Lauren Fox
“Here’s to Love”
Metropolitan Room – March 21, 28, April 4, 11, September 8
I hadn’t planned on reviewing Lauren Fox. I went to her show at the Metropolitan Room last month purely out of curiosity: though this was her first venture into cabaret, she had received praise for her recent work in theatre, and I wanted to check her out. Because of time constraints and other commitments, writing about her wasn’t under consideration. But I was so impressed by what I saw that my enthusiasm and my sense of justice demanded that I say something.
It was clear that someone special was on stage with her very first number, a pairing of “My Father’s Waltz” (Dan Messé, of the Brooklyn-based band Hem) and “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” (Helen Deutsch, Bronislau Kaper). As Fox sang, she radiated a sweet warmth and conveyed a sense of personal investment in the material—as though she weren’t interpreting a song so much as telling her own story. Of course, the songs were not necessarily autobiographical; however, her artlessness and artistry gave her performance a feeling of immediacy and truth, making the sad parts of the second song more heartbreaking than I’d ever experienced with that song before.
Though this was her first cabaret show, throughout the evening she exhibited skills that have eluded many singers who’ve been at the art form for years. One of those skills is being able to act without appearing to be acting: her renditions were enriched by small but beautifully observed acting choices that never came across as acting choices. And she knows how to play to all areas of a room organically, without resorting to the counter-interpretive device of oscillating with no dramatic motivation.
Fox also knows how to use dialogue to set up a song, or as I like to say, to tune the audience’s antennas—as in her introduction to another Dan Messé piece, “Great Houses of New York,” Messé’s tribute to past glory. Her explanation of the background behind Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” provided an appropriately somber setting for her pairing of that song with Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” Her rendition of the Berlin piece was one of the few I’ve heard that fully grasped the song’s darkness. (I’m dismayed how few singers recognize that the song is about neither music nor dance; both are used metaphorically. The lyric “until they ask us to pay the bill” doesn’t refer to the waiter bringing the check; it refers to the final reckoning, and the line that follows, “and while we still have the chance,” means while we’re alive. In the Cohen song, “end of love” is a similarly mortal allusion.)
But perhaps the most striking example of this skill was her lead-in to Rodgers and Hart’s “With a Song in My Heart,” which gave a rare clarity to the song’s context and helped us appreciate her interpretation, which took us on quite an emotional journey. You may have heard renditions that were vocally more lush or ravishing, but I doubt that you’ve ever heard a better one. It was a revelation. Fox does something else that many other singers fail to do: sing the verse. And even when artists do sing a verse, they frequently do little more than pay it lip service—literally—whereas Fox gives verses as rich a reading as she does the body of a song. With “With a Song in My Heart,” not only does the verse lay very important groundwork, it is one of the prettiest in the standards repertoire, and Fox sang it with considerable depth and understanding.
She paired “Drunkard’s Prayer” (Karin Bergquist, Linford Detweiler) with Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” two songs that use drink as a metaphor for love. Fox took the second song slower than I’d heard before—not arbitrarily, but so as to better convey the song’s meaning and give it greater emotional weight; it was the most affecting rendition of the Mitchell classic I’ve ever heard. (For her, it’s always about serving the song and about communication. Contrast this with singers who play with tempi and arrangements for no discernable reason other than a misguided attempt to be distinctive.)
And so it went. “Getting Some Fun Out of Life” (Joe Burke, Edgar Leslie) was very jolly, Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” was infused with understated but palpable love and tender longing, and Ben Folds’s “The Luckiest” was so simple and so touching. Only “To Keep My Love Alive” was not fully realized: she hadn’t yet mined all of the delights in this delicious Rodgers & Hart song.
The evening was adroitly constructed, with a less-meaty song dropped in from time to time among the more substantial offerings. After singing one of them, she described it as “a palate cleanser.” After another, she asked, “Isn’t that a happy little song?” Unlike her introductions, these pronouncements didn’t tune our antennas in advance; rather, they shaped our evaluation of the song after the fact: they made us comfortable with having enjoyed the song without having been bowled over by it. Hmmm. I’ve never seen that done before; it’s very smart. As I said earlier, she opened the show with “My Father’s Waltz”; in a nice bit of symmetry, she closed with the heartfelt “Here’s to Love,” which was written by Hod David and Ray Errol Fox, her father.
Jon Weber served as musical director and piano accompanist. Over the past few years I’ve seen him with a number of singers, and I can only conclude that he is incapable of providing less than superb collaboration and support.
Lauren Fox will be returning to the Metropolitan Room in November and December with a program of the songs of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. I’ll be there.
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.