Review: Carrie St. Louis and Isaac Sutton Kick Off Their Israel Tour of BROADWAY-ISRAEL

In celebration of Israel's 70th Anniversary, Isaac (Tzahi) Sutton and Broadway's Carrie St. Louis, who is currently playing Off-Broadway as Annette in Le Poisson Rouge's production of Cruel Intentions: The Musical, opened their Israel tour of their show Broadway-Israel at the Kiryat Motzkin Theatre Hall.

The show began with a short overture compiled of a few songs from musicals and others, played by a three piece band that includes Ram Erez on the Bass, Henry Vered on the Drums, and the show's musical director, Giora Linenberg, on the electric piano.

Following the overture, Isaac Sutton entered the stage in a smooth transition with the song "Willkommen" from Cabaret, greeting the audience hello while adding "Welcome to an evening which is entirely- A Musical", then continued with the song "Life is a Cabaret". Sutton then told the audience about the TV show Smash, leading to the song "Let Me Be Your Star", during which he introduced Carrie who joined him in the duet.

They then continued with the song "Hello Dolly" from the musical under the same name, while changing each mention of the name Dolly to either Carrie or Isaac, depending on who sang the verse, and Isaac even invited Carrie to a small dance on stage, which hopefully gave her the warm Israeli welcome she definitely deserves.
Afterwards, they started talking about Carrie's arrival in Israel, and she said: "Thank you so much for having me here! I cannot believe I'm in Israel, this is my first time in Israel and I absolutely love it". Sutton then asked her if perhaps, with all her Broadway experience, she could share with him any tips, which led to her singing to him "Popular", from one of her roles on Broadway as Glinda in Wicked.

Now that the audience was introduced to St. Louis's exceptional talent it was the perfect time to sing the duet "Anything You Can Do" from Annie Get Your Gun, and then continue to sing from other classic musicals songs such as "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story, with Carrie's stunning and tender high notes, a breathtaking medley from The Sound of Music, the song "Stars", a refreshing choice for Sutton to sing from Les Misérables followed with Carrie singing "I Dreamed a Dream" also from that musical, and a Fiddler on the Roof medley, during which drummer Henry Vered added some remarkable inputs which sadly were hardly heard because of the poor sound quality where especially the bass sounds covered his playing.

Carrie then sang the song "Memory" from Cats with a voice so soft and pleasant that the audience couldn't wait to applaud even before the song truly ended. She continued with telling about her audition for the musical Rock of Ages in Las Vegas where she got to play the leading role of Sherrie and after a year performing there she was invited to play the role in New York in what became her Broadway debut. This led to her and Sutton singing "I Wanna Know What Love Is" from the internationally acclaimed show.

At this point the Israel part of the show began, as Carrie sang from the musical My Fair Lady both the Hebrew version of the song "The Rain in Spain" (called "Barad Yarad Bidrom Sfarad Haerev", translation- Hail fell in southern Spain this evening), followed with "I Could've Danced All Night" where she sang an entire segment in what could easily be believed as fluent Hebrew.

After Carrie told the story of how she got to be on the national tour of Wicked and was later on invited to reprise the role on Broadway, Sutton returned to the stage for them to sing "For Good" from the musical.
They then had a short Q&A segment which led to Isaac singing "Ah Ya Rab" from the Israeli musical Salah Shabati and afterwards a medley from the musical Kazablan. To finish the evening strong, Carrie then sang "Don't Rain on My Parade" from Funny Girl and finally they both sang "Climb Every Mountain" from The Sound of Music.

As part of the encore started with Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" sung by Isaac, the audience was desperate for more, especially from such an extraordinary talent as of St. Louis's which they rarely get to witness on an Israeli stage. But they got an even better surprise when she sang an entire song in Hebrew- "Hurshat Ha'Eucalyptus" (The Eucalyptus Grove), a song that the late Naomi Shemer wrote back in 1961 for a small musical production in an elementary school in the northern Israeli Kibbutz Kvutzat Kinneret which later became an international hit and was also sung by Canadian-Belgian singer Lara Fabian (whose musical director and pianist is also Giora Linenberg).

For the truly final song they performed "The Phantom of the Opera", where Isaac sang in Hebrew and Carrie brought the house down in English, appropriately summing up the evening's theme of connecting between Broadway and Israel, a very welcome connection that will hopefully be seen more around here in the near future.

Carrie St. Louis & Isaac Sutton will perform "BROADWAY-ISRAEL" at The Tel Aviv Museum of Art on March 22 and The Jerusalem Theater on March 24.
For tickets and information visit Bravo or call *3221 or +972-3-6443718.

Photo credit: Ronit Suzan

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