Books, Arts & Manners: Tenors, Tomatoes, and a Turkey

PETER CHELSOM’S Hear My Song is an attempt to capture the fey charm of Ireland at its most leprechaunish by recapturing the charm of the old Ealing Studios comedies at their most English. You recall those delightful comedies of several decades ago when Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Joyce Grenfell, James Robertson Justice, and other such foxy folk made us laugh intelligent laughter of the sort that never made us miss a joke because we were still rolling in the aisles over the last one. After all, we were not being paid to dust the floor with our clothing; the Ealing (I almost wrote “healing”) films made us laugh with our minds and hearts rather than with our bellies.

Well, Hear My Song is about Micky O’Neill, a desperate pop-concert promoter, whose Liverpool nightclub, Heartly’s, is slipping. Unable to book a decent act into it, he has to resort to fellows like Franc Cinatra, who reads fine to people who have no eye for spelling, but sounds dreadful to those with an ear for music. Under the threat of foreclosure, Micky books a chap who bills himself as “Mr. X—is it or isn’t it?” The reference is to Josef (Jo) Locke, the legendary Irish tenor whose voice made women weep, but whose evasions did not make the tax collector smile.

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John Simon

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PETER CHELSOM’S Hear My Song is an attempt to capture the fey charm of Ireland at its most leprechaunish by recapturing the charm of the old Ealing Studios comedies at their most English. You recall those delightful comedies of several decades ago when Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Joyce Grenfell, James Robertson Justice, and other such foxy folk made us laugh intelligent laughter of the sort that never made us miss a joke because we were still rolling in the aisles over the last one. After all, we were not being paid to dust the floor with our clothing; the Ealing (I almost wrote “healing”) films made us laugh with our minds and hearts rather than with our bellies.

Well, Hear My Song is about Micky O’Neill, a desperate pop-concert promoter, whose Liverpool nightclub, Heartly’s, is slipping. Unable to book a decent act into it, he has to resort to fellows like Franc Cinatra, who reads fine to people who have no eye for spelling, but sounds dreadful to those with an ear for music. Under the threat of foreclosure, Micky books a chap who bills himself as “Mr. X—is it or isn’t it?” The reference is to Josef (Jo) Locke, the legendary Irish tenor whose voice made women weep, but whose evasions did not make the tax collector smile.