Review: Lianne Marie Dobbs Shows What Tributes Should Look Like at 54 Below

There’s an inherent trap for a cabaret artist putting together a tribute show, especially one that celebrates another singer. It’s very easy to be so faithful to the tributee and to the facts of their lives that your audience loses sight of the artist presenting the tribute. It’s easy to become bogged down in times and places long ago when what is really important is why the artist loves the person they’re paying tribute to. What we’re usually left with is a wan copy of the original.

I’m happy to report that in her show THE WINDMILLS OF MY MIND…FOR DUSTY SPRINGFIELD, Lianne Marie Hobbs has cleverly avoided that trap. Her trick is to draw comparisons between what she calls the “hamsters in her brain” and those that inhabited the similar ones in Dusty Springfield's brain. The late Dusty Springfield had a one-of-a-kind voice that made her the toast of Carnaby Street-era England before she took the world by storm. With a smoky, soulful voice, she was often called “the female Elvis.” She recorded some of the coolest songs of the 60s and 70s including a string of hits by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. She had a brain which she found hard to turn off. We would have called her neurodivergent, but the term didn’t exist yet.

Lianne Marie Hobbs takes this idea and draws parallels to her own overactive brain. She is a tornado of energy who can turn around on a dime and be the picture of stillness. She is an artist of many colors. Her voice is brighter and less husky than Springfield's but this is not a show about impersonation. It is about Springfield’s influence on her life and her art. What she has in common with Springfield is an all-encompassing passion in every musical moment. There is no guesswork about her emotional intentions. Whether it is raw and tragic or lighthearted and comedic, her acting is clear as a bell.

Her set opened with two of Dusty’s big hits, the Phil Spector-produced “Stay A While” and her biggest Bacharach/David song, “The Look of Love.” She shared her technique for focusing an active mind in “Doodlin’/I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself.”  She found common ground with Springfield in her affinity for traveling with an emotional support animal. In Springfield’s case, it was a stuffed toy cat. In Dobbs’ case, a somewhat scruffy toy monkey called Pumpernickel, who made an appearance during her version of “I Only Want to Be With You.” Dusty Springfield acutely experienced the loneliness of touring which Dobbs related to in “24 Hours from Tulsa.” She also talked about their shared joy in creating a home in “A House is Not a Home.” It is a notoriously difficult song to sing which she gave a beautiful reading.

She talked about Springfield’s love for the Motown sound, which she demonstrated with three stories about artists she worked with over the years in “Tell Him/ Heat Wave/ For Once in My Life.” This led to her own Motown-style hit, the biggest of her career, “Son of a Preacher Man.” The Motown theme continued with “Goin’ Back/ Up on the Roof" which she peppered with a story about Dusty Springfield’s childhood glasses and how she shared that in common with the chanteuse.

The last section of the concert was a series of amazing musical monologues. Dusty Springfield was supposed to have starred in the London production of I’m Getting my Act Together and Taking It on the Road. She got Nancy Ford and Gretchen Cryer to agree to let her arrange their songs in her style. The production unfortunately fell apart and was never heard. But Lianne Marie Dobbs along with her musical director came up with an arrangement of what a Dusty Springfield arrangement might have sounded like in “Old Friends.” The highlight of the night was a story about Springfield’s mom, who laid aside many of her ambitious dreams when she became a mother at an early age. Her story was told in the beautiful Barry Manila song, “Sandra.” She gave us one of Springfield’s rare gems, a version of “Come Back to Me” from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Her beautifully acted rendition of “The Windmills of Your Mind” was a masterful demonstration of how stillness can be far more powerful than any movement. She ended her concert with a song that was given to Dusty Springfield by Peter Allen. He had initially written it for his then mother-in-law, Judy Garland. The song “Quiet, There’s a Lady Onstage” was the perfect summation of Both Dusty Springfield and Lianne Marie Dobbs.

The strength of Dobbs as a performer is her uncanny ability to play the seductress while simultaneously playing the theatre nerd. She has a sense of humor that’s by turns goofy, sophisticated, self-deprecating, and outrageous. She was made for cabaret. She played the small room of 54 Below like Cher at Caesar’s Palace. She worked every member of the audience like an old friend. It was a delight to watch. Her band was made up of some of the best guys in the business. Rex Benincasa on drums, Tom Hubbard on bass, and Sean Harkness on guitar made beautiful sounds. The secret weapon of the evening was musical director Ron Abel, whose arrangements evoked the sound of Dusty Springfield without being copies of her arrangements. They were clever renditions that were all Lianne Marie Dobbs. The show was absolutely everything a tribute show should be.

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For more information on Lianne Marie Dobbs, visit her website liannemariedobbs.com, or follow her @nycnightingale on Instagram.

For more great shows at 54 Below, go to 54below.org.

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