Few pop artists are as universally recognized for their musical genius as Stevie Wonder. And perhaps no album exemplified Wonder’s brilliance more than “Songs in the Key of Life.”
The original LP, released in September 1976, was an epic double album of 17 songs, with an additional seven-inch EP, entitled A Something’s Extra, containing four bonus tracks. It went on to win 4 Grammys, including Album of the Year, and sold more than 10 million copies world-wide.
The most commercially successful songs on the album, “Sir Duke,” “I Wish,” and the saccharine “Isn’t She Lovely,” were the least of the album’s considerable achievements. At a time when album play required a constant moving of the record player needle in order to land on the most worthwhile singles, “Songs in the Key of Life” was one of those cherished albums that allowed you to drop the needle once, go about your business, and enjoy each side from start to finish. It wasn’t just a collection of tracks, but a celebration of love, life, and the Black cultural experience, tempered with meditations on loss and pain.
That’s why it’s easy to see why the Upper West Side’s Symphony Space chose to enlist the talents of Broadway vocalists to cover “Songs in the Key of Life” for a benefit concert this past Monday night, with the benefit being Symphony Space itself. And who better to mine the emotional depths of Stevie’s masterpiece than performers who repeatedly animate and interpret songbooks for a living?
The concert’s production team was remarkably faithful, almost to a fault, to the source material, offering each song from the original album, back-to-back, in the precise order in which they appeared on the original album. Judiciously left off the evening’s playlist were the instrumental “Contusion” and the bonus tracks, ”Saturn,” “Ebony Eyes,” “All Day Sucker,” and “Easy Goin’ Evening.”
A threesome consisting of Blu Allen, Keirsten Hodgens and Mariah Lyttle started the evening off with a rendition of “Love’s in Need of Love Today” before assuming their place as backup vocalists for the rest of the numbers. Their dutiful execution set the tone, with each subsequent artist competently delivering their song from the middle of the stage, accompanied by a house band.
There were indeed standouts. Jhardon DiShon Milton, performing “Sir Duke” alongside Adrianna Hicks, featured a voice that was wonderfully Stevie-like in its tonal quality. Jenn Colella deftly held “Knocks Me Off My Feet” as a silky jazz standard. Heath Saunders, eschewing the mostly R&B vibe of the evening, added a touch of poppy rock in his American Idol audition interpretation of “Pastime Paradise.” Ali Louis Bourzgui and Adrianna Hicks provided lovely harmonies in “Ngiculela,” and Nikki Renée Daniels was haunting in “If It’s Magic.” Amber Iman’s penultimate performance of “As” was the strongest and most inspiring of the evening. And of course, each artist was allowed to belt out solos as the entire company performed the final number, “Another Star.”
The audience was, in turn, hard to disappoint. The crowd on-hand, which skewed older and whiter, possibly reflecting the mostly Upper West Side Symphony Space donor base, responded to each number with an appreciation buried deeply within their generational love of Stevie. As she was leaving the show, the woman sitting in front of me remarked that she’s been a Stevie fan ever since she watched him perform “Fingertips” way back in the day, when he was a teenager known as “Little” Stevie Wonder.
Still, there were far fewer lips moving, butts shaking and shoulders swaying than I hoped for. In fact, “restraint” is the word that most characterized the evening. If you’ve ever been to a Stevie Wonder dance party, you know how much spiritual and kinetic energy is freighted by Stevie’s pre-1990s music. And if you are not closing your eyes, holding your heart and tilting your head towards the sky throughout a Stevie concert, then you ain’t really Wonder-ing.
Perhaps the featured artists were saving their voices for their main gigs, or were held back by the house band, which performed with the mood range of a lounge pianist. Either way, I kept waiting for barn-burning renditions that never fully arrived. Even “As” was not afforded the escalating tempo and energy that makes it one of Stevie’s most emotionally transcendent compositions. And inexplicably, the producers decided that “Ordinary Pain” would only feature Stevie’s vocal portion, and leave out the Shirley Brewer “Reply,” a deliciously brutal rejoinder and take-down that memorably begins with the line, “You’re just a masochistic fool.” The performing artist, Zachary Noah Piser, more than held his own with a crooner’s command of the number, but without the Brewer rebuttal from the original album, the producers again missed an opportunity to bring down the house.