Nancy Stearns’s light voice might not make it through the auditions at the Metropolitan Opera, but that’s okay with me because she’s a personable charmer, and in the intimate surroundings of a cabaret room, she delivered an enjoyable hour of music and entertainment.  She nailed the lyrics of the songs she sang as if she were the writer and wanted to be certain you understood exactly what the number was all about.  And if there was any doubt about just what that might be, all you had to do is watch her.  She’s got as mobile a face as a mime, and the body language to match.

The song list lived up to the show’s title.  In the midst of the dismal spring New York suffered, Stearns claimed the idea for the show came to her when she heard James Taylor’s “Summer’s Here.”  More to the point, perhaps, was her inclusion of Fran Landesman and Tommy Wolf’s “Nice Weather for Ducks,” although “On the Sunny Side of the Street” was also on the bill.  Weather long has been a popular subject, and Stearns dipped into the songbooks of Noël Coward, Irving Berlin and Daryl Sherman, as well as Tom Jones and Duke Ellington, for relevant tunes.

The two highlights of Stearns’s very pleasant show were a rib-tickling “Christmas in New York,” by Francesca Blumenthal, and a sensitive and effective rendition of Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927.” Newman’s impassioned lyric  “Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline…,” written to commemorate that catastrophic weather, resonated three quarters of a century later with Hurricane, Katrina, and yet again with the current headlines of flooding in the Midwest.

Gregory Toroian on piano and David Finck on bass supported their vocalist well.   In return, Stearns frequently stepped back to allow them the opportunity of instrumental breaks.  Helen Baldassare directed.  J-P Perreaux, the “artist in the booth” as Stearns described him, was technical director.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
April 28, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org