Having freshly heard Linda Eder’s recording of “Man of La Mancha" ("I, Don Quixote"), I was highly anticipating her live show.  Although the show started promisingly as she revealed a strong, creamy-sounding voice in a perky “Blue Skies,” things started to go south as soon as the third number when an execrable tune from Shrek was offered up for her son. I hope he appreciated it.

A great liability to the whole endeavor was a sound system so bad that my guest muttered that the band resembled a Bar Mitzvah crew circa 1967.  Also unsettling, the random array of songs was presented with mechanistic over the top "arrangements”—most of them modulating with a sense-numbing symmetry.

Eder informed us several times how nervous she was to be singing in New York, how wearing a dress was not her style and how she would prefer to be riding her truck while shopping for sanding belts (to renovate her home).  This type of amateurish, eye-rolling-inducing patter further grated on my hardened New York City nerves.

The evergreen “Charade” (Johnny Mercer/ Henry Mancini) was offered up in a rushed “Latin” tempo, never allowing the lyric to breathe, with a couple of very short pseudo-jazz instrumental solos thrown in. Other selections included some Bee Gees, Beatles and most mercilessly, her ex-husband’s (Frank Wildhorn) musicals, Jekyll  and Hyde and the thankfully unproduced (in NYC) Camille Claudel—which actually sounds like something that would have vied with Max Bialystock’s (The Producers) choice of Springtime for Hitler  for the world’s worst musical.

Eder sounded a bit more centered in her country numbers, though she did fail to make a real connection to the scorchingly erotic lyric of “Son of a Preacher Man.”  She did belt it strongly and confidently as she seemed to finally put aside her nerves by the end of the evening.

Although the voice sounded young and fairly fresh, Eder was anxious to remind us that she was forty-eight years old and had been singing for years, leading me to believe that she was not in a position to further mature artistically.  She succeeded only if one’s idea of good singing is to start off relatively contained and singing exponentially louder till arriving at a thunderous climax of overly long-held notes.

She closed with a relativity simple rendering of the Elvis standard, “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You,” giving us a taste of what she could do if she were willing or able to scale down. Her website may be correct when it states, “Linda Eder possesses one of the greatest contemporary solo voices of our time,” but she is far from the only exceptional voice out there, and there are many others who use their talents to a higher purpose than this elephantine lounge act.

Melody Breyer-Grell
Cabaret Scenes
October 17, 2009
www.cabaretscenes.org