When you appreciate a cabaret performance, you just applaud. You know how to applaud, dontcha folks?  . . . You just spread your hands apart and clap.

Maureen Taylor should be roundly applauded for taking on an interesting challenge as the theme of her most recent show at the Metropolitan Room—a tribute to the iconic and still thriving Lauren Bacall. It was inspired self-casting. As a singer (and a former opera one at that), Taylor certainly has the vocal chops to deliver nine Bacall songs from her films and musicals. As a performer, Taylor possesses the lean, classy Bacall bearing, complete with the high cheekbones. And as a Bacall admirer, Taylor brought a fan’s passion to the project. But as a musically tight and artistically engaging cabaret show, Too Marvelous! just wasn’t marvelous enough.

Taylor’s challenge (with her director Jay Rogers) was structuring a show around the musical history and life story of a film and theater legend who is more a charismatic performer and personality than a great vocalist. Bacall may have done more singing in films and musicals than most people remember, but the totality of her songbook doesn’t make for a compelling cabaret set list. Taylor and Rogers compensated by adding songs either connected to a Bacall vehicle (like “Sex and the Single Girl”) or that represented aspects of her personal story (“An Affair to Remember”). For the most part, the songs were cleverly placed within the mix of chronological events in Bacall’s life, but the solid structure wasn’t enough to overcome the show’s major flaws—too much script, not enough singing and too few interesting songs.

Even Bogie would have done a double take when Taylor took the stage in a very stylish and Bacall-ish white jacket (designed by Anthony Manfredonia), featuring a large trench coat-like collar and deep lapel that created a sexy, plunging neckline effect. Taylor launched the show appropriately with “A Remarkable Woman,” from the 1981 Bacall film The Fan, before announcing she would be “celebrating what I find fascinating about Lauren Bacall.”  The early Bacall career chronology began with Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael’s “How Little We Know” (from Bogart and Bacall’s first film together, 1944’s To Have and Have Not) and segued into “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine” (Stan Kenton/Charles Lawrence/Joe Greene) used in The Big Sleep. After Taylor offered a cute original lyric about her own affinity for Bogie (“C’mon and Bogart me, just like you did Bacall”), and before “Bold Fisherman” (the song Bogart sang in The African Queen), Taylor launched into almost enough information about her subject’s famous Hollywood marriage to fill a Wikipedia entry.

On “Bold Fisherman,” Taylor brought in her Musical Director/pianist John DiPinto and drummer Terese Genecco to play Bogie and Bing Crosby, respectively, in their attempt to re-create a fun and priceless spot from a 1952 Crosby radio show. Then the band, including bass player Mark Schmeid, provided backing vocals on “Conga!” from Wonderful Town (Leonard Bernstein/Betty Comden/Adolph Green), the 1971 revival in which Bacall starred. Both numbers were fun, but slight, and seemed to serve as just a break from the ballad-heavy set. Taylor’s lovely soprano sounded delightful on “I May Be Wrong (But, I Think You’re Wonderful!)” (Henry Sullivan/Harry Ruskin and sung by Doris Day in the 1950 film Young Man with a Horn), but she inexplicably interrupted herself to go all E! Hollywood Story with an anecdote about Kirk Douglas (who starred with Bacall in the film).

It seemed that whenever a song or the show itself was building momentum, Taylor brought the musicality to a halt with more narrative, as if a director was screaming “Cut!” There was more patter (about Bogie’s passing) to set up the rationale for singing Frank Loesser’s “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year,” which wasn’t in a Bacall vehicle. Taylor’s rendition of the ballad was moving, but delivering it as a duet with DiPinto (presumably as Bogie), and singing it facing her pianist rather than towards the audience, detracted from the song’s intensely personal and emotional power.

The rousing “Welcome to the Theater” (Lee Adams/Charles Strouse) from Applause (which earned Bacall a Tony Award) seemed to signify the start of Act II, and Taylor’s interpretation was strong and commanding. Yet, here again, and then on a beautiful rendition of “Sometimes a Day Goes By” (John Kander/Fred Ebb) from Woman of the Year, she decided to either reel off Bacall’s theater résumé or offer a riff about her marriage to Jason Robards, Jr. just as the songs were building steam. Taylor was lively on “But Alive” (Applause), jaunty on “I Wrote the Book” and “One of the Boys” (both from Women of the Year), and achingly poignant on “An Affair to Remember” (another Bogie tribute), which she sang in French to signify Bacall’s work in France.

Taylor mounted the piano for the forgettable “Hearts and Diamonds” (The Fan), a ballad not as well-suited to the singer’s higher range as it was for Bacall’s deep, smoky alto. Taylor faced the same range issue with “Something Greater” (Applause), but overcame that with her emotional, heartfelt interpretation. The finale, “Too Marvelous for Words” (Johnny Mercer/Richard Whiting), the love theme used in the 1947 Bogart-Bacall film Dark Passage (and, ironically, also song by Doris Day in Young Man with a Horn), brought Taylor’s touching homage to her heroine full circle.

Taylor has some reassessing to do if she wants her Bacall tribute to have legs as a cabaret show (it might actually work better as a biographical one-woman theater piece), but she can take heart in one of “Betty” Bacall’s many great quotes: “You don’t always win your battles, but it’s good to know you fought.”

Stephen Hanks
Cabaret Scenes
December 18 , 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org