Review: Sarah Carson Charms Don't Tell Mama Audience With ENGLAND AND AMERICA - A TRANS-ATLANTIC LOVE STORY

There's a new storyteller on the scene, and even though Sarah Carson has been performing her show ENGLAND AND AMERICA: A TRANS-ATLANTIC LOVE STORY since April of 2022, it took until last week for this writer to (finally!) get around to seeing it. An incompatible schedule may have kept us apart for the last year, but Sarah Carson and I are in the room together now, and I couldn't be happier.

Born of the British Isles and naturalized as a New Yorker, Sarah Carson chose, for her debut solo show, some personal stories that serve to introduce her to the cabaret community and the fans who fill the cabaret rooms, looking for personal stories. As the title would suggest, Ms. Carson's hour-long show touches upon her life as a UK citizen, the decisions that factored into her family's relocation to Manhattan, and the world that awaited her here. That, alone, is enough for a successful cabaret show (if the writing is good enough) but Sarah Carson and director formidable Lennie Watts crafted more into the script, and that is what makes Sarah Carson's show the one that led people to tell this writer (for months) that it was the show to see.

The thing is, Sarah Carson's show isn't one of those hit-em-over-the-head, lightning bolt moment, earth shattering shows that people go crazy over. The reason so many people reached out to say, "Have you seen the Sarah Carson show, yet?" is because of the quality of the storytelling, and the charm of the storyteller. This is a quiet, lovely, poetic (and funny) show about a woman in love with her family history, involved in her heritage, dedicated to her homeland, and passionate about her new life (well, it's not that new anymore). Ms. Carson details for her audience her interest in the stories of her ancestors (opening with John and Taupin's "Every Story" was a wise choice) before spending the first part of England And America (another John/Taupin song featured in the play) describing the lives of parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and ancestral landscapes in ways so visceral that a member of the audience can actually visualize the lands and scapes being described. With her exquisite script and rolling storytelling skills, Ms. Carson paints pictures with her words, whether performing a straight-up monologue, or executing a tale woven together with monology and music (the performance of Christina Perri's "1000 Years" is, quite literally, sob-inducing). Carson and masterful Musical Director Steven Ray Watkins have created treatments of songs that go beyond a cabaret singer standing at the mic crooning to a place of purest theater, allowing all of Sarah's moments to be moments infused with honesty and authenticity (a version of "The Green, Green Grass of Home" in English and Welsh was both inspired and inspiring). This is no club act - this is a storytelling show... storytelling with music.

As for the musical part of the storytelling, Carson is possessing of a lovely soprano, reedy and airy like the folk singers of the Nineteen Seventies, women like Judy Collins and Joan Baez who were famous for their (wait for it) storytelling. The sound is pretty, the technique is solid, and when combined with the mixture of Sarah's natural skills as an orator and the acting that emerges a studied storyteller, it is a winning combination. And, lest the references to poetic verbiage and florid folks singers of the past give one a wrong impression of Sarah Carson, it should be noted that there is plenty of humor in England And America, by way of a bawdy little ditty "The Ballad of Barry and Freda" (hilarious) and two parody numbers featuring lyrics by Carson, herself. In part two of the act, Carson focuses on the relocation to NYC, making way for the parodies "Talk Like a New Yorker" (inspired by Bricusse and Newley's "Talk To The Animals") and "Little List" (Taken for Gilbert and Sullivan's "I've Got A Little List"). Sarah Carson has announced herself as both a lyricist and a comic, both skills that will serve her as she moves forward in the cabaret industry.

I love storytellers. That is a note that I wrote on the setlist for Sarah Carson's show. There were a number of notes written on the setlist for Sarah Carson's show but that one seems to say everything that needs to be said about Sarah Carson and her debut show on the Manhattan cabaret stage. Sarah Carson is a storyteller. Sarah Carson is a good storyteller. And although Sarah Carson has a home in England that she loves, and Sarah Carson has a home in New York that she loves, now she has a new home, one on the cabaret stages of New York City. It is a home where storytelling and storytellers belong, and it is a home where Sarah Carson is most welcome.

The England And America band is made up of the best in the business:

Don Kelly on percussion, Sean Murphy on bass, and Steven Ray Watkins Musical Directing from the piano.

Sarah Carson ENGLAND AND AMERICA - A TRANS-ATLANTIC LOVE STORY has completed a year of performances at Don't Tell Mama but other great shows can be found on the DTM website HERE.

Follow Sarah Carson on Facebook HERE.

Photos by Stephen Mosher; Visit the Stephen Mosher website HERE.

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