If your romance is going really well, you might consider taking in the off-Broadway musical revue, “The Wonderful Wizard of Song: The Music of Harold Arlen.” On Valentine’s Day (February 14th at 8 p.m.), you can get married onstage during the performance. The theater will provide a group wedding photo, a champagne toast after the show for your entire wedding party, and a commemorative certificate documenting your wedding. The show will also provide two official witnesses. The cast, made up of three male crooners (George Gubatti, Marcus Goldhaber and Joe Shepherd) and a terrific female singer (Antoinette Henry), perform the songs of one of America’s great composers, Harold Arlen, who wrote “Over the Rainbow” and other songs from “The Wizard of Oz,” “Stormy Weather,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Paper Moon,” “Accentuate-The-Positive,” “Lets Fall in Love,” “The Man Who Got Away” and many other standards. The show is playing at St. Luke’s Theatre (308 West 46th St.; 212- 246-8140). The cost for the wedding couple is $350 (for two). Wedding guests pay the regular ticket price of $69.50. “The Wonderful Wizard of Song” is worth seeing even if you don’t want to make a lifelong commitment.
Last year, a new club opened, 54 Below (254 W 54th St.; 646-476-3551), featuring top-flight Broadway and cabaret performers. I haven’t been there but the two new CDs recorded at the venue, Patti LuPone’s “Far Away Places” and Norbert Leo Butz’s “Memories and Mayhem” (on Broadway Records) confirm that the music is on a high level.
LuPone’s CD not only evokes exotic places but pays tribute, either expressly or implicitly, to singers she admires: Edith Piaf (“Hymn to Love” and “I Regret Nothing,” which she somehow transforms to “I Regret Everything”) and Billie Holiday (“Travelin' Light” and “I Cover the Waterfront”). She reminisces about New York during the 1970’s (when the city was bankrupt and Times Square was seedy) and then segues into a piercing rendition of “The Ballad of Pirate Jenny.” LuPone tells a funny story about making a movie in Sicily, the land of her ancestors, where she feels at home when seeing the noses on the men and the mustaches on the women. Somehow the anecdote leads to “I Wanna Be Around (to Pick Up the Pieces When Somebody Breaks Your Heart).” After a British inflected “By the Sea” (from “Sweeney Todd”), LuPone exclaims, “I can do accents … like Meryl.” Her comic flair comes through again on Cole Porter’s “Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking.” She shows off her soulful side with “Night Life.”
