Every Kind of Light: The Bergmans’ Love and Lyrics Illuminate 92NY
Entertainment can quietly rearrange the furniture of the heart. Such was the case at The 92nd Street Y in New York, where the Lyrics & Lyricists series — now in its 53rd year and still the country’s preeminent celebration of the Great American Songbook — turned its considerable affection toward Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Titled Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman, the program gathered more than five hundred songs’ worth of legacy into a single, intermission free arc of feeling, and it did so with the unhurried confidence of artists who know exactly what treasure they are handling.
Billy Stritch and Ann Hampton Callaway in "Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman" at the 92ND Street Y, NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
Patient, Attentive, Unafraid of Silence
The Bergmans, one recalls, were married for the duration — a partnership of more than six decades, with both living into their late nineties — and that fact is by no means incidental to their work. Indeed, their lyrics behave like a long marriage: patient, attentive, unafraid of silence, and attuned to the small revelations that accrue when two people pay close attention to one another over time. To spend an evening in their catalog, therefore, is to be reminded that the most durable popular songs are seldom the loudest; more often, they are the ones that name a feeling we had assumed was ours alone.
L-R: Billy Stritch, Ann Hampton Callaway, Nikki Renée Daniels, Brandon Victor Dixon, and Ali Stoker. On Bass, Michael O'Brien, Drums, Eric Halvorson, and Reeds, Aaron Heick in "Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman" at the 92ND Street Y, NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
Billy Stritch and Ann Hampton Callaway: Hosts Who Know the Terrain
The evening’s gravitational center was Billy Stritch, who entered to extended applause and, smiling, accepted it as an old friend accepts a warm room. By now, Stritch is nearly ubiquitous in the New York Songbook ecosystem — you will find him at Birdland and elsewhere almost any week — and his value is easy to state yet hard to overpraise. At the piano, whether soloing or accompanying, he honors the precise emotive intent of composer, lyricist, and singer alike, never mistaking decoration for devotion. His arrangements breathed; moreover, they left room.
Ann Hampton Callaway and Billy Stritch. Photo by Georga Osborne
As Perfect as a Snowflake
Beside him, co-host Ann Hampton Callaway served as both narrator and witness, having known the Bergmans personally. In her program note, she describes their words as “as perfect as a snowflake” and fondly recalls sitting in “the room where it happened” as their songs were born. That intimacy registered onstage; consequently, when Callaway spoke of friendship, you believed her, and when she sang, you understood why Barbra Streisand recorded so many of the songs Callaway grew up studying. Dick Scanlan and Malcolm Gets shaped the evening by providing the script, with Scanlan directing and Rommy Sandhu choreographing. They structured the night as a conversation and celebration rather than a formal recital.
Nikki Renée Daniels in "Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman" at the 92ND Street Y, NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
Three Soloists, and Every Kind of Light
While the hosts provided the event’s framework, three featured soloists brought vibrancy and color to the program. Nikki Renée Daniels, her soprano luminous and unforced, made “The Summer Knows” ache and “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” tremble; she sang as though the lyric were being discovered in real time.
Billy Stritch and Brandon Victor Dixon in "Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman" at the 92ND Street Y, NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
Brandon Victor Dixon performed "Nice 'n' Easy," bringing a misty, intimate ease to the classic Bergman lyric (music by Lew Spence) and lending a discreet devastation to "Where Do You Start?," a powerful breakup song about dividing a shared life. Ali Stroker, a Tony Award winner, also took the stage with "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?" singing with such open-hearted candor that the question ceased to be rhetorical. Her guiding motto — turning limitations into opportunities — felt, at that moment, less like a slogan than a working philosophy of art.
Nikki Renée Daniels, Ali Stoker, and Brandon Victor Dixon in "Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman" at the 92ND Street Y, NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
Unanimity That Cannot Be Rehearsed
Together, in ensemble numbers such as “The Best of Friends,” the three discovered the blend that distinguishes a true company from a mere lineup of stars: generous, listening, and willing to recede so that an individual phrase might land. Time and again, the result was the kind of unanimity that cannot be rehearsed into being; it can only be felt. One sensed, watching them, that they were not performing the Bergmans so much as keeping faith with them — handing the lyrics forward, intact and warm, as one passes along a treasured family story.
