Nostalgia for the decade of tie-dye and draft cards, bongs and protest marches was in full display in That ‘60s Show…with mixed results. While nothing less than superb cabaret entertainers, the duo Tom Michael (at the microphone) and Beckie Menzie (at the piano) are superb cabaret performers, who seamlessly shared and traded vocal duties as they gave the rock, pop, and folk anthems of that seminal decade a cabaret makeover, polishing their rougher edges—from the Beatles to the Supremes—to a more conventional sheen.

This proved successful with the pop-accented tunes, revealing depths of feeling and storytelling in “I Know a Place”/”Downtown,” a controlled but heartfelt “The Shadow of Your Smile by Mr. Michael that avoided the sudsy, and an Everly Brothers medley that gave a slowed-down “Bye Bye Love an almost elegiac edge.

Still other songs proved resilient to musical airbrushing. “Eleanor Rigby”/”Get Back” started strong but veered off into the preachy, and their “The Times They Are A-Changin’, instead of raging at the status quo, became simply a full-voiced wrap-up on this most contentious of decades.

Ms. Menzie revisited “Me and Bobby McGee” accompanying herself with spare, bluesy piano, expressing the crushing disappointment of lost love in a series of crashing final chords. The duo also delivered a jazzy update of the Motown classic “The Way You Do the Things You Do” with a touch of vocalese and scat. They also delivered a very funny, if over-long, medley of pop hits with “Wedding Bell Blues” now about unpaid bills and “Good Morning Starshine” morphing into “Good Morning Starbucks.

Bob Barnett
Cabaret Scenes
August 29, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org