The Singing Cab Driver Show
By Jack Helbig
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For his efforts St. Ray has been featured in the Sun-Times and Chicago magazine, on Wild Chicago and the Today show. He was even crowned “international taxi driver” of the year by a worldwide cabbie organization.
The songs themselves are better, though St. Ray (working with Burnell) still hasn’t discovered his own voice as a tunesmith. He doesn’t say so, but it seems he may be a “hummer”–the Hollywood term for a composer who hums a tune and then asks a trained musician to write it down. Nothing wrong with that. Charlie Chaplin was a hummer–he could play the violin but had had no formal training–and he composed his own film scores that way. But if St. Ray is indeed a hummer, it might help explain why all the numbers in the show are reminiscent of other, better songs.
But these stories are meant to be only the icing between the layers of St. Ray’s songs. And in his case, the frosting is more nourishing than the cake.
Jarvis illustrates the performance with a slide show of photographs culled from the family album, adding a much needed visual component. But at times the slides detract from the show, making it feel more like a soporific business presentation than the thoughtful, humorous family portrait it is most of the time.
