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Music Review
Woman for All Seasons, Ballads and Emotions
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
May 10, 2011
One of the
pleasures of cabaret reviewing over the long haul has been to observe the
evolution of K T Sullivan from an effervescent musical comedian into the
increasingly fearless and complex singing character actor she is today. Her new
show, which opened at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel last week, is called
“Rhyme, Women and Song,” but it might just as well be titled “The Seven Ages of
Woman,” for all the musical and emotional territory she covers.
This is not to
say that Ms. Sullivan has sacrificed the charm of her original comic persona —
a voluptuous, eye-batting Lorelei Lee type — to plunge into doom and gloom. Not
at all. It is to say that beneath the glittery icing, as Luther Vandross once
said of Diana Ross, lies “a serious cake.”
All the songs
in “Rhyme, Women and Song” are written in whole or in part by women. Dorothy
Fields, Carolyn Leigh, Kay Swift, Betty Comden, Dorothy Parker, Marilyn Bergman
and Joni Mitchell are some of them. Accompanying Ms. Sullivan at the Oak Room
are two (unrelated) musicians with almost identical names: Jon Weber, on piano,
and John Webber, on bass, who give several numbers a solid jazz kick.
The changes in
style and mood from song to song are so quick that at times “Rhyme, Women and
Song” suggests a sequence of lightning-fast blackout sketches. But there is a
rough through line under it all. Early in the show a medley of “Don’t Let a
Good Thing Get Away,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street”
and “The Other Side of the Tracks” becomes a suite about a woman’s determined
upward mobility in which Ms. Sullivan doesn’t disguise the connections between
romantic aspiration and material calculation.
She puts her
stamp on a jazzy arrangement of Ms. Mitchell’s “Case of You,” by giving the
words “still be on my feet” a defiant emphasis. Two little-known ballads, “How
Am I to Know?” (lyrics by Parker, music by Jack King) and “He’ll Make Me
Believe That He’s Mine” (music by Paul Horner, lyrics by Peggy Lee, from the
1983 musical “Peg”), are exquisitely crooned. Where once Ms. Sullivan might
have raised an eyebrow while singing these ballads of abject surrender, she
ventures all the way inside their treacherous dream worlds.
For “Please
Don’t Send Me Down a Baby Brother” she adopts the voice of a stubborn, willful
little child, and for “I Can Cook Too” she becomes a tough, swaggering
go-getter. She locates the desperation inside the housewife subsisting on
tabloid fantasies in Amanda McBroom’s “Dreaming.” In the end Ms. Sullivan’s
natural ebullience and perfect comic timing transport you to a blissful
plateau.