Let's say right off, it doesn't get much better than this.

Give him a melody, a lyric, and a piano, and Eric Comstock will bring you a solid song – he always chooses solid songs – with fresh, intriguing panache. His elegant wife and symbiotic partner, Barbara Fasano, looks cool and sings warm. Her power is in her interpretations and she is turning up the heat in every show. One example in Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams, is Fasano's impassioned "Younger Than Springtime" (Rodgers and Hammerstein), defining the visceral exhilaration war-weary Lt. Cable feels when he first makes love with his star-crossed lover, Liat in South Pacific.

The title song suggests this show's purpose – "Just remember that sunshine/Always follows the rain." Fasano and Comstock are savvy people who know the score. Comstock's dry irony always emerges at just the right moment to puncture any veering toward excess. Announcing an upcoming "relentless medley of optimism, including that master of optimism, Stephen Sondheim," he delivers a bright, immaculately phrased, "Who Cares" (Gershwins), paired with "You're Gonna Love Tomorrow" (Sondheim). Unlike the play, Follies, Comstock and Fasano do not escort this tune down a path of disintegration.

We expect the best (often less familiar) songs from Comstock and Fasano. Rather than choosing the well-known Depression anthem of the disenfranchised, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?," Comstock steps in front of the piano to sing "Brother, Where Are You?," Oscar Brown, Jr.'s lament of a child's loss and abandonment. Fasano continues with the woman's take of the story, "My Forgotten Man" (Warren and Dubin). Comstock's affecting rendition of "Song of Bernadette" (Cohen/Warner/Elliott) is softened by Fasano's, "Sunny Side of the Street" (McHugh/Fields), delivering comfort for Bernadette's collective guilt.

"Use Your Imagination" (Cole Porter) opens the show with Fasano's careful phrasing and Comstock's soft piano support and Sean Smith's confident bass. Nick and Charles Kenny's "Gone Fishin'" is a bluesy confab of just hanging loose. Comstock's piano chords in Berlin's "Let's Face the Music and Dance" conjures up Fred and Ginger whirling over a sleek dance floor to a song that says a lot more about life than dancing. One high point has Fasano, perched next to Comstock on the piano bench, singing, "Just a Little Bit More" (Schwartz/Fields). She conjures up an image of a young girl in the '30s, sitting on a city stoop and dreaming about something better, not much more, just a little bit.

Without brushing the edges of melodrama, Comstock and Fasano celebrate the great tradition of American songs avoiding longwinded narrations, just a pungent comment and they sing the song. Fasano's recollection of the joys she felt as a teenager driving to the beach in her new blue, convertible Camaro leads into her rendition of Paul Simon's "America," where she takes us on a traveler's cross-country bus travels, conveying his emptiness through her vocal nuance. Michael Barbieri casts allusive lighting for the songs.

This "Couple of Swells" make it look easy but Comstock and Fasano's Wrap You Troubles in Dreams is a cabaret chef d'oeuvre for troubled times.

Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams continues 3/7-8 & 3/13-15.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Cabaret Scenes
March 3, 2009
www.cabaretscenes.org