Review: Jennifer Damiano Masterfully Showcases A Career Beyond Her Years In One-Woman Show 'Jennuinely' at Feinstein's/54 Below

In traversing her career through the songs and stories that have brought her to this point, it is clear that Jennifer Damiano's journey belies her age. Yet, through her one-woman show Jennuinely at Feinstein's/54 Below on July 29, the second of what was originally a three-performance engagement (two more encore performances have been added to her schedule), the Tony-nominated Damiano gave the impression of a young woman who has seen it all in her decade-long career.

That's not to say she isn't happily embracing the unexpected twists and turns in what's still to come. This is, after all, someone who starred in the perilously ill-fated Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and lived to tell the tale.

Tell tales, she does in Jennuinely. The first thing audiences will notice about Damiano is her richly powerful voice; the second, though, is her self-effacing humor, a charming combination of bashful sincerity and shtick. In fact, Damiano immediately followed her first song of the evening, a rousing if not uncreative take on Gavin DeGraw's "I Don't Want to Be," with the admission that, after her first show three days prior, "I didn't think I was going to be nervous... But I'm still nervous."

Fresh off the Broadway run of the short-lived but fiercely beloved American Psycho, Damiano expressed, despite her omnipresent anxiety, feeling ready to be making a solo concert debut. To comfort herself, though, she officially kicked off her set with "Everything Else," one of the cheekier numbers from Next to Normal, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical about a mother with bipolar disorder and her family ailing alongside her, for which she received that Tony nod.

Considering both the acclaim it granted her and her personal investment in the piece, having started with it in its Off-Broadway run (despite, she confessed, having nearly passed on it), it's unsurprising Damiano allotted more time to it in her own show than anything else. Perhaps just as fitting is her choice for co-writer: Brian Yorkey, Next to Normal book writer and lyricist. Other songs from the show included the treachery-imbued, "Growing Up Unstable," as well as two more emotionally-wrought tunes, both of which required some assistance.

Though it feels sacrilegious referring to Alice Ripley as a "guest," the ethereal icon who played Damiano's mother in Next to Normal (a role which garnered her a Tony of her own), joined her one-time daughter onstage for a take on the wrenching "Maybe," the act two duet from which the musical derives its title. Damiano and Ripley also crooned an original song, "When I'm Olde," written by Ripley. The tune is as eccentric as Ripley herself, and though not catchy in the least, any mere mortal would be grateful to witness Ripley strumming on an acoustic guitar. The evening's other guest was Robi Hager, with whom Damiano and Ripley all belted "Superboy and the Invisible Girl," which could be considered the thesis statement of Damiano's forlorn and ignored Normal character.

Damiano also paid homage to her first Broadway gig, Spring Awakening (she made her Broadway debut understudying four roles in the original 2006 production), astutely choosing two of the show's most well-known songs, both of which encapsulate the throes of maturing. She was hauntingly reserved on "Mama Who Bore Me," before channeling that same pubescent unrest on "My Junk." Damiano also took the audience back to the very beginning with her Spring Awakening audition song, Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn." Like her other pop covers, the song was met less warmly in the room than the Broadway selections. However, that speaks more to Damiano's audience (which, unsurprisingly, is mostly theatre fans) than it does to her capability in breathing personality into the songs. Other selections from the pop canon included No Doubt's "Just a Girl," Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide," and Alanis Morissette's "One Hand in My Pocket," the latter meshing warmly into Damiano's pop-rock wheelhouse.

Regardless of the genre at hand, the band was unwaveringly on-point and versatile, under the musical direction of Benjamin Rauhala (also on piano), with Alexandra Eckhardt (bass), Thad DeBrock (guitar), Marques Walls (drums) and Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf (cello).

The most poignant of the cover songs was a stripped down interpretation of Billy Joel's "Vienna," which Damiano dedicated to her father in the audience. In fact, as made clear by Damiano, her father was in most of her audiences, having seen Next to Normal 38 times, for example. Again enacting the theme of coming of age duality, Damiano recalled the turbulent period in which she was starring in Next to Normal at just 16. "Times got lonely and weird and crazy," she said. "My dad would drive into the city after work every single day to come get me... As a kid those moments don't mean anything; you just want them to be over. But looking back now, those moments are everything." The audience's collective "aw" was on-cue.

Of course, the show could not be entirely devoid of that aforementioned Spider-Man musical. During a final audition for the piece, Damiano recalled singing for the show's composer, U2 frontman Bono, and moving him to the extent that the perpetually sunglasses-clad rocker removed his purple shades to wipe a single tear from his face. Damiano sang the show's emotionally climactic number "If the World Should End" from a decidedly different vantage point than how it was performed in the production. "As much as I wish I could be suspended hundreds of feet above the ground, I think we'd all appreciate it if I kept things a little more grounded," she said. Her voice, however, made no such promises.

Damiano is, in some ways, a contradiction personified. She could consider herself a Broadway veteran, and yet, she is profoundly her age and has not yet become weary of the business in which she has grown up. She's smartly tapped into the amalgam, using it to her advantage in the ways she presents herself as a performer and a person: not inexperienced but with the best still surely to come.

Jennifer Damiano will continue her run at Feinstein's/54 Below on August 31 and September 1.

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