There’s a new cabaret supper club in downtown New York that, with luck, may become a regular fixture. An impressively decorated boîte downstairs at the long-established City Hall Restaurant, the Granite Room’s small stage, its polished wood bar and stone walls evoke thoughts of upscale basement speakeasies where black-tied gents and their ladies sought late night pleasures and forbidden drinks. Except that the elegant surroundings are a more recent refurbishing, it might even have been one, since the building housing it has been there since 1863.

Inaugurating the room as a new showplace, KT Sullivan created a program appropriately nostalgic, with songs first sung in the nineteenth century to some as modern as 1929.  Sullivan’s musical sleight of hand, her ability to shift from opera to ballads to comic material and do it effortlessly always is one of KT’s impressive attributes.  A surprising aspect of the hour-plus show was the enduring familiarity of Sullivan’s oft century-old songs. Her opener and title song, “(East Side, West Side) the Sidewalks of New York,” was from 1894.  “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” “A Bicycle Built for Two,” and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” all were popular before the turn of the century in 1900.

A consummate performer, Sullivan traversed the room as she sang, usually without a microphone and keeping her audience virtually transfixed as she ran through a song list of more than four dozen numbers, albeit some offered only as tidbits.  Only modesty might have kept her from introducing the show’s highlight with “You won’t get anything like this elsewhere, folks,” as she launched a medley of twenty-nine numbers, all from the year 1929. “29 from 29,” she called it.  Once again, it was startling to realize that so many still-popular tunes were celebrating an eightieth birthday.  “Singin’ in the Rain,” “You Do Something to Me,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “More Than You Know,“ “(There’s Gonna Be a) Great Day” and two dozen others.

Jon Weber, Sullivan’s proficient accompanist, kept things moving at a measured pace as he shifted mood and style to suit the songs.  In a delightful dividend for the audience, Weber, a highly regarded musician and recording artist in his own right, played during the dinner preceding the show.

If this inaugural show is a bellwether of what’s to come, Kathleen Downey’s Granite Room will be a grand addition to New York’s cabaret and nightlife scene.  KT Sullivan and Weber continue this show there each Thursday through September 10^th.  It’s a blast. Don’t miss it.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
August 20, 2009
www.cabaretscenes.org