Review - Loni Ackerman's Next To Ab-Normal

I suppose there's nothing unusual about a little kid waking up one morning to see a group of her parents' friends socializing around the family piano. It's just that when you're young Loni Ackerman, those friends include Mayor John Lindsay, Ted Kennedy, Ralph Nader, several members of the Black Panthers and, playing the piano, football star Rosie Greer.

But hey, what would you expect from a kid who spends her 13th birthday party singing duets with Gwen Verdon, as directed by Bob Fosse.

Musical theatre fans know Ackerman as the girl with the big, belty voice who played the feisty maid in George M!, the Boston gold-digger in No, No, Nanette and the torchy Bronx teenager in So Long, 174th Street before graduating to replacement leading lady stints in Cats, Evita and Sunset Blvd.

But in her delightfully quirky cabaret evening now playing at the Metropolitan Room, Next To Ab-Normal, Ackerman explains how, as the daughter of two of New York's most prominent philanthropists (Her mother, Cyma Rubin, produced No, No, Nanette and Doctor Jazz on Broadway.), casual dinners with family friends might include passing the salt to Dennis Hopper or Leopold Stokowski. ("I called him Skokie.")

Her funny anecdotes - like how Bobby Van inadvertently helped her lose her virginity - are accented with a collection of songs from her career and assorted American Songbook classics, charmingly sung with strong mellow vocals, accompanied by music director Paul Greenwood's ensemble and directed by Barry Kleinbort.

"Crossword Puzzle," which she introduced in David Shire and Richard Maltby, Jr.'s Starting Here, Starting Now, is given a stellar treatment as she recreates the breakdown of a neurotic New York woman who keeps intimidating her boyfriend with her advanced vocabulary. And when she brings back Stan Daniels' "Men," her big So Long, 174th Street number where a frustrated teen recalls the boys that did her wrong, she pops in some of those high shrieks of adolescent angst that made her original performance so memorable.

Hugh Martin's "The First Girl In The Second Row," which introduces stories about her dubious career as an aspiring ballet dancer, is followed by a gentler moment, a lovely rendition of Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields' "Pink Taffeta Sample, Size 10," a ballad cut from Sweet Charity, that Ackerman first heard when the lyricist sang it at her home before taking the show for pre-Broadway tryouts.

While spending time in Paris (a good excuse for David Yazbek's "Here I Am") Ackerman was asked to translate the original French lyric for a Joe Ricotta melody, resulting in the dramatic ballad, "Come Back, My Love." She was told the song was being used for a film but she didn't find out until later exactly what kind of film.

"My career with Andrew Lloyd Webber can be summed up in three hand gestures," she quips, demonstrating the classic poses for Grizabella, Norma Desmond and Eva Peron before a dynamic medley of "Buenos Aires," "New Ways To Dream" and "Memory."

Married to sound designer Steve Canyon Kennedy, Ackerman says she's happily settled into a more normal suburban life, but a visit to her abnormal past provides a perfectly charming evening.

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