“Russian on the Side”
Written by Mark Nadler
Showing: Royal George Theatre, 1641 N. Halsted St., through June 15
Tickets: $34.50-$55
Contact: (312) 988-9000; russianonthesideonline.com

By Web Behrens

Contributing writer

There’s an interesting soft shoe going on at the Royal George mainstage right now. Well, two, really: Pianist/singer/comedian Mark Nadler delivers some soft-shoe while playing piano during his one-man show, “Russian on the Side.” It’s a clever bit, down to the details of the brightly colored Elvin shoes. But it also encapsulates, metaphorically, the bizarre balancing act going on with this production: Nadler, it seems, can do just about anything and somehow make it look effortless—yet he simultaneously seems to be trying too hard.

In “Russian,” previewing here before moving to Broadway this fall, Nadler constructs a show around a Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin tune, “Tchaikovsky and Other Russians,” which Danny Kaye pattered to notoriety in the 1940s. The song’s lyric is actually a zippy rhyming list of several dozen Russian (and Russian-American) composers, which gives Nadler a spine to hang a show on. He expounds on each of them in the course of 90 minutes, sharing stories and snippets of their music.

Considering his skill, there’s no reason an audience shouldn’t leave the theater fully satisfied after such a jam-packed evening. The man can certainly play, and he belts out songs with such gusto one suspects Ethel Merman gave the boy her lungs when she croaked. But in the end, “Russian” doesn’t quite gel. One issue is that the material zigs and zags in the oddest ways. It might be hard to sustain a general audience’s interest in all these long-dead Russians (though some, like Glinka, have especially interesting biographies), so Nadler takes bizarre side trips highlighting Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma” and Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures”—tenuous connections, at best. (Far more exciting, not to mention pertinent, is his mash-up of Frank Loesser’s “Ugly Duckling” with “Swan Lake.”) Furthermore, Nadler’s just not as funny as he wants to be: “I don’t play Chopin; I play show tunes” is not a knee-slapper of a one-liner.

Which brings us to the greatest trouble: Nadler actually displays more enthusiasm than talent, which is really saying something. You sometimes wonder if he’ll leap across the top of his piano, sail past the footlights and shake a random audience member by the lapels, just because he can. Director Mark Waldrop really needs to exert a steadying influence here, because it’s an ultimately off-putting performance style.

This reviewer found his mind wandering, pondering what lies underneath Nadler’s larger-than-life stage persona. It wasn’t hard to see a young gay kid, picked on and bullied, whose smarts and skills went unappreciated by a sports-loving straight world. To judge by his frantic “Lookit me!” approach to performing, Nadler’s been overcompensating ever since. (Either that, or he’s hopped up on too much caffeine and coke.) As soon as he dials it down a bit and improves some of his banter, he’ll have a revue that really sings.