Jerome Elliott is hot.  Bringing the warmth of his hometown of Palm Springs to a cold, rainy night in Hollywood, he filled an ample stage that contained only a piano and a microphone with the power of his voice and the pleasance of his personality.

An eclectic mix of songs coalesced into a compelling portrait of selected moments from Elliott’s life. This included a particularly strong and moving tribute to his parents, “Honey” and Doris Moskowitz: a beautiful performance of “I Cannot Hear the City” (Craig Carnelia/Marvin Hamlisch), sung in a full, lush baritone — which seemed to move the audience so powerfully that there was a long pause after the song ended before the applause began — followed by “What You’d Call a Dream” (Carnelia), in a dramatic rendering that gave full justice to the metaphor about striving to please a parent through baseball. Combined with two preceding songs by Jacques Brel — “Jackie,” about the way the person in the song would like to be, and “Marieke,” about loving the home one has left, sung in both English and Dutch (both translations by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman) — the four-song sequence demonstrated the deep emotional range Elliott is able to convey.

The show wasn’t all high drama, however, as Elliott showed off his lighter side with a very expressive “Feather in My Shoe” (David Baker/Will Holt) and a self-revelatory “The Masochism Tango (Tom Lehrer).

Making his Los Angeles cabaret debut, Elliott opened the show with “Gotta Have Me Go with You” (Harold Arlen/Ira Gershwin), followed by “Coachella Valley Blues” (Elliott/Tim Bruneau), a tribute to his adopted home of Palm Springs, “[where] it may be hot/But honey/It’s only a dry heat.”

Elliott showed off his deep timbre on a nicely nuanced “You Go to My Head” (J. Fred Coots/Haven Gillespie), which featured a strong instrumental interlude by pianist and Musical Director Charles Creasy. A discussion of various anti-depression medications led Elliott into a well articulated “White Rabbit” (Grace Slick).

Elliot Zwiebach
Cabaret Scenes
February 17, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org