While there are countless interpreters of smart American standard song and torrid Tin Pan Alley soliloquies, few artists are as knowing, educated and warmly humorous about their exploits as Mark Nadler.
Nadler is a longtime Philadelphia favorite who has played with the New York and Philly Pops, as well as many solo shows at the Prince Theater (most recently 2014, with his Weimar Republic cabaret on decadence, Jews and gays — three groups he belongs to). The crooner-howler and pianist throws himself into deep background and appropriate musical characterizations with every show, be it his Tchaikovsky-Russian program, his Ira Gershwin showcase, the cool contemporary songbook “1961” (dedicated to tunes from the year he was born) or his decade-plus take on Cole Porter, “A Swell Party RSVP.” Within that framework, Nadler can studiously and stridently attend to the sly, coded language and double (and triple) entendre that was Porter at his wittiest and wiliest. Nadler will sing for his supper at Dino’s Backstage & the Celebrity Room in Glenside March 3-4.
PGN: I know you dig deep during research. Have you had a chance to hunt and peck through Philly?
MN: It depends on what show I’m doing, where its roots might be. Using the Cole Porter show as an example, I don’t know that he had roots in your town, but if he did, I’d find them. The local angle on this show is that there will be audience interaction — not audience singing though, thank God. It becomes personal, not local. You know where I have hung? Curtis Institute for recitals. The Suzanne Roberts for shows. And your museums: I love the Barnes and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania Museum with the mummies of ancient Egypt and the Silk Road exhibition with the corpses of old China. Plus, Rittenhouse is always a lovely place to sit, have coffee and read a book.
PGN: You’ve moved beyond your Jazz Age musical roots. Why?
MN: Along with “1961,” I’m doing a potpourri of newer standards and theater songs at my improvisational monthly night in New York City, songs written in the last 20 years. I’m not attempting to do pop songs of today, whatever today is — never did, I don’t think.
PGN: Do you have a time cut-off?
MN: I have no cut-off. I will tell you that what makes me want to do a song is the wit of the lyric, and if I can bring something to it in storytelling form, or in flushing out a character.
PGN: And pop songs of the present can’t or don’t do that?
MN: No, they do not, not for me. So it’s not about time — the year or era when a song is written — but rather how the song speaks to me and what I can, from there, bring to an audience. Why would you listen to Mark Nadler do a song unless I couldn’t do anything unique with it?
PGN: When you’re considering an Ira Gershwin or a Cole Porter song, are you looking for yourself in their words and music, or placing yourself in their hands?
MN: I have to find something deeply meaningful to and for me. I pick a song because it is funny, or because it is touching or mainly because it gets my juices going in some way. My process from there is that I look for precisely what the songwriter did, what he wrote and its deeper meaning, then adjust it until I feel excited — and exciting.
PGN: How does Cole Porter’s coded language work for you?
MN: That’s part of the fun of Porter, cracking the code. Porter and Larry Hart, who were both gay, wrote in code about being gay. They wrote very personally in that manner. Now, me being a guy that is gay and grew up in Iowa having to live his life and knowing full well how to express himself in that code, I automatically look for that language. Porter is my all; I have been to his gravesite and played at his home. I have gotten to know Cole Porter as intimately as I could without sitting down to dinner with him. Knowing that he wrote “Begin the Beguine” while on vacation on the Fiji Islands and hearing a beguine colors my impression of that song and that moment. I could imagine my own beguine, and wrote in counterpoint to his beguine, and that underpins his song. That takes the beguine from the big-band era into something more intimate.
PGN: That’s the most times I’ve heard the word “beguine” used in one statement.
MN: And so it begins.
Mark Nadler performs 8 p.m. March 3-4 at Dino’s Backstage & the Celebrity Room, 287 N. Keswick Ave., Glenside. For more information or tickets, visit http://www.dinosbackstage.com/shop/show-tickets/march-3-mark-nadler-cole-porter-after-dark/.