In her sexy, tulip-red, Marilyn Monroe-styled frock, veteran cabaret/jazz vocalist Mary Foster Conklin emerged, like a new bloom from the dark doldrums of winter, with a show devoted entirely to spring. In so doing, she lifted her own spirits as well as the spirits of a small but appreciative audience.

“This was a terrible winter,” she said, admitting that she needs the change of seasons to keep her own mood elevated. She got off to a good start by opening with a fresh and breezy arrangement of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “It Might As Well Be Spring.” She moved into one of several additional, somewhat obscure, spring celebration songs with Bill Evans’s “In April.” It has a particularly beautiful lyric by Roger Schore. This number had an exceptionally fine solo by jazz pianist and Musical Director Janice Friedman. Friedman possesses rock-solid jazz piano technique and provided strong and sensitive accompaniment throughout the set, ably joined by Marco Panascia on bass and Todd Isler on drums. They were equally tight and tasty when Conklin went in another direction on a succession of "wrist-slashing" spring ballads like “Spring Isn’t Spring Anymore” (M. Dennis/G. Dennis), the Tommy Wolf/Fran Landesman ode “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” and “A Wet Night (& a Dry Martini).” If you can sing any one of these three songs convincingly, you can sing most anything!

Despite a sense that she has experienced darker times in her life, regardless of the season, Conklin continues to exude a youthful glow and a comfortable acceptance of who she is, what she’s doing and why she’s doing it. We should all be so blessed!

Lynn DiMenna
Cabaret Scenes
April 21, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org