Music Review: Christiane Noll - Gifts

This article was first published at Blogcritics

Christiane Noll joins Patty LuPone and Norbert Leo Butz in Broadway Records’ 54 Below live cabaret performance series with her album Gifts. Perhaps best known for her role as Emma Carew in the musical Jekyll and Hyde, the talented singer has established herself as a legitimate member of the Broadway aristocracy, and her cabaret act demonstrates why that is.

Of course a good cabaret act assumes a fine voice, but a great cabaret act demands more. The best acts have a theme; they have a narrative arc. In the popular jargon of the trade, there must be a journey. “Gifts,” as Noll explains in a liner note, “from my father I now share with my daughter.” ”Music,” she continues, “was not only our family trade, it was how we expressed ourselves and our inner most emotions.” Family and music are her theme.

 Brought up in a house filled with music, her father was a conductor and music supervisor for CBS, her mother a soprano, she was, as she describes it in her two part medley “Growing Up,” even as a baby enthroned atop a grand piano in the family apartment, inundated with music. Her father would play; her mother would sing, and she gives us a taste, a little Puccini, a bit of Mozart, some Victor Herbert, and some Gilbert and Sullivan. As she grows, she looks to develop her own sound, leaping from “Whistle While You Work” to “What I Did for Love.”

She goes on to run through her career, from poorly chosen audition material to her Broadway success and her father’s pride in her Jekyll and Hyde debut, of course with appropriate musical examples. Then moving on to her pride in her own daughter, whose singing it turns out can tame a playground bully. It is an endearing, if perhaps a mite sentimental journey.

Along the way there is the music. She opens the set with “Somewhere Out There” from “An American Tale.” Highlights include “The Sound of Music,” an intense version of “Send in the Clowns,” and an unexpected choice in “Some Enchanted Evening.” There is a nice change of pace in the “Museum Song” from Barnum, and an homage to her Ella Fitzgerald period in her encore (in an arrangement by her father) “Mr. Paganini.” Of course, no performance would be complete without “In His Eyes,” her Jekyll and Hyde show stopper, and while composer Frank Wildhorn isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, listening to her sing his music, it is enough to make you wonder why.

Christiane Noll is as versatile a singer as you’re likely to come across, and her versatility shines through on this album. She can sing opera and art songs. She can do patter; she can swing. And if it looks like she’s found a permanent home on the Broadway stage, her cabaret act gives her the opportunity to show off her other talents.

You can check out Noll singing “The Sound of Music” and doing a promo video for the show on YouTube.

Music Review: Patti LuPone - Far Away Places.

This article was first published at Blogcritics

Who better to headline the opening of 54 Below, a new night club adjacent to the heart of Manhattan's theater district, than perhaps the reigning Broadway diva, Patti LuPone? What better way to inaugurate a new series of recordings of live cabaret shows that with that diva's performance? No better way, given the critical reaction to the LuPone show, no better way by a long shot. Fans will get their chance to hear the set on January 15^th when Broadway Records releases the debut disc in their "Live at 54 Below" series, Patti LuPone's Far Away Places..

From the moment LuPone opens her mouth, she has her audience in thrall. These are people, friends and fans, who know what she's selling and can't wait to buy. Their excitement is palpable and she feeds on it. It is an excitement that comes through even on the CD.

Wanderlust is the theme of the evening, as the singer takes the audience on a journey over water to far away places, interspersed with the kind of clever banter you've come to expect from a cabaret performer. While the clever jokes can get old with the repeated play the album is likely to generate, whether she is talking about her talent for accents or even her Sicilian heritage, they are certainly entertaining enough in the moment.

Still no one is going to buy the CD for the incidental comedy. The music is the thing, and the music can be 'fabulous.' She opens by setting the theme with "Gypsy in My Soul" and follows with a swinging jazzy take on Willie Nelson's "Night Life" in which she redundantly introduces herself and welcomes her audience. The first of four Kurt Weill tunes, "Bilbao Song" is next. According to the liner notes, LuPone was especially keen on performing Weill and her versions of "Bilbao" and later "Pirate Jenny” are among the evening's highlights. Somewhat surprisingly, she ends the show with "September Song" in spite of its opening lines.

