Performers have come to cabaret from many of the performing arts: Broadway theater, television, film, concerts and recordings. Each form offers a performer another dimension, another skill, another style to help keep an audience rapt and entertained. As Christine Ebersole sings through her current engagement at the Café Carlyle, it’s clear that she brings it all and shares it all, offering one of the most delightful and unobtrusively professional shows of the season.

Christine is many people at once, and her show reflects it. Tall, slim, her blonde hair piled atop her head, dressed in comfortably elegant style, she is a combination of both the musical performing star she is and the suburban mother she also is—and whom she brings alive briefly in her performance. Once she starts singing in her clear soprano, it’s difficult to pull your attention from her as she moves through diverse moods: sentimental (Hammerstein/Kern’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” the Gershwins’ “I’ve Got a Crush on You”); bubbly (McHugh/Fields’ “On the Sunny Side of the Street”); moving (a medley of Noël Coward’s sweet “Matelot” and “Come the Wild, Wild Weather”); a zesty Rodgers/Hart piece, “Give It Back to the Indians”); a transporting rendition of a traditional Irish ballad (“The Last Rose of Summer”). Her singing is rooted in simplicity, true to the music and the stories of the songs, yet with her own bubbling-under-the-surface good spirits.

Further, Christine offers the gift of minimum talk and maximum music, albeit with a brief, amusing chat about her family life that serves as a neatly placed change of programming pace.

Rich music backup comes from John Oddo, Musical Director and pianist; David Finck, bass; David Ratajczak, drums, and the versatile David Mann on reeds. This engagement runs through February 20, 2010.

Peter Haas
Cabaret Scenes
February 3, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org