For its residents and visitors alike, Prague is a city of music. In concert halls and venues large and small, there are performances every day by opera companies, symphony orchestras, chamber music ensembles, and - much our delight and surprise -- smaller groups and piano bars focusing on the songs of the American composers and musical theater.

We were spending a week in the ancient city that boasts a thousand-year-old castle, a massive stone bridge over the wide Vltava River celebrating its 650th anniversary, and towers, churches and buildings that go back to the 15th and 16th century. Tonight, we needed to choose. There was The Best of Gershwin at the famed Municipal House Concert Hall, which oddly included numbers from Bernstein's West Side Story, Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady, and Jerome Kern's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Ol' Man River." Also, a program, The Best of World's Musicals, equally even-handed in featuring My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Cats, Hello, Dolly!, Hair and others. We selected the latter, presented in a former monastery, and devoted an hour to being serenaded by soprano Marie Cernvena, pianist Suzana Nemechova and R. Fojticek, an impressively supportive tenor saxophonist. If the vocalist's renditions substituted occasional V's for W's ("Vouldn't it be lover...") her voice was clear, her delivery spirited and interpretations of the lyrics on target.

From conversations overheard, the audience seemed predominately Czech, French and German, leaving little doubt how American musicals have caught the world's fancy. And what could have been more appropriate for a couple of temporary expatriates from the New York club scene than soprano Cervena's closing number, Kander and Ebb's Cabaret, asking, "What good is sitting alone in your room? Come hear the music play..." Short of the two-drink minimum, it was Prague, but cabaret all the way.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
June 1, 2007
www.cabaretscenes.org