In a repeat performance, Alison Fraser and Mary Testa celebrated the music of Rusty Magee, Fraser’s late husband, to a sold-out crowd. Rusty, born Benjamin Rush Magee, was a composer and lyricist whose musical The Green Heart, written with Charles Busch, was staged by the Manhattan Theatre Club. Rusty also won the New York Outer Critics’ Circle James Fleetwood Award for Moliere’s Scapin in 1993. He was a prolific composer, arranger and musical director, writing everything from rock to a children’s Christmas opera Flurry Tale. He died at the age of 47 in 2003 after a battle with cancer.

The loving chemistry between Fraser and Testa, as they hold hands, permeates the stage in this celebration of life, love, sadness, disappointments and renewal as they open with “Perfect Kind of Love.” Mary Testa, even when serious, still has that “I can be trouble” twinkle that we’ve come to love as we recall her most recent Broadway performance as Melpomene and Medusa in Xanadu. Alison Fraser is direct and filled with endless emotion, aglow in the music of her late husband. She is currently wowing audiences on Broadway as Tessie Tura in Gypsy!

“New York Romance,” a romance of the street, desperate and full of lies, is filled with soulful insights about relationships and is only one of several of Magee's songs that express the inner depths of human frailty. “The Green Heart” conveys the ‘fragile feeling locked inside a heart that hasn’t had a chance to grow.’ “Why Am I Gettin’ Too Old” explores the disappointment with life’s natural evolution, albeit with a bit of fun. “The Balance of Power,” (in Island rhythm) written with Lewis Black for The Czar of Rock and Roll, is an ode to the absurdity of politics. Magee surely had a style of conveying with music the varying genres of life.

Dubbed the Queen of Rock n’ Roll, guest Annie Goldin, almost causes a riot with Don’t You Go and Get Famous, as Fraser and Testa supply back-up harmonies, to the cheering crowd. Set to poetry were encores “High Flight” (Testa) and the beautiful Walt Whitman’s “Thanks in Old Age” dubbed “Sweet Appreciation” (Fraser), a fitting close to an evening of heart.

Magee will forever be a part of musical history, remembered with the new Rusty Magee Archives at Brown University, his alma mater. On piano, Allison Leyton Brown; guitar Bernd Shoenhart; bass Doug Largent; drums Russ Meisner.

Sandi Durell
Cabaret Scenes
October 20, 2008
www.cabaretscenes.org