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In her “All Sondheim” show at 54 Below, Alice Ripley has managed to differentiate herself from the seeming plethora of cabaret performers who offer entire sets devoted to that particular deserving composer. She has done this by relating some charming personal anecdotes linking herself to most of the songs she sings here. As a kid in the theatre-free “cornfields of Ohio,” Ripley was introduced to Sondheim only by hearing his one genuine pop hit on her transistor radio: “Send in the Clowns,” as recorded by Judy Collins. In college, at the age of 19, Ripley improbably played Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd. Nonetheless, that became her favorite Sondheim show. Coming to New York in 1992, with an Equity card already in hand, her go-to 16 bars for auditions was “Broadway Baby.” Here she delivers it as the driven, hopeful ingénue she was back then, rather than as the more usual veteran performer looking back, as if to say, “What else would I have done with my life?”
A determined and forceful vocalist, Ripley can dial it down when it comes to lyrics. She relates her personal favorite of all of Sondheim’s songs, “Anyone Can Whistle,” to her belief that it deals with “embracing awkwardness, leading to intimacy,” then proceeds to sing it as well as I’ve ever heard it sung. Her version of “Losing My Mind,” while mostly sung in the manner of Dorothy Collins and virtually all of her Sally successors, focuses on Ripley’s favorite self-descriptive lyrics in Sondheim’s works: “There I stand in the middle of the floor, not going left, not going right.” Ripley maintains that those words reflect her own bifurcated psyche. She also suggests that the least-well-known song in this set, “I Remember” (from the 1966 television broadcast Evening Primrose), reflects a certain internal longing that she felt, and then she subtly proves it.
For comic relief, Ripley offers an even more manic than usual version of “Getting Married Today,” which she had sung as Amy at The Kennedy Center. During a rehearsal for that production, she deliberately decided to go over the top, “to get it out of my system,” not knowing that Sondheim himself had slipped into the theatre and seen the whole thing. While the composer was generally complimentary of her ability, he said, “Next time, just sing the words.” Sometimes in her 54 Below show she does only that, performing vocally pretty much as others have over the years, not really attempting to find new colors in, or relate personally to, “The Miller’s Son” or “The Ladies Who Lunch.” As for “Send in the Clowns,” Ripley sings it pretty much as Judy Collins still does, perhaps not wanting to tamper with a childhood memory of near perfection. She’d like to play Mrs. Lovett again, now that she’s age-appropriate, but her nifty changeup here was to do a pairing of the Sweeney songs “No Place Like London” and “Not While I’m Around.”
What could be another audition song, for a role she’d dearly like to take on “in the second half of my life,” is her rousing finale, “Rose’s Turn” (music by Jule Style). Throughout the evening, Ripley demonstrates an admirable lack of hand- and arm-waving in her delivery, employing such upper-body histrionics only when she is channeling the frustrated amateur and stage mother in her all-out delivery of “Rose’s Turn.” Here you can believe that Gypsy’s mother would have done it just that way, with all that wind-milling about, but seeing Ripley’s rendition you can also believe that Rose just might have become a star herself in another time and other circumstances—not always a given when “Rose’s Turn” is sung.
But wait. “Rose’s Turn” might be the finale, yet it isn’t the end. There is a blatant add-on, neither a coda nor a proper encore: two songs from Ripley’s signature role as a severely bi-polar wife and mother in Next to Normal (Tom Kitt, Brian Yorkey): “Maybe (Next to Normal)”—with pianist Jessica Means, the evening’s sole accompanist, standing up to sing the daughter’s part—and “I Miss the Mountains.” From the reaction of Ripley’s enthusiastic full-house fan base for the opening show, it was clear she’d done the right thing to have tacked on these two numbers, as odd as it might have seemed to the rest of us. As she put it, regarding the latter song, “That’s the one thing I had to sing if I wanted to get out of here alive.”
There were a few presentational problems. Ripley sang too many of her songs sitting on a stool—after all, this was a theatre-based program. Although the piano playing of Means was lissome throughout the varied set, there were some times I longed for some additional instrumental accompaniment. And for the first show, at least, Ripley wore a sleeveless, bright blue sequined (very) mini-dress that often distracted from the performance.
“All Sondheim”
54 Below – August 12 (two shows), September 23
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.
In her “All Sondheim” show at 54 Below, Alice Ripley has managed to differentiate herself from the seeming plethora of cabaret performers who offer entire sets devoted to that particular deserving composer. She has done this by relating some charming personal anecdotes linking herself to most of the songs she sings here. As a kid in the theatre-free “cornfields of Ohio,” Ripley was introduced to Sondheim only by hearing his one genuine pop hit on her transistor radio: “Send in the Clowns,” as recorded by Judy Collins. In college, at the age of 19, Ripley improbably played Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd. Nonetheless, that became her favorite Sondheim show. Coming to New York in 1992, with an Equity card already in hand, her go-to 16 bars for auditions was “Broadway Baby.” Here she delivers it as the driven, hopeful ingénue she was back then, rather than as the more usual veteran performer looking back, as if to say, “What else would I have done with my life?”