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by Seth Rogovoy
LENOX, Mass., July 28, 1996 -- Give the 87-year-old Victor Borge credit for not playing things totally by the book. At his performance at the National Music Center on Saturday night, the piano-playing comedian made frequent humorous reference to the sparse crowd in attendance. "Had I known we were going to be this few, we could have gone to my hotel room," said Borge, garnering one of his biggest laughs of the night.
In a bit of pre-show drama, promoter Richard Nader invited those who did show -- but who were mostly seated toward the rear of the hall -- to move forward and fill in the row after row of seats that sat empty toward the front of the auditorium. There were apparently few takers for the $100 seats; it's not clear how those few who did spring top bucks for the show ultimately felt about rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi.
In any case, Borge was a good sport about it, joking about how he peeked out from backstage before the show and saw nothing but red- suited people in the front rows (the seats are red). Presumably if it hadn't been this, it would have been some other theme about the venue Borge would have riffed on in order to add some freshness to a show that otherwise was wearingly familiar and routine.
In some sense, Borge's comedy is as up-to-date and cutting-edge as Steven Wright's. It's a slow, conceptual type of comedy that relies more on cognitive leaps of faith than rib-tickling joke-telling, although there was a bit of that, too. At one point he even played games with the shadow cast by the spotlight on the black backdrop -- an eerie echo of something Wright himself did at this very venue a few years back.
In Borge's case, the show is as much performance art as anything, and the running gag is when will the actual performance take place. By assuming the guise of a concert pianist who would much rather gab than play, Borge pokes gentle fun at the conventions and pretensions of classical performance.
While stalling for time, Borge told jokes about his family. His grandfather didn't speak to his grandmother for three days -- he didn't want to interrupt her. His cousin invented the burglar alarm, but didn't reap any windfall -- his invention was stolen. His grandfather invented the telephone, but he only had one of them so he couldn't prove anything.And so on.
Borge's non-concert concert consisted in large part of playing the Top 40 of classical piano music -- Beethoven's "Minuet in G," Chopin's "Minute Waltz," themes from Schubert, Brahms, Wagner and Rachmaninoff -- and interspersing the "Happy Birthday" song into each piece. While this was amusing the first three times, it grew tiresome, predictable and even annoying over the course of the evening.
When Borge finally did get down to the business of playing, he exhibited a light, feathery touch, with a lack of definition and articulation. While there were few if any young people in the audience, Borge ironically might be just the man to bring classical music to the MTV generation. He offers up equal doses of irreverence and seriousness, and his three-minute renditions of the classics are well-suited for those with TV-induced, short attention spans.
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[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 29, 1996. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1996. All rights reserved.]
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