A singer of great skill and soul, Clint Holmes just keeps getting better. His current show is devoted to the music of Peter Allen. Now, I have mixed feelings about the Allen songbook. I always found his tribute to his father “Tenterfield Saddler” a bit on the maudlin side. That is, until I heard Holmes sing it. There is a sincerity and textured emotion that Clint does better that almost any other singer, and that therefore makes him the perfect ambassador for Mr. Allen.

Holmes is on the record as saying “I feel like I’ve lived enough life to finally dig into Peter’s body of work.” And Holmes has had some hardships, so what was deep just got deeper. I kept thinking, throughout this show, “Wow! The staging!” The director was Will Nunziata. He has a painterly visual sense, which serves Clint very well.

Holmes’s voice is smooth and warm, like a fine aged bourbon, he charms. The name of the show is “When You Get Caught Between The Moon and New York City.” Holmes relates that Allen was on a plane that circled an NYC airport, thus the lyric. Holmes also get personal: his father was a jazz vocalist, who worked in a steel mill, and his mother was a white British opera singer, who taught voice.

He includes a song he wrote himself “1944”, about his parents meeting in Europe, and he has imbued the song with both richly evocative details and deep feeling, and he delivers it warmly but with very tasteful restraint. It never fails to make me cry. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

For more more about Jonathan Warman’s directing works, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.