Hamptons Summer Songbook by the Sea will bring Steve Ross and Karen Murphy to LTV Studios in Wainscott on Saturday evening at 7:30 for “Best of the Versed,” an intriguing name for a program devoted to “the opening lyrics you may not know to tunes you thought you did.” The program will be produced and hosted by David Alpern.
Songs by such iconic composers as Ira Gershwin, Larry Hart, Cole Porter, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Sammy Cahn, Herman Hupfeld, and other creators of the Great American Songbook, some familiar, some obscure, will include rarely performed introductory lyrics.
A few samples to whet your appetite: “As a tot when I trotted in little velvet panties,” “In Verona my late cousin Romeo,” “I don’t need a moon, a nook, a tune for violins,” “Men are really men no longer now,” “My face is glowing, I’m energetic,” and “My love must be a kind of blind love.”
The latter will be familiar from the 1959 recording by The Flamingos, but it was actually written by Harry Warren and Al Dubin in 1934 for the film “Dames,” when Dick Powell introduced it. Art Garfunkel also covered it, in 1975. Mr. Ross and Ms. Murphy will “tell you more and sing them all,” says the studio.
Mr. Ross, who was dubbed “the suavest of all male cabaret performers” by The New York Times, has been a fixture in both the Manhattan cabaret community and at venues around the world for more than 40 years. His CDs include musical explorations of Stephen Sondheim, Alan Jay Lerner, Porter, and Noel Coward, whose green velvet smoking jacket was presented to Mr. Ross by England’s Noel Coward Society.
Ms. Murphy’s Broadway credits include “A Little Night Music,” “9 to 5: The Musical,” “42nd Street,” and “Titanic.” Off Broadway she has appeared in “The Jerusalem Syndrome,” “Forbidden Broadway,” and “My Vaudeville Man,” for which she received a 2009 Drama Desk nomination.
A former reporter, writer, and senior editor at Newsweek magazine, Mr. Alpern launched Newsweek On Air in 1982, which featured interviews with everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Walter Cronkite to Rosemary Clooney to Robert Caro. Now a full-time Sag Harbor resident, he moderates foreign policy discussions for the John Jermain Memorial Library and writes book reviews for The Star.
Tickets for the program are $50 in advance, $55 at the door, and $80 for cafe table seating.
