LTV’s Hamptons Summer Songbook by the Sea will return on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with “Best of the Versed Strikes Back,” produced and hosted by David Alpern and featuring Steve Ross, Karen Murphy, and Maria Abous. Audience members will be provided with song sheets for those who want to sing along.
The program, which “strikes back” because it’s a return by popular demand of a successful show last summer, features music by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, Johnny Mercer, and more. Some tunes will be familiar, others obscure, but all will have introductory verses that are now rarely performed.
Mr. Ross has been called “the suavest of all male cabaret performers” by The New York Times. After a gig at the New York piano bar Ted Hook’s Backstage, he reopened the Oak Room at Manhattan’s Hotel Algonquin in 1981 and played there on and off for more than 15 years. He has performed on Broadway, Off Broadway, and internationally in London, Paris, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Melbourne, and Sydney. His dozen CDs include musical explorations of Stephen Sondheim, Lerner, Porter, and Noel Coward.
Ms. Murphy has extensive stage experience, having played Madame Armfeldt in the Broadway revival of Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.” Her other Broadway credits include “9 to 5,” “All Shook Up,” “42nd Street,” and “Titanic,” and she won a Drama Desk nomination for her Off Broadway performance in “My Vaudeville Man.”
Maria Abous is a crossover soprano whose voice “begs for lush orchestration,” according to Rolling Stone UK. She has performed in New York at Birdland, Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 54 Below, and the Triad. With her latest album, “Merry Little Christmas,” she “brings an ethereal twist to holiday classics with the timeless allure of Grace Kelly, the vocal warmth of Frank Sinatra, and a heart all her own,” according to Daily Front Row.
A reporter, writer, and senior editor at Newsweek, in 1982 Mr. Alpern launched “Newsweek On Air,” a weekly radio broadcast that featured interviews with writers, entertainers, and newsmakers. Thirty years later he took the show independent and nonprofit as “For Your Ears Only.” Now a full-time Sag Harbor resident, he hosts author talks at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton and often reviews books for The Star.
Tickets are $60 in advance, $65 at the door, $100 for cocktail table seating with a drink included.
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This article has been updated from its print version to reflect that “Best of the Versed Strikes Back” is on Sunday night, not Saturday night, and to update the nature and location of Mr. Alpern’s library talks.
