“I Hear Voices”

The Duplex  –  June 4, 8, 12; added performances June 21, 29

A YouTube video of Carly Sakolove singing Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” as a dozen different “Broadway Divas” was picked by Time as one of the top ten web videos of 2010, and to date it has had over 115,000 views. Now the young actress-singer-impressionist has teamed with director and co-writer Bill Russell and piano accompanist Dan Micciche to present the cabaret show “I Hear Voices,” which debuted recently at the Duplex. Though as a show the evening needs further development, as a showcase for Sakolove’s talents it should be regarded in large measure as a success.

Some of Sakolove’s impressions were uncannily right-on. When she did Arlen and Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” as the young Judy Garland, I actually drew a breath in wonder and delight. On “Someone Like You” (Adele Laurie Blue Adkins, Dan Wilson), she persuasively captured the soothing roughness in Adele’s voice, and a brief passage of Judy Dench singing was perfection.

There’s a limit, though, to how much mileage one can get with an evening of dead-accurate impersonations. In a cabaret show—unlike, say, a portrayal in a biopic—success often requires not only capturing the subject’s voice and mannerisms, but heightening them; the degree of augmentation depends on what the impressionist is going for. Sakolove understands this, and she was clearly aiming at humor when she gave us Patti LuPone doing Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” and Elaine Stritch performing Sondheim’s “The Ladies Who Lunch,” and she succeeded splendidly: her exaggeration of LuPone’s adenoidal inarticulation and Stritch’s flattened delivery was side-splittingly funny.

One factor that made these two impersonations work so marvelously is that they were solidly grounded in the two stars’ actual traits. Less successful were Sakolove’s takes on Bernadette Peters (Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind”) and Barbra Streisand (Bob Merrill and Jule Styne’s “Don’t Rain on My Parade”). The reason is that they didn’t merely exaggerate, they went afield. She got Peters’s voice right, but I could see no relation between Sakolove’s physical mannerisms and any performance I’ve ever seen Peters give. And though she mimicked Streisand’s vocal approach, the sound lacked Streisand’s exquisite clarity, and she overstated Streisand’s famous physical mannerisms. What’s more, why did Sakolove give both of these ladies intonation problems? (Perhaps that was unintentional, a mishap the night I attended.)

A couple of other impressions didn’t quite make it aurally. Her impersonation of Idina Menzel’s rendition of Stephen Schwartz’s “Defying Gravity,” while duplicating Menzel’s power, failed to convey the quality of her voice—in either sense of the word. On Robert and Richard Sherman’s “A Spoonful of Sugar,” Sakolove ably mimicked Julie Andrews’s admirably precise elocution, but the sound lacked Andrews’s brightness. This takes me to another point. Even if her Andrews impersonation had been unexceptionable, while it might then have been technically impressive, the success would have been only partial because the entertainment value in a recreation of Julie Andrews doing one of her signature songs is limited. (Team Sakolove could learn from Christine Pedi’s approach to impersonations in general, and to Julie Andrews in particular: Pedi gives us Andrews perfectly observed but heightened—the point I made earlier—and she has Andrews singing the least-Andrews-like song imaginable, so we get humor from both the slight exaggeration and the wacky song selection.)

On Sondheim and Styne’s “Some People,” the show did try to give us something more: a parody lyric, written by Sakolove and Russell, in which the singer asks Mama, not Papa, for 88 bucks, only this time it’s for ice skates. The lyric is OK, but it’s not clever or funny enough to provide added value. However, performing the song as Liza Minnelli, Sakolove was delightful. Towards the end of the show, she sang Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” as a handful of different women, but this, too, didn’t provide added value because she’d done all of these impersonations earlier, and the interpretation did not introduce a fresh point of view.

The evening was structured as a session in a psychiatrist’s office, with Sakolove telling her therapist about having heard voices all of her life. This device served as the hook for her to go from impression to impression, which made it useful enough, but it never rose above the level of an obvious device. Two songs, each with Sakolove singing as herself, bookended the therapist session. Preceding the session was the opening number, “Twisted” (Annie Ross, Wardell Gray). Sakolove’s performance was quite respectable, if a bit stiff; it also came across as perfunctory, as though the only reason the song was in the show was as a lead-in to the therapy device. At the end of therapy, she tells the doctor that she’s ready to be herself, then she sings “As If We Never Said Goodbye” (Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black, Christopher Hampton). Sakolove’s rendition was vocally strong, but she didn’t dig beneath the surface. If she had, she could have shown how the lyric, though written for a completely different context, related so poignantly to her situation at that point in the show. Indeed, when I saw the show, I wondered why she and Russell had chosen the song; however, re-reading the lyric now and seeing how line by line it could easily refer to rediscovering oneself—i.e., to Sakolove’s declared mental state—I got goosebumps. That’s what her interpretation could and should have done.

Bill Russell is a very fine writer—as evidenced by Side Show, Pageant, and Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens—and it is clear that Carly Sakolove has the talent and potential to hone her skills. I’ll be interested in seeing what they come up with next time round.