There are so many Betty Buckleys – the Broadway diva, the serious jazz singer, the conceptual recording artist, the rock chick – that when going to one of her shows or listening to one of her CDs, one never knows quite what to expect.  Luckily the audience that showed up to Quintessence: An Evening with Betty Buckley and Kenny Werner for the Kennedy Center’s Barbara Cook’s Spotlight series got Betty Buckley the storyteller.

Buckley gave fierce interpretations of classics of her repertoire like “Meadowlark” as well as new material such as the Alison Krause song “Ghost in This House.”  Variety in the program spanned from Gershwin (“They Can’t Take That Away From Me”) to Jobim (a particularly fluid medley of “Dindi” and “How Insensitive”) to Dylan “(The Times They are a Changin’”).

Unifying it all was Buckley’s great skill as an actress.  She subtly layers character details into her work that give her portrayals nuance and depth.  She mines more quirky humor from “With One Look” than I would have thought possible and her version of “Unchained Melody” had a uniquely compelling feel of a woman intensely dealing with a lover in a specific situation.  The story she told preceding “Meadowlark” felt so fresh and spontaneous that anyone who hadn’t seen her Donmar Warehouse DVD would had to believe that she was making it up on the spot.

While Buckley’s voice inevitably isn’t what it once was, she deploys it strategically and produces thrilling effects as appropriate.  The 19-year collaboration between Buckley and music director Kenny Werner shows in the seamlessness of their work together.

In another story, when talking about the path that led her to attend Texas Christian University rather than Berkeley, Buckley explained, “I wanted to be Janis Joplin.  My Mother wanted me to be Julie Andrews.”  Fortunately, she became the performer we saw tonight.

Michael Miyazaki
Cabaret Scenes
October 3, 2008
www.cabaretscenes.org