Listening to Sally Champlin sing is something wonderful.

"Something Wonderful” also happened to be the best song in her set. Lovely enough in its own right, the Rodgers & Hammerstein ballad from The King and I becomes, in Champlin’s presentation, a song with a gentle bossa nova beat that pulls it out of the show’s context and updates it, as Champlin noted. The altered approach worked extremely well, even for musical purists who don’t like it when a singer strays too far from a song’s original melody; Champlin simply shifted the beat and delivered on an arrangement she worked out with Lanny Hartley.

The other absolute highlight of the show was Tom Waits’s “Kentucky Avenue,” about as far away from Siam and Rodgers & Hammerstein as one can get — a poignant tour de force about one friend proposing a series of dangerous and devilish pranks to another friend who has his own problems to cope with — problems that do not become clear to the listener till very late in the song. The song audibly moved the audience as well as the singer.

When Champlin is at the mic, an audience is seeing a real pro at work.  If she isn’t singing, she’s riffing on the melody, or humming, or jutting out her jaw or using her hands expressively to advance the performance. Despite more than twenty years away from doing cabaret, Champlin is always in top form, whether doing a jazzed-up version of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” (also R&H) — which she described as her “Blossom Dearie moment,” a bluesy take on Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” or a bouncy version of “Time After Time” (Jule Styne/Sammy Cahn).

She also surprised us with a German language version of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (Harry Warren/Johnny Mercer), called “Zwischen,” and a gorgeous version in Spanish of “Cucurucucu Paloma” (Tomas Mendez).

Champlin was more than ably supported by Todd Schroeder on piano, particularly during an instrumental section of “The Nearness of You” (Hoagy Carmichael/Ned Washington), when Schroeder produced a beautiful waterfall sound effect during a solo.

Elliot Zwiebach
Cabaret Scenes
April 29, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org