A jazzy glorious sound fills the living room of the Harry Truman Little White House, in Key West, where the 33rd president took winter vacations, playing poker with his buddies. It comes from the rich, luscious voice of Miriam Pico and the fine jazz piano of David Chown. A few times a month, cabaret takes over the building built in 1884 where Truman spent some winter weeks and which is now called Truman‘s Little White House. The living room, except for the intimate collection of a few dozen round tables, is at it was then. The cabaret shows that take place there are appropriate, since Truman was a piano player.
It‘s 1948, the tenth birthday of Café Society, where great jazz and cabaret in a corner of Greenwich Village clashed with the worst know-nothings of the McCarthy era. But we‘re over that now, so come to this musical memoir to enjoy the delicious sounds of the 30s and 40s. And recall how evil the thought police of that era were. The club became a target of slimy columnists such as Dorothy Kilgallen, who called it a “Moscow-line nightclub.” It was the only place that welcomed whites and blacks, certainly enough to make Mme Kilgallen call it subversive.
Between the rock and roll of the sixties and the disco of late seventies stood the golden age of the great singer-song writer. Urban Stages, in its sixth season of December cabaret, this year presented twelve days of performances that ranged from the songs of Stephen Sondheim to a tribune to Big Crosby. The performers were major cabaret artists.
Wrapped in a white gown, an iconic white gardenia in her hair, Audra McDonald channels Billie Holiday — her voice, her accent, her manner — till you believe you are sitting in the slightly tacky Philadelphia dive where Holiday sang her last songs. “What a little moonlight can do” becomes a magical mood changer. It‘s helped by the dreamlike direction of Lonny Price.
One great –McDonald — sings another great, Lady Day. Her imitation is brilliant. She has mastered Holiday‘s accent, a slight trill, a broad vowel. Lady Day did blues with a jazz beat, following mentors Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong.
Cabaret singer/song-writer Bonnie Lee Sanders is fanciful and moody. She begins rather optimistically at the second-floor cabaret at Pescatore on Second Avenue singing “Spring is Here,” but then moves into musical angst, of loves that are gone.
She creates an ambiance with songs you haven‘t heard before. They are dark, sometimes French. Of course, you note a Piaff inspiration.
Sanders is inventive, not slick or predictable. I especially liked her “My Tommy, My Bobby And Me” and “Broadway Moon” – both her own smart lyrics
It‘s getting to be a lesser-kept secret, but twin brothers Peter and Will Anderson are back at 59E59 Street Theaters for a multimedia jazz band performance, this one called “Le Jazz Hot: How the French Saved Jazz.”
A mix of old video and terrific live playing by their quintet, it is devoted to the stories and sounds of some of America‘s great black jazz musicians who went to France beginning in the 1920s, because the French were a lot more hospitable to them than were Americans, including American cops. Some are famous, but others you might not know about.
Dee Dee Bridgewater is an accomplished jazz singer who recreates Billie Holliday so expertly you‘d swear she had channeled her. Musically. But the play written and directed by Stephen Stahl is so hokey and histrionic that it gets in the way of the artistry. Stahl has been working on this production and trying to bring it to New York for years, decades. But perhaps his emotional connection overwhelmed his artistic sense.
The play shows Billie in London where her manager (a too-laid-back David Ayers) is trying to steer her sober as she rehearses with a band for a bet-the-house performance to salvage her reputation so she can return to work in New York.
The Gerald Clayton Sextet suffused the sultry Nice air with cool melodic jazz. Logan Richardson on sax did trills, and Thomas Crane on drums hit cymbals that matched Clayton‘s piano‘s high notes. Joe Sanders‘ bass maintained the mood.
This was classic jazz, a bit of swing, and everything had a resolution. The musicians are sophisticated New Yorkers. There were no screeches or wails to assault the ears or the senses.
Marieann Meringolo’s rich mellow slightly jazzy alto voice presents Michel Legrand’s romantically charged music with almost theatrical intensity. Legrand, famous for music for such films as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Yentl, needs someone like Meringolo to provide the necessary drama to his muse.
I saw Maureen McGovern at Birdland, the iconic jazz club on West 44th Street in New York. It always amazes me to hear her smooth mix of jazzy, a soupçon of folk, and lyrics that are as smartly political as they get. These are not the standards you might expect at a cabaret. At 61, McGovern channels the 60s and 70s, and her rendition of the Beatles When I’m 64 is the best I’ve ever heard. She presents an ethereal version of Up, Up and Away (Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon.) She also conveys a feminist idiom: A woman is a fighter, a mighty force of nature. On the folk side of the era, this very versatile performer does a powerful If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song), noting that Pete Seeger has always been a hero of mine. And McGovern has long been a favorite of mine.
Songs of love, loss and war shimmer in this witty cabaret By Lucy Komisar This charming, poignant, elegantly staged theater piece of love-and-loss songs envelopes one so completely that you feel as if you‘d wandered into a Paris cabaret instead of the slightly seedy Zipper Theater, where the lobby bar and cozy corners establish a […]
