Once the recession is over, bring back the shows with the intellectual challenges, the sturm und drung and the conversation about overcoming adversity. Right now, let’s just enjoy heaping helpings of fine music and great fun. This is precisely the right time for 3girls3’s high energy salute to the music of Barry Manilow—This One’s For You. The three girls in question are Gail Becker, Heather Moran, and MaryMonica Thomas.

Arrangements by musical director and accompanist George Howe are lively, rich and for the most part well executed by the attractive trio. Howe himself performs nicely in his own solo of “Beautiful Music” and adds another lower register layer of harmony to the ladies’ mix. Because Mary Monica Thomas is a dancer, physically simple moments in cabaret ballads have challenged her in the past. However, in “When October Goes” (for which Manilow was asked by Johnny Mercer’s widow to write music to a serendipitously discovered incomplete Mercer lyric), Thomas finds her interpretive home in Mercer’s spare, prosaic poem. She leads us on a meaningful, mature journey about a choice to stay connected with the past. Heather Moran brings to the table a stage (and offstage) personality that is all at once wide-eyed child and womanly woman. One moment she goofily explains to the audience how she forgot her slip, while in the next she takes us through tender longing in a beautifully sung “Weekend In New England.” While all the ladies sing nicely, Moran’s pipes are, well, remarkable. She can pull volume but not resonance way back to unfurl a ballad so it can resolve in a resonant crescendo of power and dramatic discovery. Unlike many singers with great chops, she doesn’t oversing; cabaret is arguably lyric driven and Moran wisely holds on to that. On the comedy side, her timing is solid and her delivery uninhibited. Gail Becker brings the right touch of understatement and balance to the trio.

This One’s For You is more staged and blocked than most traditional cabaret shows, which adds variety to the evening. But at times when the “girls” were relating to Mr. Howe at the piano, their positions forced their backs to the audience. Positioning the vocalists upstage around the piano might have allowed the audience to enjoy all the faces together.

The dialogue isn’t about Manilow’s lifestyle choices. Rather, each lady speaks briefly about her early connection to Manilow’s music. It’s a good choice and we relate more intimately to our hostesses as we understand each better.

The numbers are funny and fun, including the medley of Manilow’s now timeless commercial jingles (“You deserve a break today,” for example). The show’s climax is a riotously funny take on "Copacabana" staged à la the musical, Cabaret. Thomas, as our showgirl Lola, sang in a campy Deitrich accent and danced her ‘lil heart out while Becker and Moran became the harmonic chorus representing the jaded band from the nightclub scenes in Cabaret. When, reminiscent of Liza, Becker and Moran straddled the bar stools, the audience erupted in bigtime laughter. Hats off to the Skokie Theater for its grand menu of cabaret in which this performance is representative of its quality. Oh, "Mandy," this is one entertaining show.

Carla Gordon
Cabaret Scenes
March 4, 2009
www.cabaretscenes.org