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Isabel Rose
October 8, 2014
Expensively produced flash-and-trash is often able to find an enthusiastic audience, even at the high end of the cabaret world. This one-night effort proved that anew, and you didn’t have to go to Las Vegas to see it. Rose, whose show at 54 Below was in aid of her latest album release, “Trouble in Paradise,” is the first to admit that she may not be for all markets. Dressed in what looked like a green one-piece bathing suit covered in green sequins at her chest, and with green spangles dangling over her thighs, she noted, “I look like a gay leprechaun.” Her hennaed, long-fall fright wig was hideous, as she concurred. Her patter and onstage movements were sometimes more than borderline vulgar. (During one song she did a faux lap dance, and in another number she cried out, “Why don’t you give me something to atone for on Yom Kippur?”) Rose seemingly aspired to sing and talk like Bette Midler, and to dance like Ann-Margret. She succeeded at neither, despite her obvious effort and that of her backup team. Still, she clearly had a committed following in her audience, even beyond the abundant coterie of friends and family.
Rose started off well enough, apparently following her alleged affinity for the 1960s. The first year of that decade provided her with a spiritedly apropos “A Lot of Livin’ to Do” (Charles Strouse, Lee Adams, from Bye Bye Birdie). She followed this with an equally uptempo version of “The Things We Do for Love” (Graham Gouldman, Eric Stewart) from 1977, which quickly proved to be her real favorite year, at least for this set, because more songs were from 1977 than from any other year. Later in the show, she sang the same song as a ballad, proving that she could re-interpret a familiar song and give it a distinctive meaning. But too many of her 13 songs lacked a justification for her to be singing them. Bruce Springsteen’s “Fire,” from 1977, and her closer, The Captain and Tennille’s Grammy-winning “Love Will Keep Us Together” (Neil Sedaka, Howard Greenfield), are seldom, if ever, covered, because they are indelibly linked to their introducers and difficult to reinterpret. Similarly, Rose’s encore, “Reflections” (Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland) belongs to The Supremes and seemingly can only be done the way they did it in 1967. And that’s just the way Rose and her backup singers, Abby Ahmad and Kathy Pfaffle, performed the song, only louder. Why try to sing someone else’s indelible signature songs if it’s not possible to pull off a new take on them?
While Ahmad and Pfaffle aren’t exactly the Harlettes, they managed to stay on a par with Rose in singing and dancing. (They might want to rethink those frilly black shorty pajamas as costumes, however.) The splendid five-piece backup band deserved a more varied program. I got the feeling this quintet—Tommy Eichmann, piano; Sarah Goldstone, keyboards; Bryan West, bass; Kiyoshi Matsuyama, guitar; and Bruno Esrubilsky, drums—could play anything.
In her copious chat, Rose concentrated more on her performance style rather than the songs themselves, and rarely provided context or even the names of the composers or original artists (the double-threat Springsteen was the exception). She credited two mentors, Betty Buckley and the female impersonator Hedda Lettuce, both of whom were in the audience. Rose said Buckley “taught me a lot about giving love to the people in the room for my show” and that Hedda Lettuce had given her specific drag-queen moves and lines. Buckley smiled, waved and blew kisses from the sidelines, but Hedda Lettuce was upfront shouting out an example of a specific gimmick he’d taught her: how to smile like Marilyn Monroe. The method is too dirty to repeat here and Rose had the grace to warn “members of my family in the audience” to cover their ears.
54 Below – October 1
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.
Expensively produced flash-and-trash is often able to find an enthusiastic audience, even at the high end of the cabaret world. This one-night effort proved that anew, and you didn’t have to go to Las Vegas to see it. Rose, whose show at 54 Below was in aid of her latest album release, “Trouble in Paradise,” is the first to admit that she may not be for all markets. Dressed in what looked like a green one-piece bathing suit covered in green sequins at her chest, and with green spangles dangling over her thighs, she noted, “I look like a gay leprechaun.” Her hennaed, long-fall fright wig was hideous, as she concurred. Her patter and onstage movements were sometimes more than borderline vulgar. (During one song she did a faux lap dance, and in another number she cried out, “Why don’t you give me something to atone for on Yom Kippur?”) Rose seemingly aspired to sing and talk like Bette Midler, and to dance like Ann-Margret. She succeeded at neither, despite her obvious effort and that of her backup team. Still, she clearly had a committed following in her audience, even beyond the abundant coterie of friends and family.