Ali Syroker. Courtesy allistroker.com
The Band, the Room, and the Moving Image
Behind the singers, a world-class ensemble gave the Bergmans’ melodies their proper backing: Aaron Heick on reeds, Michael O’Brien on bass, Eric Halvorson on drums, and Andy Ezrin on keyboards, with Stritch presiding over the Steinway. They swung when the material called for it and dissolved into mist when it did not.
Equally worthy of praise was the visual design. A large upstage screen changed color, tone, and mood as the songs moved from story to film to memory—projection design by Kylee Loera and Greg Emetaz, lit with distinguished sophistication by John Kelly—so that the evening became a kind of time travel, with famous movie moments flickering past like memory itself. Nothing gaudy, everything choreographed with care. One left convinced that good design, much like good lyric writing, succeeds precisely when you stop noticing the seams.
Nikki Renée Daniels. Photo by Kyle Flubacker. Courtesy nikkireneedaniels.com
Why These Songs Endure
A little context earns its keep here. The Bergmans belonged to a distinguished lineage — alongside Michel Legrand, Marvin Hamlisch, Johnny Mandel, and Dave Grusin — that married jazz’s harmonic sophistication to the narrative clarity of theater and film. Theirs was the art of the title song, the three-minute screenplay: a complete emotional argument delivered before the credits roll. It is telling that two of the night’s sly pleasures, “Nice ’n’ Easy” and “That Face,” date from the Bergmans’ earliest partnership with composer Lew Spence, when they were crafting wry, finger-snapping confections for Frank Sinatra. Thus, when Callaway invoked “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” and “You Must Believe in Spring,” she was knowingly pointing to a tradition in which the cinema, the cabaret, and the Broadway stage all fed one wide river.
Ann Hampton Callaway in "Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman" at the 92ND Street Y, NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
Music Is a Living Conversation
It is worth remembering, too, that the Songbook is no museum. The inclusion of a Stephen Sondheim interpolation — “Everybody Says Don’t” — within the Bergman canon reminded us that this music is a living conversation among writers across generations, and that a lyric written for one film can, decades later, become an act of communion in a concert hall on Lexington Avenue. In that sense, the program was less a retrospective than a relay race, the baton passed hand to loving hand.
Brandon Victor Dixon. Courtesy brandonvictordixon.com
A Legacy Deserving Seeking Out
By the closing sequence — “The Way We Were,” then “And Then There’s Maude” — the room had achieved that rare, shared stillness in which strangers briefly become an audience in the truest sense. Fittingly, Callaway ends her program note with an exclamation that doubles as the evening’s thesis: “What a deep heritage!” Indeed. To celebrate the Bergmans, ultimately, is to affirm the proposition that tenderness, attended to with craft, outlasts nearly everything.
Billy Stritch in "Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman" at the 92ND Street Y, NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
Safest in The Hands of People Who Love It
That proposition is precisely what the Lyrics & Lyricists series has protected for more than half a century and what 92NY’s broader 2025–26 season continues to nurture. If this concert proved anything, it is that the American Songbook is safest in the hands of people who love it enough to take it seriously — and who remain joyful enough to make us fall for it all over again.
Billy Stritch and Nikki Renée Daniels. On Keyboards, Andy Ezrin, and on Bass, Michael O'Brien, in "Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman" at the 92ND Street Y, NYC. Photo by Richard Termine
Every Kind of Light: The Bergmans’ Love and Lyrics Illuminate 92NY
Every Kind of Light: The Love and Lyrics of Alan & Marilyn Bergman
Venue: David Geffen Stage at the Kaufmann Concert Hall, The 92nd Street Y, New York
1395 Lexington Avenue (at 92nd Street), New York, NY 10128
(212) 415-5500
Tickets & 2025–26 Season: 92ny.org — Lyrics & Lyricists
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