Get ready, New York, because Stephanie Burkett Gerson has just moved to your wonderful town, and she’s got the goods to shake up cabaret and Broadway stages, as she demonstrated in her final Southern California performance before moving East.

She opened with a very strong, wide-ranging version of “Life of the Party” (Andrew Lippa, from The Wild Party) that built and built some more, which proved to be her pattern throughout the show. Her second song, “I Love a Piano” (Irving Berlin), started as a ballad and upped the tempo ever so gently, building to a powerful finish that showed off her very legitimate voice — a soaring soprano combined with a powerful belt — most effectively, followed by what she called her audition song — “Astonishing” (Mindi Dickstein/Jason Howland from Little Women), which also rose to a powerful climax that demonstrated the full range of her spectacular voice. And she can act, too, on top of the rest, as she demonstrated in “Get Out and Stay Out” (Dolly Parton, from 9 to 5: The Musical).

One of the evening’s highlights was the beautiful “Anytime”(“I Am There”) (William Finn, from Elegies: A Song Cycle) — a song about watching out for all living things, which Gerson dedicated to her parents.  Later, with apologies to her parents, she sang the down-and-dirty “A Call from the Vatican” (Maury Yeston, from Nine) — recreating a part she has performed in regional theater, with every sexual and sensuous gyration intact, which brought the house down.

She invited her husband, Zane Gerson, on stage, along with her college chum, Cassandra Murphy, and together with pianist and Musical Director Allen Everman they performed “Eyes Quartet” — a haunting mingling of “In His Eyes” (Frank Wildhorn/Leslie Bricusse, from Jekyll & Hyde) and “Lily’s Eyes” (Marsha Norman/Lucy Simon, from The Secret Garden) in glorious four-part harmony.

Gerson was backed throughout the show by an effective musical ensemble that consisted of Everman on piano, David Lamoureux on drums, Jordan Lamoureux on bass and Jeff Jansen on electric guitar.

With plans to move to New York four days after the show, Gerson ended with “A Change in Me” (Tim Rice/Alan Menken from Beauty and the Beast) — accompanied softly by Jansen on acoustic guitar — which she described as “a good moving-on song.”

Rather than acknowledge the source of each song in her patter, Gerson employed a large screen at one side of the stage that projected a Playbill or CD cover with each song title and the songwriters’ names — a very effective device. The screen also served as a surface on which to show videos of Gerson singing as a young girl and photos from various stages of her professional career — a technique that worked well with a crowd of family, friends and other well-wishers, but may be less conducive in other venues.

The show doubled as a CD party at which Gerson released her first recording, Once Upon a Time.

Elliot Zwiebach
Cabaret Scenes
April 10, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org