There are many songs with titles consisting of three little words. They include the romantic Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh’s “It Amazes Me,” the amusing, “I Said No” (Jule Styne/Frank Loesser), even the disillusioned “Down With Love” (Harold Arlen/E.Y. Harburg). At the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, Maude Maggart uses all the arrows in her artistic quiver to send messages of romance, amusement, sensuality, nostalgia and advice. All had three-little-word titles. This is merely a device, certainly, but an expedient way to deliver some impeccable, tried-and-true tunes in her own unique way. Maude Maggart makes the familiar intriguing, the exploration of love provocative and her show riveting.

Maggart has crafted her career with a grasp on the past.  She even changed her birth name of Amber McAfee Maggart to Maude Maggart, as old fashioned as an antimacassar, and one of her selections here, not surprisingly, is Kern and Mercer’s “I’m Old Fashioned.” In that vein, she sings Stephen Sondheim’s, “Love, I Hear,” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, articulating all the feelings of young love: “I pine, I blush, I squeak,” – complete with a Maggart squeak. She veers subtly from innocence to street-wise, sizzling with "Body and Soul" (Green, Heyman, Sour, Eyton) and has a grand time hamming up Tom Lehrer’s “The Masochism Tango.”

Maggart has a theatricality that builds throughout the show.  In Johnson and Coslow’s "My Old Flame," she puts her hand to her forehead, admitting, "I can't even think of his name." She moves around the piano and uses her hands and fingers as well as her light, quick vibrato voice to illuminate the spirit of her songs. John Boswell on piano accompanies her with sensitivity and elegance.

E. Y. Harburg said, “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.” Maude Maggart compels you to think and feel her songs in every show.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Cabaret Scenes
April 14, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org