Sierra Boggess
In so many important ways, Sierra Boggess is my kind of cabaret entertainer. She possesses a solid, well-schooled soprano voice that ranges up to a high E. She is willing to embrace—and is very adept at delivering—musical outliers to the traditional cabaret canon, from Puccini opera to contemporary country/folk Her warm and direct rapport with both her audience and her musicians is astonishing. Her understanding and interpretations of long-familiar songs belie her 31 years, and can break my heart. I’m still recovering from her “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (Jerome Kern, Otto Harbach, from Roberta) and her “You’ll Never Know” (Harry Warren, Mack Gordon, the Oscar winner from Hello, Frisco, Hello), which I had heretofore felt that Alice Faye had wrapped up for good in the 1940s.
But it isn’t just the oldies that allow Boggess to shimmer in her current show, “Awakening” (which is also being released this week on her live CD of the same name). Dolly Parton’s “Wildflowers Don’t Care Where They Grow” beautifully underscores her act’s theme of self-assertion. Even better, this song provides a moving duet between Sierra and her father, Mike Boggess, who plays a guitar he hand-crafted. By singing and playing directly to one another, they provide the audience with a profound shared experience. Mike Boggess appears on just that one number, but Sierra’s two onstage collaborators offer essential underpinning for her entire set. Musical director and pianist Brian Hertz knows just when to play along and when to back off, and on the cello, Sierra’s sister, Summer Boggess, is so simpatico she makes you wonder why every cabaret soprano doesn’t engage that instrument for her cabaret act.
As befits a singer who became a Broadway star in 2006 in the title role of The Little Mermaid, Sierra Boggess includes a sweet dose of Disney in her set: “Part of Your World” (Alan Menken, Howard Ashman, Glenn Slater, from Mermaid); “Just Around the River Bend” (Menken, Stephen Schwartz, from Pocahontas); and her encore, “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” (Mack David, Al Hoffman, Jerry Livingston, from Cinderella). Her real finale, pre-encore, is up to-the-minute: a rousing “Live Out Loud” (Andrew Lippa, Brian Crawley, from the new stage musical A Little Princess, based on the Frances Hodgson Burnett story, and currently playing in Boston.
Ah, but it’s time for the caveats, and they unfortunately are too numerous for a major engagement of this sort, which badly needed a director, or at the very least an editor. The biggest problem is Sierra’s professed theme of “Awakening”: self-discovery and personal growth, in her case based largely on her personal library of copiously quoted self-help pop psychology of the Wayne Dyer school. But this premise is immediately belied by her un-ironic opening number, “I Have Confidence” (Richard Rodgers, from the movie The Sound of Music). It’s also hard to believe that she was once merely “Lovely” (Stephen Sondheim, from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), as her second song would have it. Boggess appears to have been self-possessed and sure of her path in life from the git-go, so she sings the result, not the process. Where is the childhood angst? Where is her growth? When she channels Eva Tanguay in a stylish and committed version of the pre-flapper hit “I Don’t Care” (Harry O. Sutton, Jean Lenox) she puts to rest forever her thesis of an insecure and self-searching Sierra Boggess.
Also problematic is her patter. While Boggess, in a stylish black sheath, looks every inch the 31-year-old cabaret singer—at least until she starts swigging her water breaks from a plastic bottle—when she talks, she sounds more like a slightly out-of-date teenager. Too much is “totally awesome,” including the audience (also known as “you guys”) for just showing up at the club. “Bad boys” is another Boggess expression, which seemingly can apply to many things, such as her encore. (“I’ve got one more bad boy for you guys.”) The patter’s content is another issue. While her audition and rehearsals for The Little Mermaid may understandably still be a painful memory to her, they are of little or no interest to the audience at this late date. It’s touching that Boggess leads into “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “You’ll Never Know” with a tribute to her World War II newlywed grandparents, but her verbatim reading of a lengthy letter from her grandmother to her husband at the front is unnecessary and distracting. Boggess’s tale of her early and ongoing obsession with Barbra Streisand is as jejune as it is endless.
Two more set pieces go on too long and should be cut—or cut out entirely. The more promising is based on the fact that Boggess was “highly inspired by opera and obsessed with La Boheme.” But she couldn’t decide whether she would rather sing the tragic soprano Mimi, or the comic-relief mezzo Musetta. Her range allows for either, and here she sings both—Mimi’s “Donde lieta usci” and Musetta’s “Quando me’n vo” (also know as “Musetta’s Waltz”).The bit goes well enough until she gets carried away with Musetta’s manic maneuvers atop the piano. Another must-have-seemed-like-a-good-idea sketch that goes on too long is her deceptively named “Andrew Lloyd Webber Medley.” In it, Boggess performs “Think of Me” (lyrics by Charles Hart, from Phantom of the Opera) in the pop diva style of, say, Britney Spears, and other of the composer’s songs as an opera singer might attempt them. It’s funny for about 60 seconds, but seems to go on forever.
If ever a cabaret act needed to learn that less is more, especially when the more offers so much, it’s this one.
“Awakening”
54 Below – December 2, 4, 5, 6, 7
About the Author
Robert Windeler is the author of 18 books, including biographies of Mary Pickford, Julie Andrews, Shirley Temple, and Burt Lancaster. As a West Coast correspondent for The New York Times and Time magazine, he covered movies, television and music, and he was an arts and entertainment critic for National Public Radio. He has contributed to a variety of other publications, including TV Guide, Architectural Digest, The Sondheim Review, and People, for which he wrote 35 cover stories. He is a graduate of Duke University in English literature and holds a masters in journalism from Columbia, where he studied critical writing with Judith Crist. He has been a theatre critic for Back Stage since 1999, writes reviews for BistroAwards.com, and is a member of The Players and the American Theatre Critics Association.
I so strongly disagree. She was very upfront that she would not just be standing there singing. She has to tell stories to lead in to the songs. She’s a performer and needs a story, she needs to be able to act them out and call upon an emotion. I agree to disagree with your opinion and I loved the show and own the CD.