Marvin Hamlisch composes, conducts, plays the piano and conveys his musical expertise with wit and the intimacy of a friendly guest in the living room. Michael Feinstein sings, plays, entertains at his Manhattan nightclub and preserves musical memorabilia in his new Center for Performing Arts complex in Carmel, Ind. Together they bring the best of the Great American Songbook to George Mason University for the sixth annual Arts by George! benefit event. “Michael and I have been good friends for a long time,” Hamlisch said. “I call him the human Google machine because of all the facts stored in his brain. We’ll each present part of the show on our own. He’ll do the things he does and I’ll do the things I do, like standard works by Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers and songs from my own shows like ‘Chorus Line,’ ‘They’re Playing Our Song’ and of course the theme from ‘The Way We Were.’
“Then we’ll get together in a segment that we’ll wait until the day before to plan. It’s good to play it loose because it keeps us on our toes and allows us to ad-lib and keep the show going with humor. I like to be part of fundraisers like this to help scholarships in the arts.”
| Onstage |
| ‘The Great American Songbook’ |
| Where: George Mason University Center for the Arts |
| When 8 p.m. Saturday |
| Info: $40 to $80; 888-945-2468; cfa.gmu.edu; or as part of the Arts By George! benefit event for $200; 703-993-4188; [email protected] |
Already his schedule for the coming season is jam-packed. There are September shows in Johannesburg, South Africa, Dublin, Ireland, and the Hague, Netherlands, before he arrives in Fairfax. Accordingly, he uses his time wisely, composing for a purpose.
“I don’t take solace in having 4,000 pieces of music I can’t use sitting around,” he said. “Each time I sit down at the piano to compose, I’m thinking about a story or a title. When I wrote ‘The Way we Were,’ I knew the title and that Barbra Streisand would sing it. I wrote the melody first, then showed it to Alan and Marilyn Bergman. They rewrote some of the lyrics before showing it to Barbra. She made a few more changes and we were done. A long time went by before we needed it, so we wrote a second song that we didn’t use in the movie, but Barbra liked it and recorded it. She called it ‘The Way We Weren’t.’ ”
