Throwing Shivs at the American Songbook

By ERIC GRODE

Nellie McKay’s limbs might not be as nimble as those of Bill Irwin and David Shiner. (Whose are?) But her ukulele-strumming and piano-playing fingers, to say nothing of her deceptively barbed tongue, get every bit as much of a workout in the two men’s long-awaited reunion, Old Hats.

“I guess it isn’t all me up there,” McKay says of her Old Hats persona. “It’s also Hoagy Carmichael and Louis [Armstrong] from ‘Hello, Dolly!'”

Some of her Old Hats material, notably the exorcism-themed gospel rave-up “Dispossessed” and the anti-anti-feminist “Mother of Pearl,” will be familiar to her fans. (“It’s good to recycle,” she says.) But she also debuts three new songs plus a Jobim-style Portuguese tune to accompany that hapless magic act.

While the actual interactions between McKay and her leading men are largely confined to that sequence and a charming Charleston, she says director Tina Landau has encouraged a fair amount of creative back-and-forth within the cast. Or, as she puts it, “Everyone in this show has opinions about everything.”

McKay says she tried to keep herself in the dark about Irwin and Shiner’s skills before Old Hats rehearsals “because otherwise I’d have been too intimidated to function.” But now that she and her band members have a nightly view of the action, staying unaware is no longer an option: “Every night, we’re beside ourselves when we watch the show.”

Eric Grode is a freelance arts writer and a professor at Syracuse University’s Goldring Arts Journalism Program
Photo by Joan Marcus