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“A Toast to Ava Gardner”
Metropolitan Room – March 19, 25, April 5, 6
In her new show, Sigali Hamberger takes us on a journey through Ava Gardner’s personal life and professional career—her background, desires, ambitions, marriages, love affairs, film roles, and leading men—en route, singing songs that illuminate significant events and relationships. How fitting that Gardner, widely regarded as one of the great beauties of the cinema, should be toasted by a young lady who comes on stage looking glamorous and lovely. And how gratifying to see that the young lady has grown considerably as an artist since her last appearance at the Metropolitan Room, in 2010: her soprano is as beautiful as before, but her interpretations now reveal greater depth and nuance, and they display a more distinctive point of view.
The start of the show—perhaps the first third of the evening—differs markedly from what follows. I’ll discuss the later, larger part of the program first, and will get back to the earlier part later. (Got that?)
The songs have been very well chosen and positioned. For example, “Thanks a Lot, But No Thanks” (André Previn, Comden & Green) comes right after Hamberger tells us of Gardner’s rejection of Howard Hughes’s advances, and she sings “Cornet Man” (Jule Styne, Bob Merrill) in the context of Gardner’s marriage to bandleader Artie Shaw, who favored his music over his wife. (Note that only a couple of the selections come from Gardner’s films.)
Hamberger’s performances are all—or very nearly all—quite strong. With Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash’s “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” she displays noteworthy acting skill, overlaying the lyric’s inquisitiveness with a palpable sense of exasperation. Her rendition of Charles Aznavour’s “For Me, Formidable” is a sincere protestation of love, and she makes a poignant emotional connection with “Blame It On My Youth” (Oscar Levant, Edward Heyman). Her delivery of “Two for the Road” (Henry Mancini, Leslie Bricusse) is one of the most romantic I’ve heard, and it works especially well here, in the context of Gardner’s marriage to Frank Sinatra. As we know, the marriage did not last, as reflected in “I’m a Fool to Want You,” which Sinatra wrote with Jack Wolf and Joel Herron; Hamberger’s interpretation is brooding and incisive, made all the more so by musical director Ido Alexander’s lush piano accompaniment. Indeed, I should think a recording of just Alexander’s piano scoring for the show would be a pleasure to listen to.
Now we get to the first part of the evening, which is problematic. In the opening number, Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” Hamberger’s sound is too operatic to convey the song’s dissipation and disillusionment. She interrupts each of the subsequent songs after a few lines in order to give us a bit of narration, then returns to the song to deliver only a few more lines to wrap it up. Using the songs thus, as musical punctuation, robs them of any impact they could have qua songs.
The greatest offense is perpetrated against Susan Werner’s “Movie of My Life”: the second portion of the song, in which the singer achieves painful self-awareness, has been omitted because it does not serve the show’s purpose. Not only is that an obscene thing to do to Werner’s work, the portion that has been used is not crucial: the point Hamberger is making here does not require musical expression. Mind you, the song extracts that Hamberger sings are mainly very well performed—for example, the playful naughtiness she brings to George Gershwin and Buddy DeSylva’s “Do It Again”—but they are frustratingly fragmented and truncated. This can be fixed by including fewer musical selections in the first part of the show, and doing them in their entirety, with the narration preceding or following the songs, not as interruptions—i.e., the approach taken in the far superior following two-thirds of the evening.
Actually, there’s another problem, at least at the performance I attended, and it pops up from time to time throughout the evening. In a few numbers, Hamberger has her head in constant motion while she’s singing; it’s a counter-interpretive distraction.
I do hope Hamberger and her director, Scott Coulter, work on the structural and programming problems at the top of the evening. This two-thirds excellent show could be 100% terrific.
Roy Sander has been covering cabaret and theatre for over thirty years. He’s written cabaret and theatre reviews, features, and commentary for seven print publications, most notably Back Stage, and for CitySearch on the Internet. He covered cabaret monthly on “New York Theatre Review” on PBS TV, and cabaret and theatre weekly on WLIM-FM radio. He was twice a guest instructor at the London School of Musical Theatre. A critic for BistroAwards.com, he is also the site’s Reviews Editor; in addition, he is Chairman of the Advisory Board of MAC.
