Lianne Marie Dobbs

May 13, 2013

“Everything Old Is New Again”

Metropolitan Room  –  April 7, 8, 14, 21

Lianne Marie DobbsLike figure skaters, cabaret artists can be judged on their technical skills and their artistic merit. Lianne Marie Dobbs has both of these bases covered: Her voice is an attractive and unfailingly sure instrument, and she has considerable acting chops; what’s more, she is able to combine these skills to deliver nuanced interpretations across a range of styles with both sensitivity and showbiz savvy. Having all of these virtues is rare, but admittedly it’s not unique. However, she has something else, something that distinguishes her from other gifted artists and makes us sense that we are in the presence of someone special.

That something is mixture of several qualities Chief among them is an inner enthusiasm—no, more than that, a passion—to perform, to be on stage, to communicate with an audience. That passion is almost palpable; it makes the room crackle with energy. Related to this, she projects a sweepingly positive, optimistic sense of life, so that energy boosts us.

Another signal quality is the way she presents herself. Whether doing a show or performing in an open mic, she always looks “dressed up”—not dressed formally, necessarily, but deliberately, as though each appearance were an event, and each audience worthy of her best. And her bearing on stage is dignified—not stiff, mind you, but poised. She reminds one of the supper club singers portrayed in black-and-white films of the ’40s.

How fitting, then, that her recent show at the Metropolitan Room, which was directed by James Beaman, should celebrate the music of several decades back. And how appropriate that it began with Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer’s “I’m Old Fashioned.” Dobbs’s rendition was polished and purposeful, yet warmth came through; delivering the verse as an off-the-cuff personal statement was a nice way to take us into the song.

Her reading of the touching “Plenty of Time,” a very early Kander & Ebb song about not letting love and happiness slip through one’s fingers, was quite affecting. She was equally effective with two songs at the other end of the stylistic and emotional spectrum, “Home Lovin’ Man” (Dorcas Cochran, Lionel Newman) and “It’s a Woman’s Prerogative” (Arlen & Mercer): get-down and sexy on the first, playful and sexy on the second. And with “Sleepy Time Gal” (Joseph Alden, Raymond Egan, Ange Lorenzo, Richard Whiting), her work atop the piano was delicious.

She paired “The Trolley Song” (Hugh Martin, Ralph Blane) with “Too Late Now” (Alan Jay Lerner, Burton Lane), segueing from a truncated version of “Trolley” to the ballad. She was doing the first song so well, I was hungry to hear her perform it in its entirety, but then her rendition of the second piece was perfectly lovely and perfectly romantic, and the “Trolley” set-up justified the positive spin she placed on the usually-more-triste second song.

Another pairing didn’t fare as well qua pairing. Dobbs went from “My Time of Day” (Frank Loesser) into Ralph Freed and Burton Lane’s “How About You?” done as a chipper duet with her music director/pianist, the multi-talented Bill Zeffiro. On its own, the duet was delightful, but the Loesser, a brief, poetic paean to New York just before dawn, was a mighty strange lead-in. What’s more, as exquisite as this piece may be, it’s more a moment than a song. (In Guys and Dolls, it gives us a glimpse of Sky Masterson’s underlying sensitivity, paving the way for the romantic duet “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” which it segues into.) Since it’s too short to perform as a single number, if one wanted to include it in a cabaret show, one would have to pair it with something mood- and content-appropriate.

But that’s a small matter—a programming problem, easy to correct. There is a more important issue to be dealt with: grasping that in interpreting songs, sometimes the best way to communicate a lyric or a feeling is to keep it inside, i.e., to internalize it. It is not necessary to perform every line. For example, in “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” (Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II), she shouldn’t accompany the lyric “I am of the latter brand” with a palms-up gesture; it’s too obviously an acting choice, and, so, takes us out of the song and the moment. So, too, with her rendition of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square” (Manning Sherwin, Eric Maschwitz). She should let the sentiment in these songs—two of the most tender and intimate ever written—inform her performance. Instead of trying to express the feelings explicitly, she should embody them, radiate their warmth. That way, the audience will not only get the message, they’ll feel it.

Dobbs has come a long way in correcting this syndrome. It was far more prominent when she competed in last summer’s MetroStar Talent Challenge. A few months later, when she debuted “Everything Old Is New Again” for a single performance, she already showed considerable improvement, and with this recent engagement, it was a serious issue with only the two songs just cited. I suspect that at least part of the problem stems from her zeal—which was probably also the cause of her injecting the word “oh!” before “poor puzzled moon, he wore a frown” in “…Berkley Square” and of a slight tendency towards effusiveness in her patter—e.g., “I truly believe these songs are timeless” and “I’ll never, ever forget it.” But I wouldn’t want to curb her enthusiasm—as I discussed near the top of this review, it’s a wonderful thing. I’d just encourage her to employ it and her prodigious talents a little more selectively.

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About the Author

Roy Sander has been covering cabaret and theatre for over thirty years. He’s written cabaret and theatre reviews, features, and commentary for seven print publications, most notably Back Stage, and for CitySearch on the Internet. He covered cabaret monthly on “New York Theatre Review” on PBS TV, and cabaret and theatre weekly on WLIM-FM radio. He was twice a guest instructor at the London School of Musical Theatre. A critic for BistroAwards.com, he is also the site’s Reviews Editor; in addition, he is Chairman of the Advisory Board of MAC.