I love seeing actors do cabaret, and not just because I’m an actor myself. I love it because it gives the performer a chance to step out of the constraints imposed on him or her by casting directors and the rolls of the genetic dice that determined his or her appearance and voice quality. At its best, a cabaret act allows you to see the full range of an actor’s talent. That assumes, of course, that the actor in question is ready to take that leap of faith and work beyond his or her usual range. Shana Farr does not appear ready to take that leap yet. So, while Pure Imagination was unquestionably a very intelligently crafted, beautifully sung and highly entertaining show, it stayed well within what would seem to be Ms. Farr’s comic operetta comfort zone. The stakes, to paraphrase singer-director Lina Koutrakos, needed to be raised to move the show from the level of “very good” to “great”.

That said, for a first show by a young, classically trained artist, “very good” is – well – very good. The song selection, to begin with, was very smart and included several numbers I hadn’t heard before – always a positive sign. The program leaned heavily on songs that were funny and that showcased Ms. Farr’s impressive technique; the Dick Scanlan/Jeanine Tesori collaboration “The Girl in 14-G,” for example, did both. Her performance was a tour de force.

The logical flow of the evening was excellent.  A case in point: Ms. Farr has a parallel career as independent jewelry designer; one of her creations was given away as a door prize at the end of the evening, in fact. She used comments on her experience selling baubles, bangles and beads to men with flexible ethics to take us from Gershwin and Weill’s “My Ship” to Francesca Blumenthal’s “The Lies of Handsome Men” and thence to something I’d never heard on a cabaret stage before: a James Bond film medley. It was ingenious and funny, even if it did treat some of the songs (particularly “Diamonds Are Forever”) with a little less respect than I think they deserve. Still, how can you not like the use of a kazoo as a stand-in for the braying trumpet in “Goldfinger”?

Ms. Farr did have a tendency to slip over the line from acting to indicating – not uncommon in performers with classical and operatic backgrounds, in my experience – which sometimes brought me out of the moment in her ballads. But, even then, her performances were so solid that I was willing to let it pass. Besides, some of the decisions she made in those ballads were quite persuasive and unexpected.  Her “My Favorite Things,” for example, began in the darkness of someone trying to overcome sadness and fear by thinking of those favorite things, moving only gradually into the light. It was an insightful choice and very effective.

For her St. Louis appearance, Ms. Farr employed the talents of local musicians Amada Kirkpatrick (performing Steven Ray Watkins’s original arrangements, presumably) on piano and Jay Hungerford on acoustic bass. They played well together and it would have been nice to hear more from them – they had only very brief solo breaks – but, given what was probably a fairly tight rehearsal schedule, that probably wouldn’t have been realistic.

The bottom line is that Pure Imagination was a very strong and persuasive first effort by a very talented young performer from whom we should expect to hear great things. The sparkle of her jewelry designs was matched by the flash of her performance; between the two of them, she would appear to have a shining career path ahead of her. For more information on both of her careers, visit her web site: shanafarr.com.

Chuck Lavazzi
Cabaret Scenes
April 17, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org