Review - Teri Ralston Makes For Good 'Company'

Teri Ralston's Broadway career may only consist of small roles in two musicals but those two musicals, as they say on the Brooklyn side of Shubert Alley, were cherce. Her young soprano can be heard in scattered solo moments on the original Broadway cast albums of Company (as Jenny) and A Little Night Music (as Mrs. Nordstrom), but she's probably most known among musical theatre fans for her delicate and lovely performance of Stephen Schwartz's "Chanson" in the original didn't-make-it-to-Broadway cast album of The Baker's Wife.

At the opening of her two-night stay at The Metropolitan Room, titled Home Again after the Cy Coleman musical which was her second high-profile show which closed on the way to Broadway (but not before changing its name to Home Again, Home Again), she certainly seemed at home, surrounded by an audience filled with companions from her days as Harold Prince's "All-American Girl." (That's what he called her in explaining why he originally thought there wouldn't be a part for her in ...Night Music.)

"I got to sing 'Soon' before you did," she says directly to Victoria Mallory sitting up front, telling of her gig helping out Prince and Stephen Sondheim by singing the score to their musical version of Smiles of a Summer Night at backers auditions. When she explains how she left the show to play Annie Oakley in Florida, she points out her replacement, Joy Franz, at a corner table. Her warm and sweet "In Buddy's Eyes" was perhaps all the sweeter because in the intimate Metropolitan Room she was probably able to look a bit into the eyes of Harvey Evans, who she's directed as Buddy in Follies, seated in the back.

With music director/arranger Shelly Markham at piano, Ralston touched on Sondheim throughout the evening, highlighted by a comic delivery of her choral contributions to Company and A Little Night Music ("Bobby.................. Bobby.............. Bobby, baby.............", "Remember................ la la la...........") and "Make The Most of Your Music," from the 1987 London production of Follies. In the latter, lines like "If your music isn't great, you can change it, just modulate," get big laughs when she prefaces the song by saying it was meant to be a tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

But greater impressions were made with softer, nostalgic moments like Kander and Ebb's "Colored Lights" and Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford's "Old Friend." Ralston's head voice, though still melodically sound, shows some wear of age, but her belt is hearty and robust, best utilized in Jacques Brel's "Marieke."

As a special guest, Company's original Marta, Pamela Myers took the stage armed with comic bits about the recent revival. ("Can you see Donna doing 'Tick Tock' with a tuba?") With everyone expecting to hear "Another Hundred People," the showstopper she introduced in that show, Myers instead went into Bobby Goldsboro's pop hit "Little Green Apples." Pretty enough, certainly but why such an odd choice? Because that's the song she used for her Company audition. And to top it off, she tells us, when she had finished singing Sondheim asked if she had written the song herself. Before the roar of laughter had subsided, the intro had begun for her rousing and passionate vocals (in the original key) of her signature tune.

The casual atmosphere of opening night helped the evening seem more a party than a cabaret show, which helped to gloss over a few minor trouble spots. After all, when you get to be in a room with a woman who can tell you what it's like to sit in a bar with Hermione Gingold and Glynis Johns and listen to them compare notes on the men they've both slept with, what's a few minor trouble spots?

By the way, is it really juvenile that I can't think about the title Come Back, Little Sheba without humming it to the tune of "Wake Up, Little Susie?"