Ken Haller
Happy Haller Days
The Gaslight Theater, St. Louis, MO, November 2, 2017
Reviewed by Chuck Lavazzi for Cabaret Scenes
The doctor is in, and he’s got the cure for your holiday blues. All of them.
Happy Haller Days, the latest show from singer/actor/pediatrician Ken Haller, was a romp through a full year of three-day weekends, starting with Christmas and working around the calendar. Peppered with insights from Haller’s life in medicine and theater, the evening was fun and funny, but also touching and profound.
The song choices were varied and sometimes even inspired.
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Memories of the hard life of Haller’s Swedish grandmother, for example, introduced an Independence Day segment that featured a low-key version of Neil Diamond’s “America.
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” For Labor Day, reflections on his days as a resident physician on Manhattan’s posh Upper West Side led to E.
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Y. Harburg and Burton Lane’s rarely heard “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich” from Finian’s Rainbow.
Perhaps the most emotional moment, though, came with the return to Christmas, as Haller’s thoughts on his decade as a pediatrician in poverty-stricken East St. Louis, Illinois made way for an inspiring arrangement of “Light,” from Next to Normal. Based on an arrangement for the Gateway Men’s Chorus by the late Neal Richardson, it blended the voices of Haller and his pianist and music director Marty Fox in tight and powerful harmony. The song’s hope that the light will make the “wasted world we thought we knew…look brand new” felt particularly relevant in the context of today’s bleak political landscape.
Balancing out the drama were some true comic gems, like “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” which the 10-year-old Gayla Peevey took to number 24 on the Billboard charts in 1963. Haller did an impressive job of channeling his own inner child in his charming performance. Perhaps the biggest laughs of the evening, though, came from the Valentine’s Day entry, Marilyn Miller and Cheryl Hardwick’s “Making Love Alone,” a hymn of praise in beguine tempo to (ahem) taking matters into one’s own hands.
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Bernadette Peters brought the house down with it on The Tonight Show in 1989. The Haller and Fox team got even more mileage out of it by taking it just a bit slower, giving the audience room to laugh at the song’s many jokes.
As I have written previously, Ken Haller never fails to deliver a combination of theatrical smarts and vocal authority that have made him one of our town’s principal cabaret exports.
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He and Fox also have a great rapport on stage, something that was obvious in their last effort, The Medicine Show. Expert direction by Gaslight Cabaret Festival producer Jim Dolan kept everything moving at a good pace and helped ensure the sense of a dramatic arc that, in my view, is a major characteristic of a well-designed cabaret performance.
