Actor-pianist Hershey Felder’s love affair with the piano, and his deeply intuitive connection to classical composers, has long been known to TheatreWorks Silicon Valley audiences as well as to audiences worldwide.
Over the course of a 28-year career, he has appeared in more than 6,000 live performances. That includes tours of his solo theatrical productions, in each one of which he re-creates the character of a famous composer (Beethoven, Debussy, Chopin, Gershwin, Irving Berlin and more) along with peripheral characters. The onstage piano he plays is a sort of secondary main character.
In his new play-with-music world premiere “The Piano and Me,” onstage in Mountain View, he foregoes his beloved composers to focus on his own life.
And in re-creating that life and the various people who influenced him — teachers, family members, others —not just his musical, but his equally terrific acting chops, are on full display.
At last, we hear Hershey Felder’s personal story, starting at age 6 in 1974: his first discovery of the piano in Montreal, where he grew up in an immigrant community; his various teachers (he impersonates each with detail and humor); his acceptance into McGill University’s Conservatory of Music at 16; his New York education and experiences.
“I am going to tell you the truth,” he promises right from the beginning. That truth is exhilarating and sometimes devastating.
A first-generation kid from an East European Jewish family, he was fat in childhood and tormented at school. Astounded to learn that Beethoven composed “Für Elise” when he was deaf, Felder says that he experimented and realized he could hear music in his own head. As a child, he wondered, “Why should one man at a piano move me?” He learned that “music had to come from a composer’s soul.”
Individual by individual, Felder describes all that was left, in his childhood, of his family: his beautiful mother who dies so young; his taciturn widower father; his grandparents. His grandfather keeps a battered suitcase by the front door, which contains, among a few other items, a Jewish prayer shawl. In case someone comes to take us away, his grandfather explains.
The traumatic family background forms the solid core of “The Piano and Me,” and Felder shares details with such calm restraint; the impact is all the more devastating.
The piano takes center stage, but the two-hour intermission-less show effectively includes wall projections. Portraits of composers and family photos are at times gently animated; the video-projection design is by Stefano DeCarli, scenic and visual elements by Felder. The perfectly calibrated sound design by Eric Carstensen.
Felder is a performer who needs no director. His showmanship instincts are on fire here.
“Whatever happens,” Felder is cautioned early on in his life, “never stop playing the piano.” Luckily for us, he has not.
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s “Hershey Felder: The Piano and Me” continues through Feb. 8 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $34-$115 at theatreworks.org.