Any evening listening to Barbara Brussell at the microphone is an enchanted evening, and hearing her perform her vocal magic in her latest show was no exception.

Brussell was intense, wistful, plaintive, sexy or giddy, as the moment called for, in Out of the Mouths of Babes: Women Who Dared! at Tom Rolla’s Gardenia in West Hollywood — a re-creation of the show she introduced last fall at the Metropolitan Room in New York.

Brussell moved masterfully from the defiance of “Where Is It Written?” by Marilyn and Alan Bergman and Michel Legrand to the optimism of Dorothy Field’s “It’s Not Where You Start” to the touching sweetness of “It Amazes Me” by Carolyn Leigh and the complexity of “John Riley,” a traditional folksong once sung by Joan Baez.

Among several strong dramatic moments were Brussell’s reading of “Beware of Young Girls,” written by Dory Previn shortly after a young Mia Farrow stole husband Andre Previn away from her and “Putting Things Away,” the Amanda McBroom masterpiece about a woman putting the material things in her life neatly away while keeping her own dreams in check.

She even found room for some impressions during “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” moving effortlessly from Mae West to Marlene Dietrich to Bette Davis to Marilyn Monroe within a single chorus and adding a nod to Helen Kane, who introduced the song, with a “Boop-boop-a-doop” at the very end.

A newlywed for just a few months, Brussell achieved a particularly amusing transition when, after talking about her own high-school experimentation with another girl — “girls are much softer than men,” she said she realized — she immediately launched into the Carolyn Leigh-Cy Coleman song, “Real Live Girl.”

Todd Schroeder, in a black porkpie hat, provided unobtrusive piano accompaniment and occasional harmony.

While Brussell sounds the best she has in years when she’s singing, her between-songs patter, while obviously well-researched, is delivered in such a quirky, off-handed manner that it comes off almost as if she’s making it up on the spot — a situation that may make some audiences feel they are hearing something unique to that evening while causing others with less patience to squirm a bit for the artist.

But when she’s singing, none of that matters because Barbara Brussell is on very solid ground, and her enthusiasm and commitment to each piece of material warms the room.

Elliot Zwiebach
Cabaret Scenes
September 19, 2008
www.cabaretscenes.org