Paula West
D4vidFinkle
Oak Room at the Algonquin - October 27 – November 14 One of the myriad reasons I like—no, love—Paula West is that she considers Cole Porter and Bob Dylan to be on an equal footing with each other. Actually, in her current Oak Room at the Algonquin tour de force, she gives Porter the edge...
Kathleen France
D4vidFinkle
"Book of Love" Metropolitan Room – October 18, 25, November 20 Looking for love in all the right and wrong places, finding it, losing it, recovering from it, disdaining it, choking on it, floating on it, discombobulated by it—Kathleen France is only the latest boite denizen to make it the theme of a gig. And...
Barbara Lynn Pedersen
Roy Sander
"For the Love Along the Way" The Duplex - October 10, 17, 24 There is a lot that is very, very good in Barbara Lynn Pedersen's show. For one thing, there is her multi-faceted voice: sometimes a mezzo with an attractive tight vibrato that is warm and welcoming; other times, she displays the soprano end...
Sarah Rice
Roy Sander
"Screen Gems – Songs of Old Hollywood" Laurie Beechman Theatre - September 13, October 10, 17, 25, 26, February 8, March 5, 7, April 2, 26, 30 Sarah Rice is part of our theatrical history, having been the original Johanna in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street on Broadway. In her entertaining new cabaret show of songs from...
Raissa Katona Bennett
Roy Sander
Feinstein's at Loews Regency - October 19 Laurie Beechman Theatre - January 31 The defining moment in Raissa Katona Bennett's strong Feinstein's debut one-nighter came three-quarters of the way through her show. After she'd told us about having played a slew of ingenue roles, among them Luisa in The Fantasticks and Christine in Phantom of...
“Simply Barbra”
D4vidFinkle
Birdland - October 5 If right this minute they held a blindfold test to decide whether it was Barbra Streisand singing or Steven Brinbert, I'm willing to go out on a limb and say the most devoted Streisand crazo wouldn't be able to tell the difference—and that includes James Brolin. I'm basing my statement on...
Jane Krakowski
Elizabeth Ahlfors
“Has Sold Out ... Tickets Available" Feinstein's at Loew's Regency - October 6 - 10, 13, 14, 17 On big stage or small, Jane Krakowski knows how to make an entrance. In the award-winning 2003 Broadway production of Nine, Jane Krakowski slithered down from the rafters wrapped in a filmy white sheet to deliver "A...
Marilyn Maye
Elizabeth Ahlfors
“More Mercer" Metropolitan Room - October 6 - 17 (not Oct. 15) New Yorkers cannot get enough of this lady. As Johnny Mercer wrote, she's "Just Too Marvelous for Words." In June, Marilyn Maye brought her tribute "Mercer ... the Maye Way” to the Metropolitan Room. Because that was not enough for us and because...
Maria Tecce
D4vidFinkle
“Viva!” Metropolitan Room - October 11 Maria Tecce arrived on the Metropolitan Room stage reciting a poem by Nobel Prize-winning Pablo Neruda, and that’s definitely something you don’t see or hear in too many other cabaret acts. The love ode, which Tecce recited in Spanish, includes a reference to “a butterfly cooing like a dove.”...
Sue Matsuki
Roy Sander
"Sue Matsuki at the Beechman" The Laurie Beechman Theatre - September 12, 13, 26, 27, November 9 I have seen Sue Matsuki perform many times over the past eleven years. As I've said before, and will doubtless have occasion to say again, one of the most gratifying aspects—no, make that greatest pleasures—of covering cabaret over...