In an old documentary on Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, there’s some footage from around 1949 where Rodgers is at the piano—at what looks like a dinner party. Mary Martin, who had just been cast as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, is standing in the crook and launches into “A Wonderful Guy,” belting the final “wonderful guyyyyy!” in a rousing crescendo. A beaming Rodgers looks at Martin and says, “And don’t you ever sing it any other way.” Considering Rodgers and Hammerstein later cast Martin as their Maria in The Sound of Music, it was clear the songwriting giants had found the female voice they felt best expressed their songs.

That must be the way Joe Iconis and Robert Maddock feel about Lorinda Lisitza, who recently bowled over the audience at Urban Stages singing a collection of their quirky character-based songs in a revival of Triumphant Baby, the show that earned Lisitza the 2007 New York Nightlife Award for Cabaret Musical Comedy. When you see and hear Lisitza combine her superb vocal skills and comedic instincts with her obvious acting chops (she has been wonderful as a French hooker in readings of the musical revue Café Puttanesca) to deliver this portion of the Iconis/Maddock songbook, you wonder if the songwriting team could ever imagine anyone singing these tunes quite as well.

According to Lorinda, some want to try. Bette Midler has considered making the bouncy, Kander and Ebb-ish “Just As Long As You and I Are in Cahoots” a number for her Las Vegas show, and Dolly Parton is interested in the plaintive “Sing, Love and Be” (written for the writers’ musical Plastic). Maddock wrote the country-esque “Almost (99-I Love-You’s)” for Crystal Gayle and the pop-sounding “Yes or No” for Madonna. But it’s difficult to imagine even those great entertainers turning such songs into pieces of character acting the way Lisitza can.

With the bearing of an opera diva, but the soul of a down-to-earth chanteuse, Lisitza delivers a song cycle about lovable losers who in some way, shape or form might emerge triumphant in the end—at least we’re rooting for them because it’s Lorinda inhabiting their characters. In “One Step Closer to Crazy,” a song Iconis and Maddock wrote specifically for their singing muse, Lisitza assumes the look of a ditzy, almost mad, homeless woman you might find panhandling in a New York subway car.

In “Eddie Got a Color TV,” she’s a trailer park wife. In the countrified “Camden County Penitentiary” (a song that could win a country music award), she’s a desperate woman waiting for her man who’s gone to prison for a zillion years. In the dramatic ballad “The Kind That Falls,” she’s Peg Entwistle, the young actress who in 1932 committed suicide at twenty-four by jumping off the Hollywood sign. When Lorinda as Peg sings, “If I can’t be a rising star, I’ll be the one that falls,” she delivers it as an overly dramatic opera aria and it works. Her signature song may well be “Yolanda at the Bottom of the Stairs,” sung from the point of view of a vengeful Eastern European female getting even with a love rival.

After the hair-raisingly comedic and Irish jig-like “Matilda McDort: A Hairstyle on Trial,” Lorinda soars on “Sing, Love and Be,” where she croons, “Make sure everyone knows what it is that you sing,” a message not only to every cabaret singer, but to anyone who needs to express passion in life.

Speaking of passion, during the Urban Stages show, composer Iconis pounded the piano on his up-tempo numbers with an intensity that didn’t deflect attention from Lisitza or her backup singers Tanya Hall and Liz Lark Brown. Triumphant Baby is as original and a solid a thirteen-song cabaret show as you’ll ever hear, featuring music and lyrics that are highly intelligent, fun and accessible at the same time. Iconis and Maddock will no doubt one day be strutting their stuff in a big Broadway musical and it will be little surprise if Lorinda Lisitza is on stage as their Mary Martin.

Stephen Hanks
Cabaret Scenes
December 11, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org