Can a sweet-singing Disney princess be taught to swing?
“Turns out, the girl can swing!” Rob Fisher pronounced of Patti Murin, who was the original Princess Anna in the Broadway stage version of “Frozen.” The internationally known music director from Norfolk was discussing jazzy vocals, not playground equipment.
On Saturday, in his hometown, Fisher will be at the piano with Murin at the mic alongside Ross Lekites, who performed in “Frozen” with Murin.
They’ll be presenting mostly Broadway fare, with some Hollywood thrown in, from around a century ago. The songsmiths: George and Ira Gershwin.
The evening will include about 20 mostly well-known tunes by the brothers that enriched what’s called the Great American Songbook, such as “’S Wonderful,” “I’ve Got a Crush On You” and “Embraceable You.” A few lesser-known songs will be in the mix, including “Fidgety Feet,” which composer George Gershwin (1898-1937) and lyricist Ira Gershwin (1896-1983) wrote for their 1926 Broadway musical “Oh, Kay!”
Instead of conducting an orchestra, as Fisher often does, he’ll be leading a quartet of crack jazz players. The concert, part of the Virginia Arts Festival, will take place at the intimate Robin Hixon Theater. While he has taken part in the festival for many years, in 2022, he accepted an official connection as Artistic Advisor for Musical Theater and the American Songbook.
Fisher marvels at the trajectory that catapulted him straight from music school to a favored pianist, then music director and more for all things Gershwin.
“The path just kept opening up for me. And it’s kept coming back to Gershwin, which is fine with me,” he said in a recent interview.
His attraction to Gershwin began in childhood and was fed by records played in his household. By 10, he learned a simplified version of George Gershwin’s sophisticated “Rhapsody in Blue,” an innovative fusion of classical and jazz.
At 17, he played an adult solo version of “Rhapsody” on stage at the Chrysler Museum for his piano recital.
“It’s hard and it’s long — 17 minutes long. When I look back, what was I thinking? I was obsessed with it for a couple of years.”
Having grown up in the Bayview neighborhood, by a beach where he went crabbing, he developed a fascination with marine science. He majored in botany at Duke University even while actively pursuing his greater love, music. He earned a graduate degree in music at American University in 1978.
That year, he moved to New York and quickly landed a gig as pianist at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The project was the first revival of a 1933 Gershwin musical, “Let ‘Em Eat Cake,” to commemorate the 80th anniversary of George Gershwin’s birth.
“A lot of the Gershwin family and friends came to see it. I got to know them then. So when planning started for this Carnegie Hall celebration that fall, they called" and invited him to be the guest pianist.
Backstage at Carnegie, he remembers watching Ginger Rogers prepare to rehearse her song, “Embraceable You,” which she introduced in 1930 in the Gershwin musical “Girl Crazy.”
“I thought I had been transported to some other realm. She walked into the room like a normal person. It didn’t seem possible.”
He was a fan who couldn’t fathom his luck.
“I’d never been in the audience at Carnegie, and there I was on stage.”
Soon, he was helping to put together entire shows. In 1994, he became the founding music director of the Encores! series for which he unearthed dozens of forgotten Broadway scores and restaged them as concerts.
Fisher raised several Gershwin musicals from an early grave. In February 2015, Murin was in his Encores! staging of “Lady, Be Good!” That was the Gershwins’ first Broadway show, in 1924, with songs solely created by the duo, reports gershwin.com. George Gershwin wanted to create a new kind of stage show, with witty, urbane characters singing modern music.
Bringing “Lady” back to life meant recreating most of the orchestral scores and other tricky tasks.
Simultaneously, he was concluding four years of labor on the first stage version of the 1951 film “An American in Paris,” which featured Gershwin tunes. Fisher had to reconstruct and tweak a lot of music in a way he inferred the brothers would have done it.
“I arranged the score and all of the scene-change music and the underscoring and pieced it all together.” At times, he said, “it almost felt like I was having seances with George and Ira.”
The uber-romantic show opened on Broadway in April 2015. The New York Times wrote that the score was “adapted and arranged with incomparable finesse” by Fisher.
The songs Fisher selected for the Norfolk program are all romantic tunes that speak to “all of the ways people fall in love, fall out of love, get back into love.” That’s why the program is titled, “Love, George & Ira.”
“The situations have never changed,” he said. “That’s perennial, which is why their songs still resonate 100 years later.”
The 7:30 p.m. Saturday concert is at Robin Hixon Theater, 440 Bank St., Norfolk. Visit vafest.org for tickets and more information.
