” and “charming” and “sweet” frequently in conversation and who laughs easily, says of the Beethoven show, “What I can do, certainly, is address some of the humanity of Beethoven. There was something very sweet and human about him.
“The humanity is important.”