Maude Maggart

June 22, 2012

“Into the Garden”

Feinstein’s at Loews Regency  –  June 5 – 16

The selections Maude Maggart sings in “Into the Garden” are not your father’s pop songs. More likely they’d have been on your great-grandfather’s play list. Maggart focuses mainly on music written a century or so ago. According to press notes, the show was inspired by the recent centennial of the Titanic disaster.

It’s a wonderful era for this singer to explore. Dressed in a low-cut gown and elegant wrap, with a blossom in her hair, she looks like some nymph-like chanteuse from the cover of yellowed sheet music, left decades ago in the bench of a dusty piano. Maggart seems to have studied François Delsarte’s famous charts depicting the spectrum of human gesture. She places a hand at her cheek to suggest demure bashfulness and rests an elbow on the piano to project a contemplative mood. Her performance at times suggests a voice recital in the parlor of a private home rather than a club show.

Maggart begins with a medley of songs in which she concentrates on the verses rather than the choruses. Central among them is “Come Into the Garden, Maud” (Alfred Lord Tennyson, Michael Balfe), which allows Maggart to have a little fun with her own given name and also to introduce a botanical theme to the evening. Maggart makes the point that the verse of a song is the “soil” that feeds a chorus. I guess that makes sense, sort of—though it probably would have worked at least as well to have compared verses to buds and choruses to full blossoms. (Wouldn’t the “soil” of a song be the cultural components that allow it to take root—along with the imaginations and concerns of the songwriters?)

In any case, what’s important here is that Maggart sounds glorious singing this material. Her voice is somehow both whispery and resonant, which is a perfect combination for songs conjuring the ghosts of our forebears. When her voice dips to its lower register, the effect is full and passionate. Even the sound of her inhalations is crucial to her musicality.

I could listen to the beauty of Maggart’s voice long into the night. But I know the “quaintness” quotient in that first medley (which also includes Irving Berlin’s “Crinoline Days,” Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star,” and Hammerstein and Sigmund Romberg’s “When I Grow Too Old to Dream”) could wear out its welcome pretty quickly with some listeners.

Fortunately, Maggart quickly moves to an entirely different group of songs, beginning with William Dillon’s “Take Me to the Cabaret.” These are selections associated with the birth of ragtime and what Maggart identifies as the first manifestations of the “dance craze” phenomenon. It’s music that would have made your great-great grandmother worry about your great-granddad’s moral well-being. Maggart humorously illustrates how dancers posed as if in ursine attack mode while dancing the Grizzly Bear. And she cites the rumor that sexuality wasn’t a mid-Twentieth Century invention when she sings the mildly racy “Your Daddy Did the Same Thing Fifty Years Ago” by Al Piantadosi, Joe McCarthy, and Joe Goodwin.

For me, the highlight of the evening is Maggart’s performance of George M. Cohan’s “Life’s a Funny Proposition After All.” She notes before singing it that Cohan had an ability to express “existential ideas in a normal-guy kind of way.” I found her straightforward performance of the song tender and immensely moving.

Following the lead of her mentor, Andrea Marcovicci, Maggart seems to have been a scrupulous musical historian, and her enthusiastic spoken reports on her findings are charming and welcome. But the program includes some tangents that left my head swimming: I had a problem with the inclusion of certain songs and the way she ordered the selections. Maggart seems to be taking a more or less chronological approach to the material in order to show a musical evolution. So why is Noël Coward’s “A Room With a View” (first sung in 1928) performed before the ragtime-era songs? Later Maggart embarks on a fairly lengthy digression concerning the Hutchinson Family Singers from the 1850s and mentions, in passing, the group’s influence on such later folk singers as Pete Seeger. Then, near the end of the evening, she sings Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!” She performs it lovingly and gracefully—and it gives music director and pianist John Boswell a chance to do some splendid playing. But, other than the fact that its lyrics speak of time, why has it been included in this program of very early Twentieth Century songs?

These confusions didn’t spoil the evening for me. Maggart’s taste, talent, and passion compensate for the somewhat rambling—and, I think, overambitious—programming. But some restructuring of the format here would help to turn a fine show into a grand one.

 

Avatar

About the Author

Mark Dundas Wood is an arts/entertainment journalist and dramaturg. He began writing reviews for BistroAwards.com in 2011. More recently he has contributed "Cabaret Setlist" articles about cabaret repertoire. Other reviews and articles have appeared in theaterscene.net and clydefitchreport.com, as well as in American Theatre and Back Stage. As a dramaturg, he has worked with New Professional Theatre and the New York Musical Theatre Festival. He is currently literary manager for Broad Horizons Theatre Company.