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Martha Plimpton
January 26, 2010
“Martha Plimpton Sings?”
Allen Room – January 16
Shortly after Martha Plimpton took the Allen Room stage in a trench coat, eventually shed to reveal a form-fitting red dress cut up to here, she said, “I’m not known, you know, as a songbird.” No, she isn’t exactly known as a songbird, but she is known—at least to reviewers who’ve watched her accept vastly disparate assignments—as a performer who can do anything.
That includes singing. Plimpton was Tony-nominated last year for the Pal Joey role that called on her to deliver the once-racy “Zip. Did anyone think she failed to come up with less than a socko version? Okay, maybe a few people were surprised when she did nifty songbird duty throughout her one-night (two-show) stand, proving herself to be a songbird with steel wings, a soft heart, and mesmerizing hip-swiveling technique. The range of material she chose and the different voices she employed to present it—with super music man Dan Lipton at the piano, five other musicians and singers Bridget Everett and Abbey O’Brien backing her—were juicy as a tray of Nathan’s frankfurters.
Invoking Nathan’s is appropriate, not because Plimpton mentioned the hotdog stand, but because her unifying theme was New York City and having been brought up in the center of Manhattan as the daughter of two show-biz-y bodies, Shelley Plimpton and Keith Carradine. Referring to the pluses and minuses—one minus being raised near the old New York Coliseum, often used as a urinal by the homeless—she remains what she regards as darkly optimistic. “Everybody I’ve ever dated,” she tossed off, “has been an alcoholic.”
What songs did she sing as she stood with her feet planted firmly on the wide podium? (That’s when she wasn’t grinding with the fervor of Pal Joey‘s Gladys Bumps.) She plucked a ditty from Hair (Gerome Ragni-James Rado-Galt MacDermot), where mom Shelley often carted her backstage. But she didn’t render mom’s “Frank Mills.” Instead, she gave unremitting oomph to “Colored Spade.” She followed it up—in a tip of the hat to the NYPD—with Randy Newman’s satirically perky “Jolly Coppers on Parade.” To recollect the tenor of school days, during which she was occasionally bullied, she invited Lucy Wainwright Roche to the stage for a duet on Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.”
Not everything she chirped seemed Big Apple-oriented, although perhaps there were oblique connections. She gave a startling treatment to the John Lennon-Yoko Ono “Woman is the Nigger of the World.” (Lennon and Ono lived in the Dakota.) She retrieved “Pickaninny’s Paradise” (Sam Ehrlich-Nat Osborne) from fading annals. That she did may have related to a liberal education in a melting-pot burg. Any link with Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” which director Eric Gilliland enhanced by whistling an intro and outro, has to be very tentative. It was a highlight all the same because top-flight actor Plimpton infused the threnody with all the called-for angst.
No question, though, how Plimpton feels about her home town when she began the closer, Cole Porter’s “I Happen to Like New York.” She faced away from the audience to look through the immense Allen Room window that not only reveals much of Central Park and all of Central Park South but also reflects automobile headlights as if they were falling stars. Into Porter, she blended the Martin Charnin-Charles Strouse “N, Y. C.” to strengthen her devotion. Brava, Martha.
