11 Celsius

By Stefan Kanfer

TOMFOOLERY

Music and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer

"Get in line in that processional,/ Step into that small confessional,/ There the guy who's got religion'll/ Tell you if your sin's original." There was a time (circa 1955) when The Vatican Rag caused frissons and merriment all around the campus-- circuit. Songwriter Tom Lehrer was a Harvard math professor who could do numbers on anything from sex to the Bomb. But satire is a parasitical art, no stronger than its host. Folk singers, the. military, Freud and faith, all have been familiar targets for over a generation. Today Tomfoolery, a chrestomathy of 28 Lehrer hits, seems about as audacious as a glass of eggnog.

Yet eggnog is not without its spice or season. Lehrer's best lyrics are feats of compression; works like Masochism Tango ("You can raise welts like nobody else") or When You Are Old and Gray ("Say you'll love and trust me/ For I know you'll disgust me") have retained their piquancy. Surprisingly, it is Lehrer's melodies that show the fewest wrinkles, switching from exuberant marches to minor ballads with a fluency that went unnoticed in his postgraduate period. Gary Pearle and Mary Kyte's galvanic direction aids the songs when it whispers and distorts them when it shouts. Sans extraneous props, the quartet of soloists, MacIntyre Dixon, Joy Franz, Jonathan Hadary and Donald Corren, embody the Lampoon spirit of Tomfoolery and if at times they breathe too hard, it is not their age but the material's. Tom Lehrer "admits to 53, but prefers to think of it as 11 Celsius." So do we all.

--By Stefan Kanfer

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