Christine Andreas

THE NEW YORK OBSERVOR – FEBRUARY 11, 2004

 

 

Dazzling Divas’ Strapless Splendor     By REX REED

Who needs another boring box of overpriced Godivas? This Valentine’s Day, aim an arrow at your love from Cupid’s bow that won’t be forgotten. Thawing the February ice, Christine Andreas and Sylvia McNair, two luscious divas with beauty to enhance and voices to enthrall, have arrived to make the supper-club scene something very special indeed. Memorably singing songs of rumination and romance, they’re a pair of heartbreakers.Ms. Andreas is from Broadway; Ms. McNair is from the Metropolitan Opera. Amazingly, their gifts adapt sublimely to the nightclub stage. In a tired old world of psych-out, burn-out and sell-out, they bring sanity and order to confusion and anxiety, with voices as pure as the angels.

At the Café Carlyle, where Ms. Andreas is sending everyone out in search of a thesaurus to find new adjectives, she’ll be holding court throughout the entire month. Performing the repertoire on her stunning new CD The Carlyle Set, she polishes off an elegant, colorful and eclectic musical palette that includes works by Sheldon Harnick, Michel Legrand, Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, Duke Ellington, Lerner and Loewe, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Antonio Carlos Jobim and, of course—mais naturellement—Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hart. Her meticulous repertoire reflects the special alchemy that always exists between Ms. Andreas and her audiences. She doesn’t play it safe. On "Show Me" from My Fair Lady, which she performed nightly in the 20th-anniversary production that won her a Theatre World Award, she hits the ground running, and on "It’s Got to Be Love," one of the brighter songs from the score of On Your Toes, she barely takes the time to inhale. (When was the last time you heard a soprano who swings?) On the rangy, hard-to-tackle Ellington masterpiece "In a Sentimental Mood," she negotiates the harmonic detours and dissonant half-notes with a depth of soul that leaves bloodstains. The versatility and craft that have made her such a respected leading lady in Broadway musicals is very much evident in "At the Ballet," the award-winning centerpiece from A Chorus Line. Christine turns it into a three-act play of poignant introspection that you won’t soon forget.

Though she is classically trained, it’s easy to see why Christine numbers among her early musical influences many of the great interpreters of popular music, show tunes and jazz. Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland are high on her list. But what singer from New Jersey, regardless of gender, hasn’t been shaped by Frank Sinatra? In a special valentine tribute to the pain and loss in his songs of unrequited love, she cleverly discards the usual tropical bossa-nova beat on Antonio Carlos Jobim’s "How Insensitive" and almost speaks its lyrics as a perfect intro to the navy blue midnight mood on "I’m a Fool to Want You." The lyrics, some of which were written by Sinatra himself after his tempestuous marriage to Ava Gardner, still apply to anyone with specific memories of an affair that ended unresolved and refused to fade away.

 Shifting moods to the exhilarating "Storybook," the dazzling waltz from The Scarlet Pimpernel, she demonstrates once again how, and why, she stopped the show nightly on Broadway for two years. And before she wafts into the night in a sea of strapless splendor, she pulls one more surprise from her book of magic—a gorgeous, haunting, self-searching Dave Frishberg song called "Listen Here." Written for a Mary Tyler Moore television special, it is rarely performed and ready for rescue. Christine does both, finding something in the process that might well serve as a survival philosophy for us all. The song says find that inner voice that nags you with anxiety and self-doubt, and give it the old Bronx raspberry as you send it out of your life air mail, special delivery. I wish everyone would flush "My Funny Valentine," a song I hate, down the bowl with the rest of last year’s candy violets. But what can you do? It’s the only valentine song anybody knows. And I must admit, Christine gives it a new shine. So you leave with hope renewed, winter blahs on the wane and spring on the horizon. Get to the Carlyle and get ready to be enchanted.