Irving Berlin's music is the star of 'Holiday Inn'

By Pat Jenkins

The Dispatch

You might not be all that familiar with “Holiday Inn,” but it doesn’t take long after the curtain goes up on the 5th Avenue Theatre production before you realize you know the music.
Boy, do you know it.
The Irving Berlin musical is full of his famous songs, making the show that’s being staged through Dec. 31 a lesson in why Berlin is on America’s Mount Rushmore of songwriting.
There’s an entertaining story to go with the music. A vagabond entertainer gives up show business for a quiet life as a farmer in Connecticut. The radical change of lifestyle costs him his fiancée, but no worries: He gets a different girl—the right one--when he turns back to singing and dancing to save his rundown farmhouse from bank receivership by turning the place into an inn for shows on all the big holidays, Christmas included.
The star of “Holiday Inn“ is Berlin’s music. “Blue Skies,” “(It’s a Tropical) Heat Wave,” “White Christmas” and “Cheek to Cheek,” to name a few, are a reminder of the prolific 60-year career of the Jewish immigrant from Russia.  “God Bless America,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” and “Puttin’ On the Ritz” aren’t in “Holiday Inn,” but they’re more examples of why Jerome Kern, himself a major composer in the 1930s and ‘40s, once said Berlin “doesn’t have a place in American music—he is American music.”
Berlin, who died in 1988 at the age of 101, seemingly lived life with songs in his heart.  He—and they—are as alive as ever the rest of this month at the 5th Avenue.