Variety is the key to the set list. There as atmospheric, smoky "I Cover the Waterfront," a bluesy "Traveling Light," and a sprawling disco attack on the Bee Gee's "Nights on Broadway." There is a playfully cheeky version of "By the Sea," from Sweeny Todd and a dramatically stylish performance of Edith Piaf's "Hymn to Love." She does some jazzy phrasing on "I Wanna Be Around" before turning in a comic direction. Cole Porter's "Come to the Supermarket in Old Peking" takes her on a romp all over the musical world, ending in an homage to "New York, New York." A sweetly yearning treatment of the album's title song "Far Away Places" and an exotic version of Friedrich Hollaender's "Black Market" that will make you forget Marlene Dietrich round out the album.

Accompanying LuPone are Antony Geralis (accordion and keyboards), Larry Saltzman (guitar and banjo), Andy Stein (violin and saxophone) and Paul Pizzuti (drums and percussion). Music director and arranger Joseph Thalken plays piano and helps with vocals.

Music Review: Liza Minnelli - Live at the Winter Garden

This article was first published at Blogcritics

There are those performers, not all that many, who can take the stage all on their own with an orchestra and maybe a dancer or two and keep an audience enthralled for an evening.  Liza Minnelli is one of the few.  In January of 1974, after award winning successes on TV with Liza With a Z and on Broadway with Flora the Red Menace and Cabaret, Minnelli came to Broadway with a one woman show, Live at the Winter Garden, a show that sold out its month run in 36 hours, and has since become the stuff of legend. 

Listeners will soon have the opportunity to judge for themselves.  The show's recording long unavailable because of the inclusion of a medley from Cabaret which conflicted with the release of the show's sound track album will be available for digital download on April 3^rd from  www.MasterworksBroadway.com and more widely from retailers in May.  While there is clearly something of the live performance vibe lost in any recording, Liza Minnelli's magical touch with her audience is apparent. 

The repertoire is a mix of show tunes, standards, some specialty numbers written for the star by Kander and Ebb and a song or two that would have been contemporary back in '74.  And while Minnelli is the kind of singer who can take a "mouldy oldie" like "Shine on Harvest Moon" and make it her own, who can invest a novelty piece like "Exactly Like Me" with the power of her personality, she can be less at home with some of the more contemporary songs.  It's not that her pop performances are inadequate; it is simply that they don't quite rise to the level of her treatment of the music in her wheel house.  Songs like "I Can See Clearly Now" and "If You Could Read My Mind" are well done and even exciting, but they are not the singer at the top of her game.

Unquestionably the show tunes, the standards and the Charles Aznavour songs show off the singer at her best.  They are the highlights of the evening.  There is "A Quiet Thing" from Flora the Red Menace and of course the show stopping climax of "Cabaret."  It is not strange that she has a special connection with the music of Kander and Ebb, but there is also that same kind of connection with the dramatic eloquence of the Aznavour pieces, "And I in My Chair" and "There is a Time."  They give the star an opportunity to show her acting chops.   The Edith Piaf/ Fred Ebb composition "The Circle" stands out in much the same way.  "More than You Know" and "It Had to Be You" show what she can do with a standard, and "Shine on Harvest Moon" gets the audience standing.  This is Liza at her unmatchable best.

The new release features three previously unreleased encores not originally included in the song list for the show's Winter Garden run: Stevie Wonder's "You and I," "My Shining Hour," and the above mentioned "It Had to Be You."  Altogether, including the overture, the album has 17 tracks put together for the singer by Kander and Ebb.  The musical coordinator was Marvin Hamlisch. "The thing about doing a show like Liza is that every song means something," Minnelli explains. "Fred and John were so brilliant at building a show, plus I had Marvin, so we tried all kinds of different rundowns and finally came up with what you hear on the album, and thank God it worked! But you keep trying, and don't get satisfied with anything but the best."