BY CHRIS VARIAS
Enquirer Contributor
The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra closes its Riverbend season this weekend with a program of tunes familiar to Erich Kunzel's flock.
George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Kurt Weill are three names likely to pop up in just about any Pops program and three of the many composers whose work was performed in Mr. Kunzel and the orchestra's Friday night concert, Broadway Box-Office Blockbusters.
The Broadway salute, as the conductor noted, is an annual affair. It began appropriately enough, with the fanfare of a bouncy Broadway medley familiar to the ears of those who tune into Bugs Bunny or David Letterman.
Mr. Kunzel made like Paul Shaffer,swinging his arms as bows sawed against strings and throwing his hip with the boom of the bass drum.
A medley of songs by George M. Cohan, whom Mr. Kunzel hailed as "the champion of Broadway's earliest days," was full of recognizable tunes such as "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy."
Two of the better things about a Pops concert are Mr. Kunzel's between-song comments and history lessons.
He called Jerome Kern's Show Boat from 1927 "the first genuine musical" -- not a patchwork revue like preceding musicals, he said, but a unified article scripted for a particular plot.
The night got good with the Show Boat stuff. Soprano Elizabeth Beeler and tenor Kevin Anderson merrily duked it out on "Make Believe," while baritone Daniel Narducci topped them both with "Ol' Man River," spurring near-wild applause from an otherwise polite crowd of 3,836.
It was likely the performance that people talked about on their way home.
The back-to-back-to-back grouping of Mr. Gershwin's "Swanee," Mr. Porter's "Night and Day," and Mr. Weill's "Mack the Knife" brought to mind three great American singers: Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra and Bobby Darin, although the performances owed little to any of them.
