Alix Cohen - Page 5

Monday night at the upstairs library at The Player's Club, young actor/vocalist Evan Stern collaborated with one of cabaret's treasures, the veteran pianist/arranger/vocalist Steve Ross on a show illuminating the influence of a southern upbringing on the work of iconic songwriter and Savannah, Georgia native Johnny Mercer. The piece was beautifully put together with Stern's intermittent repartee (never dropping a musical stitch), reflecting his skills as an actor as well as a writer.

Danny Bacher has the performance ease of an artist who's spent twice his years on the circuit. His preternatural feel for swing delivers scrupulous control, hip, unfussy phrasing, nuanced inflection, and the kind of fluent, savory scat “wordless vocables” I haven't heard from a man in some time, certainly not one so young. His soprano saxophone and singing are so like one another in attitude and energy, Bacher epitomizes the musician whose instrument acts as solid manifestation of voice. His new CD release celebration show at the Metropolitan Room, Swing That Music (last performance of a four-show run today at 4 pm) is a jazz tribute to the three Louis: Louis Armstrong--Satchmo (1901-1971), Louis Prima--The King of Swing before Benny Goodman came along (1910-1978), and Louis Jordan--King of the Jukebox (1908-1975.) Musical numbers get along like the old friends they are, brushing shoulders, poking one another in the ribs, slapping backs. The show is well paced with next to no patter. Danny Bacher is the real deal; a musician to watch.

As she wends her way towards the stage at the opening of her new show at the Metropolitan Room (performances were on June 15 and 20), Corinna Sowers Adler sings the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II classic “All The Things You Are” with warm, legato phrases that surround the club like a hug. Sowers Adler achieves this not only with her singing, but also the friendly and personal nature of her bridging dialogue. In High Standards, she manages to make us feel privy to an authentic self without a lot of in-jokes intended for attending friends and family. The standards to which this show's title refers are not only those evergreen numbers collected in The Great American Song Book, but also yardsticks by which we measure quality and value in life.

With her new show His Aim Is True: The Singular Songs of Elvis Costello at Stage 72 (second show last night), you'll meet the new Karen Oberlin. Gone are the controlled vibrato, upper range, emotional translucence, femininity, and the playfulness of a purveyor of American Songbook/pop. Prepare for a terse, tensile, alto-voiced, punk chick (including shag hairdo) with a foot in rudderless jazz. There's nothing tentative in this raw, almost tone poem-like performance. Oberlin commits herself to her choices.

This year is the centennial of entertainment legends such as vocalists Billie Holliday and Edith Piaf, singer-actors Frank Sinatra and Alice Faye, composers Billy Strayhorn and Bart Howard, and pianist Cy Walter. In its annual tribute concert, The Mabel Mercer Foundation celebrated all these artists in 1915: It Was a Very Good Year at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, presenting a great variety of musical talent, each with a personal take.

Linda Lavin's most recent show at 54 Below (which had a three-night run between June 4-6), Starting Over--"Because that's what I've done all my life"--illuminates a succession of chapters in her career. The show bears more than a little resemblance to a 2012 appearance at the same venue. There are repeated numbers, excessive, though entertaining anecdotes, and a feel I now find formulaic.

Eric Comstock and Barbara Fasano are in a really good mood. The infectious buoyancy of their new show at the Metropolitan Room, Shoulder Season (Don't ask me what the title means. Despite explanation, I haven't a clue.), will erase world news, ease arthritis, and make love seem possible again. Well, maybe not all that. Its warm, cheerful, sometimes exuberant musicality is nonetheless recommended for whatever ails you.

On Sunday evening, 54 Below celebrated the 25th Anniversary of the musical Grand Hotel on Broadway in high style with two performances crackling with energy and featuring a talented roster of performers including 13 from the original cast. Splendidly Directed (and Written) by Walter Willison, with Musical Direction by Alex Rybeck, Bass Accompaniment from Ray Kiddain, and Dance Supervision by Yvonne Marceau, the delicious production (one really can't call it a concert despite lack of dialogue) was fluid, polished, and imaginative in its use of the room. From leads to the chorus, voices were strong, commitment thorough. In the audience, Tommy Tune must've had a helluva time. We did.

Alexis Cole makes it look easy. Even up-tempo, the performer never appears to be less than relaxed and enjoying what she's doing. Somewhere in the middle of her first number Saturday night at Café Noctambulo (at Pangea Restaurant on 2nd Avenue between 11th and 12th streets) the room seems to exhale. This evening, with her familiar collaborators David Finck (bass) and Kenny Hassler (drums) communicating in musical shorthand, Cole (also on piano) offers jazz, swing, bossa nova, and pop, putting her own subtle stamp on each, never, thankfully, losing melodic path.

Stacy Sullivan is a warm and amusing storyteller with an entertaining family history. The first six numbers of her new Metropolitan Room show on Thursday night, Since You Asked (after the Judy Collins song), are bridged by tales of her parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and her upbringing in Oklahoma. Unfortunately, five of these songs have only the most tenuous relationship to material that follows, diminishing reception with thoughts of--Where's the connection? What's she trying to say?

