Despite the fact that she has appeared in numerous films, TV and Broadway shows over a career that started as the Ivory Snow baby some 45 years ago and that she has been to Feinstein’s many times as an audience member supporting other performers. After all this, Brooke Shields overcame her own fear of performing in such an intimate setting by jumping in, at a top tier venue no less, to the oft-times, terrifying world of cabaret and supper club performing.

She surrounded herself with an A+ support team with director Mark Waldrop, Musical Director Charlie Alterman and sidemen from the recently closed Broadway hit, Next to Normal. With star quality and intelligence to spare, she passed Cabaret 101 with flying colors and with plenty of time left to earn her Masters in the art form "summa cum laude"!

Though her voice might not be the strongest of all her attributes, her nearly flawless face, figure and feminine charm were all on full display. Smart as a whip, the Princeton grad immediately engaged her audience with a particularly well-chosen song list that she delivered with a combination of warmth, spontaneity and confident exuberance.

She was clearly most comfortable with the songs from the Broadway shows in which she’s appeared. They included two songs from Bernstein, Comden & Green’s Wonderful Town, “100 Ways to Lose a Man” and “Swing,” “Me and My Baby” from Chicago and “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret.

But it was a new ballad by Marcy Heisler and Zina Goldrich, called “After All,” from their upcoming Broadway show, Ever After, that gave us a clue into the heart of a woman who has grown up, matured and become a successful performer, wife and mother in spite of the unrelenting public scrutiny her celebrated good looks have afforded her. That she lost her concentration and welled up twice while singing this poignant lyric about a mother’s love only served to endear her even more to an already smitten audience.

Giving credit where credit is due, Shields paid tribute to her mother, Teri, who has been somewhat maligned over the years as an overly ambitious "stage mother." In her show, the “dutiful” daughter suggested, with a twinkle in those gorgeous brown eyes, that we not read too much into the lyric of the song "Queen Bee" from Barbra Streisand's A Star Is Born. She inmplied that, although their relationship has always been complicated, and presently, impacted by the onset of dementia, her deep affection for and devotion to her mother remains remarkably solid.

Lynn DiMenna
Cabaret Scenes
February 1, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org