Eileen Fulton has a history, and her Metropolitan Room show made no secret of it: Fulton’s been featured on TV’s As The World Turns for forty-nine years.  Drawing on her lifetime of acting, Fulton’s cabaret creation was more a series of dramatic sketches accompanied by singing than a singer’s showcase. Vocalizing was not Eileen Fulton’s strong point, and one suspects that she knows it, but her love of the genre, of singing, of communicating with live people instead of a camera, puts her adrenalin in overdrive. Her singing ambitions often outreach her achievements, but she’s a trouper and her audience ate it up.

Fulton took on an unusual range of subjects with her songs, converting each one into a mini-theater piece.  Monologues served as patter and segue, always accompanied by Musical Director Bob Goldstone’s low-key vamping.  “Knock, Knock, Who’s There?” was treated almost as earnestly as “Fever,” where she combined her actor’s intensity with a closing lampoon of Pocahontas imploring her dad to spare her lover.

With all that acting ability, Fulton ably shifted emotional gears like an Indy 500 driver.  How many performers would end their show with the dead serious Weill/Blitzstein “Pirate Jenny,” followed by Brel’s “You’re Not Alone,” and “Carousel,” and then encore, to cheers, with “Say That We’re Sweethearts Again" ("I never knew that our romance had ended until you poisoned my food")?

Colleen Zenk Pinter (she’s the much-married Barbara Ryan on As the World Turns), joined Fulton for a guest turn and a nicely-done duo of “I Remember It Well.”  Bob Goldstone’s arrangements were right on target throughout the show, and Tom Hubbard’s bass and Ron Tierno on drums were his effective allies in supporting the patter and the dramatic turns.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
May 5, 2009
www.cabaretscenes.org