Chip Deffaa’s The Boy Next Door
(Garrett Mountain Records)
May 20, 2020
Reviewed by Bart Greenberg
Having produced over two dozen CDs, Chip Deffaa has essentially become a one-man genre of his own. Most of his recordings feature a collection of appealing performers, ranging from newcomers to Broadway veterans who have developed into a stock company the maestro draws upon. The singers all deliver with clarity and a sense of style appropriate to a repertoire that covers about a century of writing; their voices are at least pleasant, though occasionally one regrets that some don’t project a strong individual personality.
The booklet for this album, like most in the series, is comprehensive and gives an extensive background for each song along with information about the soloist or duettists.
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Thumbnail photos of each participant help to visualize them in performance. Deffaa also uses the bios to promote his other projects that they’ve appeared in. They may get a bit wordy at times, but his offerings definitely fall under the concept of “more is more,” leading to a slightly overstuffed 24 tracks.
Since the majority of the individual songs run around the three-minute mark, this isn’t a CD you’ll necessarily want to listen to straight through, but you might choose to sample a bit at a time, like a rich mix of chocolates.
Among the highlights are:
“Boy Wanted,” (the Gershwins) opens the album with a much livelier interpretation by the charming Ellis Gage (definitely the featured artist of the set with seven appearances) of a song that is generally given a more languid tempo.
“The Boy Next Door”: yes, what is more cliché than a Judy Garland standard being delivered by a young gay man with no pronouns changed. But David Warren wins with a totally sincere performance without a trace of camp (actually camp is avoided throughout most of the album; there’s a great deal of humor but happily very little camp).
Speaking of camp, Tyler DuBoys delivers an even more surprising achievement by keeping just inside the lines of taste with “Where the Boys Are.”
Several numbers are given a much fuller development, turning them into playlets. “Pu-Leeze, Mr. Hemingway” (Walter Kent, Milton Drake, Abner Silver) tells the amusing tale of a young man (Ellery Bakaitis) dealing with a mature admirer (Deffaa). “Who Needs Ya?,” the longest track on the recording, allows Alec Deland and the returning DuBoys to encapsulate a mismatched but ultimately loving relationship in this true musical-theater gem by the album producer himself.
The two major names here, both Tony-nominated, each give one solo rendition: Stephen Bogardus offers up Cole Porter’s tongue-in-cheek, plaintive “Nobody’s Chasing Me” with a comic invention that makes it regrettable that this version is so short. John Tartaglia happily gets to spend more time with Rodgers and Hart’s love song to their city, “Manhattan,” with growing joy as he enumerates the many joys of the entire New York City area.
Not all of the material is upbeat. Irving Berlin’s plaintive “What’ll I Do?” is given a delicate, sincere treatment by DuBoys and Peter Charney, and Gage brings the proceedings to a close with a wistful “Goodnight My Someone” that seems eternally hopeful.
