Drama Queen

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.

Undiluted pleasure. A major cabaret event, cabaret history, even. So supreme, the very finest entertainment that New York has to offer. Faaaabulous!

All of those would be apt descriptions of Christine Ebersole’s dazzling new show at the Café Carlyle. She has a high mark to live up to: The act that she did in late 2001 at the much-missed cabaret Arci’s Place is the stuff of cabaret legend. It caused me to write that she is “one of those talents that comes along just a handful of times every generation,” something she proved in spades in her Tony-winning run as Little Edie Beale in the Broadway musical Grey Gardens.

I’m delighted to report that this show is in the same league as the Arci’s Place act. First off, Christine is working with the magnificent John Oddo, like she did last year at the Carlyle. Oddo was musical director for the late, great Rosemary Clooney and he worked with jazz legends like Woody Herman, and it shows in the tight, elegant and powerful arrangements and piano playing he brings to the table.

This also finds her reuniting with director Scott Wittman, who has his own Tony for co-writing the score of Hairspray, and who directed that magical Arci’s Place act. Ebersole, Oddo and Wittman are all working at the top of their powers here, and the results are dumbfoundingly fantastic.

The show opens with the band tearing their way through a pounding rendition of “Hawaiian War Chant” effectively building the excitement for Christine’s entrance. Looking gorgeous and glamorous, she raises the temperature further, with, appropriately enough, “Too Darn Hot”.

She then goes into the witty patter that Wittman is so brilliant at helping singers to develop (though few deliver it with the sparkling élan that comes so naturally to Ebersole), letting us know that we are in for a show on hot topics like “sex, politics, religion…and weather!” The comment about weather gets a laugh, but one of the undeniable high points of the evening is a truly thunderous rendition of “Stormy Weather” that goes miles beyond any other rendition I’ve ever heard.

Ebersole also did a wonderful performance in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit on Broadway last season, and ever since has been working on an album (soon to be released) of Coward songs. She does a handful of his songs in the act, including the lyrical “Matelot” and the sentimental “I’ll See You Again”. If this is any indication of how good the album will be, I can hardly wait.

You absolutely, positively must see this; I’m simply not giving you any other option.

For tickets, click here. Seriously. Now.

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.

It’s no accident that Betty Buckley’s doing a lot of Broadway in her latest cabaret act — “For The Love Of Broadway!” — she says that Feinstein’s got complaints about the jazzier slant of her earlier acts at the club. “We came to see Betty Buckley; we want to hear Broadway, dammit!” She even comically complains about the situation in a very funny specialty number called “When I Belt” written especially for this act by John McDaniel and Eric Kornfeld.

Whether that’s all true or not (it certainly makes for funny patter), it’s a real pleasure to hear her tear into songs as varied as Pal Joey’s “Bewitched,” Avenue Q’s  “There’s a Fine, Fine Line” and The Wiz’s “Home.” Musical director Kenny Werner’s arrangements are original and dynamic, and Buckley’s delivery smart, big and powerful. Particularly touching was her take on Jacques Brel’s “If You Go Away” in which you could almost sense the lover addressed in the song slowly turning away.

The act, however, is a bit on the ballad-heavy side. This breaks what I consider to be one of the few rules about building a solid cabaret act: go easy on the ballads (you want an audience that is in love, not asleep). You can’t fault her often-riveting interpretations, though, and there’s just enough spicy up-tempo stuff to make this a generally enjoyable evening.

For tickets, click here.

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com. 

In Tyne Daly’s previous nightclub act at Feinstein’s, her cabaret debut, she couldn’t find a theme to connect the songs she wanted to sing, so she simply titled it “Songs.” This time, in a show called “The Second Time Around,” Daly has settled on the theme of the blessings and curses that the passage of time brings. It’s a more reflective show, with Tyne showing a more subtle side that’s equal parts expansive emotion and steely-eyed realism.

That’s not to say the stage and screen persona for which she’s known — a “broad” who’s so brassy that it’s dangerous (many have called her 1989 performance as Mama Rose in Gypsy “terrifying”) — doesn’t make an appearance. Her take on Bessie Smith’s murderous “Send Me to the `Lectric Chair” is satisfyingly intense, and she makes a very solid case that she should play Countess Aurelia, The Madwoman of Chaillot, in Jerry Herman’s Dear World (by way of a climactic medley from that show).

More typical of the tone of the show, however, is her wistful take on Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Thoughtful and hushed, it’s a more textured approach than you might expect from Daly, although what she gains in nuance, she loses in magnetism. This way of working is a mixed blessing, intriguing but not what I would call compelling.

That said, there isn’t a moment that Daly doesn’t exude both a heartening confidence and a surprising vulnerability. It’s not a rousing evening, but it is in its own way quietly rewarding.

For tickets, click here.

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.

Broadway legend Elaine Stritch’s latest cabaret show Singin’ Sondheim…One Song at a Time (has anyone ever dared to do two at a time?) finds her doing her very favorite songs by her fellow Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim, including some written with such collaborators as Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and Jule Styne. With her longtime music director Rob Bowman leading a six-piece band, Elaine works overtime to entertain audiences with Stephen’s biggest showstoppers.

Stritch is most famous today for her wildly successful autobiographical 2002 theater piece Elaine Stritch at Liberty. In her late seventies at the time of At Liberty, her voice was ragged but she acted the hell out of any song that came her way. Soon to be 85, the voice is more ragged still, but the power of her acting has not diminished one whit. The second song is “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy — let’s just take a moment to applaud the balls it takes do that epic as your second number! — and I have never seen a more frighteningly lucid Rose. This Rose knows she’s batshit crazy and doesn’t give a damn. Eek!

Stritch has a tender story to tell about the love of her life, John Bay, and his Sondheim-approved parody of “Send in the Clowns” as a Groucho Marx song. Turns out that she and John, Londoners at the time, had stayed at the Carlyle when they first came to see the show “Clowns” comes from, A Little Night Music. Today, she commutes to the show. an elevator ride down from her residence in the Carlyle Hotel, the very same room she shared with Bay.

She does some unusual takes on well-known songs: she delivers “Broadway Baby” as the wistful rumination of a Broadway star looking back on her gypsy days, and delivers the lyrics of “Every Day a Little Death” as a devastatingly effective monologue. Perhaps best of all is her ruefully tender encore of “The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me” from Sondheim’s most recent, Road Show. By and large, though, this is Broadway comfort food (in a good way) as Stritch sells every clever Sondheim-ism to the back row.

For tickets, click here.