01/19/2001
Jen Graves; The News Tribune
No title can tie the bundle of Maureen McGovern - Disaster Movie Queen, self-anointed Little Miss Menopause and scatting, soaring, Mel Torme-protege soprano with a four-octave range.
McGovern brings all that to join the Tacoma Symphony Saturday.
The "51 1/2 (year-old) and proud of every minute of it" singer is a straight-talking but contented New Yorker who broke onto the pop scene with "The Morning After," the Academy Award-winning gold record from the 1972 movie "The Poseidon Adventure."
The only thing she's not contented about, actually, is that she lives in Los Angeles. She's originally from Youngstown, Ohio, but longs for New York, where she spent 18 years in a one-bedroom on 68th and Broadway.
McGovern moved west four years ago to get involved in Hollywood in a different way. This time, she wants to act in movies, not sing along.
She played the voice of Rachel, Ben Affleck's character's mother, in DreamWorks' animated video "Joseph: King of Dreams," released in November. (No, she didn't meet Ben.)
She didn't sing at all for her role in "The Cure for Boredom," a small indie comedy released last year that's a sendup of the Mafia.
"I always continue to sing, but just doing straight acting is more interesting to me at the moment," she said during a phone interview from her home. "I want to play odd, interesting, but very strong and independent women."
It won't be a stretch. The redheaded singer has earned what she has accomplished.
A radically talented woman who was singing in a movie called "The Towering Inferno" in 1974 had room for career improvement. And McGovern has blasted through stylistic barriers and low, then high, expectations to gain a loyal following and the mostly ungrudging admiration of critics.
Her 1999 album with pianist Mike Renzi, "The Pleasure of His Company," was Grammy nominated. She dedicated it to her mentor, the late Torme (who shared her love of Yorkshire terriers). She joins Skitch Henderson and the New York Pops for her latest recording, "With a Song in My Heart: The Great Songs of Richard Rodgers." She goes on the road for cabaret shows, symphony appearances and musicals.
She wrote the music, co-created the story and starred in the children's musical "The Bengal Tiger's Ball," which had its East Coast premiere in 1999.
McGovern does what she wants to do now, but it wasn't always that way.
She started, dismally, as a lounge singer at hotels across the Midwest.
"The Morning After" was a decent first experience with the recording industry, though as a song of hope it hardly summed up McGovern's personal situation. Her mother had just been diagnosed with colon cancer and she was going through a divorce and a lawsuit with her first manager.
"My life was falling apart," she said. "And I had a cold at the time. We had to record it several times so it didn't sound like 'The Bording Apter.' I should get a cold every time I record. I can get a gold record."
During her next stint in the studio, producers picked the songs and keys and recorded the tracks "and I was basically a backup singer on my own record," she said. "It was further and further away from what was at the heart of me. I decided to leave the recording industry until I could do it on my own terms."
In 1976, McGovern went to work as an office secretary. She assumed the name of Glenda Schwartz, she said, and her boss's wife would cover for her when she had to dash off. "I would get a call, 'Can you be in the Philippines?' So I'd go and be a superstar around the world, and then Glenda Schwartz at the typewriter."
McGovern found a home in theater when she made her Broadway debut as Mabel in "The Pirates of Penzance" in 1981. Then she starred opposite Raoul Julia in Tommy Tune's production of "Nine" on Broadway in 1982.
Her role in "Pirates" came with a vocal coach, Marge Rivingston, who also coaches Linda Ronstadt, Dixie Carter and Bette Midler. That was the first time McGovern had vocal training, and she wasn't eager for it.
"I didn't want someone to change my style, and I didn't want to sound like those opera singers with a mile-wide vibrato that sound like the ghost of Bert Lahr," the morose-faced vaudevillian best-known as "The Wizard of Oz's" Cowardly Lion.
But Rivingston didn't do any of that. McGovern had begun to scat in her upper range but couldn't sing lyrics as high. Rivingston opened her range and strengthened the reaches, the singer said. "I had no idea I was a coloratura (soprano)," McGovern said. "I was an alto in the grade-school choir."
She studies with Rivingston once or twice a year. "But I do her warmup tapes all the time," said McGovern, the good student. "Thirty minutes in the morning and 30 minutes before the show."
McGovern's voice was injured when she suffered a ruptured blood vessel just before her 1990 run in Kurt Weill's "The Threepenny Opera" opposite Sting.
"The Kurt Weill estate insisted that the music be done in the first keys it was done in in the 1920s," she said. "When you're doing eight shows a week, as opposed to opera singers doing one or two shows a week, and they wanted soprano keys belted, it was just insane. I kept telling them, 'It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.'
"A week before we opened, I started to do my vocal warmups at the theater, and in the whole middle of my range only air and squeaks came out. I saw my whole life pass before me."
McGovern's voice recovered, but "I learned that no means no, and there is no one show that is worth losing your whole career."
In 1986, McGovern recorded and co-produced with pianist Renzi what she considers to be her first album. She has continued in that cabaret-songbook vein, making a name for herself in particular as a master Gershwin interpreter. New York Post critic Clive Barnes wrote that she "can sing Gershwin like Joan Sutherland can sing Donizetti."
"I don't approach the songs as museum pieces," McGovern said. "I find out why they're still alive today."
She'll do that Saturday with a "Swing, Swing, Swing" program of '40s big-band music from Duke Ellington, Buddy Rich, the Andrews Sisters and Ella Fitzgerald, she said.
"There's some inherent longing in that music," she said. "It's the last of a real, genuine, unique style. Everything since then has been hashed and rehashed."
Though McGovern was eager to shed her Disaster Queen image when the '80s dawned - which explains her role as a guitar-strumming nun in the disaster-movie spoof, "Airplane!" in 1980 - she is getting back to the kind of healing listeners told her they found in "The Morning After."
She's now working on a series of recordings that will be distributed to hospitals. "It's music that really enhances the medical process, the mind-body-spirit connection," she said. "People have said that they've put 'The Morning After' on a loop and put it on during their surgery. ... There's something about the human voice that's positive and life-affirming."
And McGovern knows about disease and healing from her own family. After nine years singing on the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon, her 3-year-old niece was diagnosed with a muscular disease in 1989.
The condition is now in remission, and McGovern said her commitment to the annual telethon is stronger than ever.
McGovern is settling into running things her way. She may have caught the acting bug, and it may help her escape the "assault" of touring travel, as she says, but the music is in her.
"I'm a singer who's a storyteller, and the ultimate gift you can give back is to inspire," she said. "I think that's why I was put here."
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* Staff writer Jen Graves covers the arts. Reach her at 253-597-8568 or jen.graves@mail.tribnet.com.
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PREVIEW
What: Maureen McGovern with the Tacoma Symphony.
When: 8 p.m. Saturday.
Where: Pantages Theater, 901 Broadway, Tacoma.
Tickets: $50-$16.
Information: 253-272-7264.
© The News Tribune