Month: July 2019

Review: Lillias White

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The title of Lillias White’s latest cabaret act is “Make Someone Happy.” It’s predicated on the thought that “the whole world, not just the United States” is a shit-show, and, given the circumstances, it’s better to craft a show that makes the audience feel better when they leave, than when they came in. That’s why she belts numbers like the title song, “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” and Nat “King” Cole’s “That’s All,” bringing them to fiery life.

The show, the advance press says, “features standards for the world of Broadway, film, and jazz.” It might well have also mentioned blues; plus, White addresses it all with that particular sort of expressiveness and virtuosity that is native to soul and jazz. White has one of those thunderclap voices, like Darlene Love or Martha Wash, that electrifies and illuminates everything it touches. The Brooklyn native made her Broadway debut in Barnum in 1981. She played Effie in the 1987 revival of Dreamgirls – really a Broadway return of the original production’s tour – a show she describes as life-changing, and she does a towering rendition of that show’s “I Am Changing.”

For her role as Sonja in Cy Coleman’s The Life, she won the Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Awards, and she gives that show’s “(Getting Too Old for) The Oldest Profession” a riotous go. She excuses the number’s raunchiness by warning that “I take no responsibility for what Sonja says to you while I’m out!” Always a great artist, always a warm presence. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: John Pizzarelli

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It’s common courtesy in a jazz setting to applaud for a bit after everybody’s solos, and indeed bandleader John Pizzarelli frequently points at one of the instrumentalists as if to say “give it up for so-and-so”! More often in this show, though, the onslaught of flashy jazziness is so relentless that you don’t applaud for fear of missing something amazing.

It’s always great to see a cabaret performer you’ve seen with smaller combos perform with a big band. Seeing John Pizzarelli with Swing 7 – a seven piece rhythm and brass band – is “too marvelous for words.” He embodies cabaret’s jazzier side with astonishing elan and profound musical intelligence. Especially in the evening’s climax, Duke Ellington’s “C Jam Blues” (otherwise known as “Duke’s Place”) in which John and the band solo with vigor, verve and virtuosity.

John plays guitar with amazing fluidity and elegance, with nonpareil mastery of a technique called “guitar harmonics” that produces high notes of extraordinary expressiveness. Pizzarelli finds many ways to put his own interpretive twist on the songs he performs. He has a particular genius for chordal improvisations, exposing hidden musical meanings in the most familiar of standards.

Also, as a singer John is very sensitive to the multiple meanings a good lyric can have, and has an uncanny ability to communicate several at once. Overall, the singing’s smart, the music’s deftly swung and the atmosphere sparkles. Neither jazz nor cabaret gets much better than this.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.

Review: Leslie Jordan

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This stand-up show at The Green Room 42 is a laugh-so-hard-you-cry look at the world through ultra-queer eyes. He outlandishly recalls “how I got that role,” namely Beverly Leslie in Will & Grace. He describes his Emmy win for that role in great and hilariously self-deprecating detail. There’s plenty of dish about Hollywood: No outing – he describes John Ritter as “a great friend to the queers but a reeeaal pussyhound” – but we definitely get the lowdown on who has a legendary dick that Leslie repeatedly begs to see…and who is nothing but mean and nasty.

Leslie, who describes himself as “the gayest man I know,” also claims that he was put on this Earth to be a comic scene-stealer (who met his only match playing opposite Megan Mullally on Will & Grace). This innate gift gives the fey, diminutive Jordan more than enough power to thoroughly command a stage all by himself.

This show is also an often moving look at the very best and worst of what queer culture has to offer. Jordan looks at the profound self-doubt that comes with growing up queer and hyper-effeminate in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Most moving of all, he describes how he threw all of his emotion about both his father and the lives lost in the Pulse nightclub massacre into throwing the first pitch at a baseball game. He threw with such passion that one of the pros said he could have had a career as a pitcher.

I can’t think of another autobiographical show that is more pure, unadulterated fun than Exposed! — it makes a convincing case for Jordan being one of the very greatest queer comic talents of our time.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.com.