Fourteen show people, their flaws, their gifts

HONKY TONK PARADE

By John Lahr

Overlook, $27.95, 336 Pages

REVIEWED BY CORINNA LOTHAR

When John Lahr was a boy, he could not understand how his famous father, Bert, kept audiences alive with laughter, but the minute he “hit the wings the person who was bellowing and madcap and powerful on stage deflated like a tire.” In his new book, “Honky Tonk Parade,” Mr. Lahr sheds some light on this perplexing question. The book is a compilation of 14 profiles of show people which Mr. Lahr has written for the New Yorker.

The profiles are not new, yet they remain fresh. They are filled with insight and a generous lack of judgment. Each profile is the result of many hours of research and interviews with the subject and his or her family, friends, colleagues and companions. Each reads like a jewel-like mini-biography.

The reader is introduced to the dreams, ambitions, motivations, fears, triumphs and failures of each individual, be it Kenneth Tynan’s brilliance and self-loathing; Richard Rogers’ extraordinary musical prowess and his imperfections as friend, father and husband; Dame Edna’s need to avenge herself on her middle-class Australian miseducation at school; or Yip Harburg’s belief in the common man. All these show people are motivated by ambition and a powerful desire to succeed. Yet in almost all of them there exists the dichotomy of the outgoing public persona and the private, withdrawn inner self.

The longest profile is dedicated to Dame Edna Everage, that wonderfully zany character, the “dandy of delirium,” and her creator, Barry Humphries. Perhaps Dame Edna represents the greatest divide between the onstage persona of the outrageous Australian every-wife and the off-stage ladies’ man. Mr. Humphries grew up in Melbourne, “a church-going and well-bred young man,” who dreamed of becoming a magician as a child.

Dame Edna owes her paternity in part to Mr. Humphries’ disgust with “the blinkered conformity” of his school and teachers. She “originated as a totem of Humphries sense of displacement both from his milieu and from his parents.” Mr. Humphries’ creativity lies in his ability to make Dame Edna funny, rather than vindictive.

Dame Judi Dench, loved and encouraged by her family, began acting as a young girl and has always been successful. She does not read scripts in advance; she relies on instinct; she communicates warmth, “a palpable, deep-seated generosity.” Mr. Lahr describes her as a “deceptively sedate, suburban figure,” when in fact “she trolls her turbulent Celtic interior, a vast tragic-comic landscape that ranges between despair and indomitability.”

Yip Harburg, “the invisible man of the American musical,” was born in 1896, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and grew up in New York’s Lower East Side.

Harburg wrote “songs that moved Americans and gave words to their inarticulate longings and fears. He called himself variously, ‘a wheeler-dealer in stardust,’ ‘a rainbow hustler,’ and a revolutionist.’”

Mr. Lahr writes that the “theme of freedom — sexual, social, intellectual — runs through Harburg’s oeuvre and forms a kind of emotional signature to his work.” He wrote one of the first antiwar musicals (“Hooray for What?”); the first all-black Hollywood musical for general audiences (“Cabin in the Sky”); the first musical about feminism {“Bloomer Girl”), and his “Finian’s Rainbow” was the first fully integrated Broadway musical. Harburg wrote the lyrics to such classics as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” “April in Paris,” “Last Night When we Were Young.”

Harold Arlen, with whom he wrote 111 songs and collaborated on the score of the “Wizard of Oz,” called him the Lemon-Drop Kid. In 1934, Harburg and Arlen moved out to Hollywood. “By 1943, Harburg had grown disenchanted with being what he called ‘a metro-gnome for Metro-Goldwyn Nightmayer’” and returned to Broadway.

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