He does have kinder words for Dorothy Fields, Frank Loesser, Irving Berlin and others.

FORBES: Stephen Sondheim Carves Up The Competition--And Himself

Her last show and most recent album explored the songs of Irving Berlin.

NPR: Maude Maggart: A New Generation of Cabaret

He begins solo, with an up-tempo "Getting Sentimental over You" from the 1940s, then adds the trio for an Irving Berlin ballad and Barron's own blues.

NPR: Kenny Barron And Eliane Elias In Concert

His wartime job as a British diplomat in America won him Winston Churchill's admiration though Churchill, intending to invite Berlin to lunch in Downing Street, ended up with Irving Berlin by mistake.

ECONOMIST: And what it says about the role of public intellectuals

Irving Berlin grew up speaking Russian and Yiddish.

FORBES: Lorenz Hart For The 21st Century: "A Ship Without A Sail" (Part 2)

In the two decades since his humor took center stage, Ives is now a playwright who dives into failed plays or musicals and fixes them, whether they're a stage version of the Irving Berlin film "White Christmas, " a French farce about marital mayhem from the early 1900s, or a work by a 17th-century French dramatist.

WSJ: Playwright David Ives finds his timing perfectly