With her new show at the Metropolitan Room that opened last night—Groupies: The Muses Behind the Legends of Rock & Roll--the usually smart and meticulous Lauren Fox (as evidenced by her shows that celebrated the music of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen and later the Pop/Rock that emerged from Laurel Canyon in the 1960s) has here chosen questionable territory--the celebration of women who serially slept their way through the music business or, as Fox more poetically says, “Made it their life's mission to meet the beautiful boys who made the music that moved them.” Hook-ups are exemplified by often unappealing numbers (too much monotone) and bridged with quotes by groupies whose role as “muses” or sources of creative inspiration seems a stretch.

One might easily call Susan Winter's Monday night show at Don't Tell Mama, A Woman for All Seasons: Part Two as half its numbers were in the first show by this name she performed during a run starting last September at the Metropolitan Room. Winter is the kind of class act that would've been lauded in nightclubs way back when, as she's a steward of the American Songbook at its most genuine but with a side of jazz influence.

Cy Coleman and Ira Gasman's musical The Life explores the human flotsam and jetsam of Times Square in the 1980s--prostitutes, pimps, dealers, runaways, the seedy, lost and desperate. And, of course, this being a musical, some have hearts of gold. The Life began Off-Broadway in 1990 at the Westbeth Theater and moved to Broadway in 1997, garnering three Drama Desk Awards and Tony Awards for Lillias White and Chuck Cooper. On Sunday evening (5/17), 54 Below presented a concert version of The Life as part of its 54 Below Sings series. The cast sunk its teeth into this score with gusto offering 15 songs that reminded us of the show's pith and sass. Intermittent narrative sketched the storyline. Few of those onstage were acting, but everyone sang up a storm.

Three of Cy Coleman's Broadway leading ladies invite you to a celebratory shindig buoyed by talent, palpably warmed by affection. Sometimes orchestrated as a harmonizing girl group and at others in distinctively different solo turns, Lillias White, Cady Huffman, and Randy Graff offer a banquet of Coleman's oeuvre in the 54 Below revue, My Guy Cy, which opened Friday night (and played again the following night). Arrangements by various musicians are texturally piquant, showcasing uncommon skill when interweaving songs. Direction (from vocalist Will Nunziata, who has a second flowering career) is fluid, deft, and winning.

Tribute shows to iconic entertainers celebrating a centennial birthday in 2015 seem to be all the rage this year. But nobody has been celebrated more in cabaret variety shows than Frank Sinatra—and rightly so. Wall Street Journal entertainment columnist Will Friedwald, also a producer and author who wrote the 1997 book Sinatra! The Song Is You—A Singer's Art, this past Saturday presented the biggest (and longest) tribute to “Ol' Blue Eyes” so far this year with Sinatra-Thon at The Cutting Room (co-curated with performer Cary Hoffman), a potpourri of events running from 10 am to an after-midnight jam, and which included varied live entertainment, rare film clips, and panel discussions.

Judy Collins, who celebrated her 76th birthday on May 1, has been entertaining us for 56 years "not including childhood." A formidable contributor to the soundtrack of Boomer lives, her transcendent voice conjures memories like few others of any generation. Collins' current show at Cafe Carlyle (which opened last night and runs until May 16) mines familiar territory like evocative comfort food, including retold tales that sometimes go on too long. Many songs take on new coloring both vocally and in terms of changed context, i.e. that of a mature woman looking back.

Evoking Rita Hayworth, a spot lit Jennifer Sheehan weaves through 54 Below towards the stage, long dark hair cascading above a body-skimming white gown replete with twinkling sequins. “I'll build a stairway to the stars . . .,” (Mitchell Parish/Matt Malneck/Frank Signorelli) she sings with stunning vocal clarity and investment that might conjure a Ziegfeld Girl. In her new show, Stardust: A Night in the Cosmos, Sheehan welcomes the “dreamers, romantics, stargazers, astrophysicists, and Trekkies” with “songs that flicker like the street lamps of eternity” with lyrics featuring stars, moons, and rose-colored hope. It's an appealing theme and one that suits the artist's fetching performance and transition from ingénue into a more mature cabaret entertainer.

Attending a multilingual performance at Cafe Sabarsky in The Neue Galerie (86th Street and Fifth Avenue) is like stepping back in time. The room speaks to an era of higher refinement, not stuffy, but encouraging pedigree and brio. Few artists epitomize this more than celebrated cabaret veteran singer/pianist Steve Ross, whose fascinating and emotionally translucent shows here never fail to enlighten and entertain.

“Lover, when I'm near you . . .” sings the debonair Todd Murray this past Monday night at Birdland, mere feet away from rapt eyes into which he pours himself. He's performing the waltzy song acoustically, voice full out in opposition to lyric mood. The back of the house undoubtedly finds sound muted. “This is how you would've heard a band singer in 1925, before a new technique called 'crooning',” he tells us. “From the time I started working, they always called me a crooner.”

Monday night found me back at Zeb's on the West Side for another of Will Friedwald's iconoclastic 'Clip Joints'--this one in honor of the Billie Holiday Centennial. During a year that is already producing a glut of celebratory events (given that it's also the Frank Sinatra Centennial year), leave it to the intriguing and obsessive writer/journalist/producer to come up with something different. Instead of a roster of vocalists live or on film, performing material we now think of reflexively as belonging to Lady Day, we were offered the singular piano interpretations of Lara Downes, recollections by alto saxophonist Jerry Dodgion (who at age 22 played with Holiday), and eclectic clips from television and film appearances of the artist herself.