Appropriately opening her show with a poem by Dorothy Parker, a wit the likes of which we may never see again, Andrea Marcovicci appears at her most accessible and high-spirited, singing torch songs both sad and comic to great effect in her wonderfully researched show. Her oft-stagey affectations remain in check, the banter most witty and the song selection intelligent. Marcovicci can still woo an audience with her wit and charm, educating gently a new era of listeners as well as reminding the old of a great musical past.

In Blue Champagne, she focuses on the early period of female vocalists who sang what were called “sullen sex hymns” and “misery chanting” by columnist Walter Winchell. She spins gold on Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s acerbic “Mr. Right,” faring well on comic material sans her shaky operatic lilt. A song performed by Bette Davis (yes, Bette) in Two’s Company, “Just Like a Man” (Vernon Duke and Ogden Nash) and the wonderful Irene Franklin (lyrics) “My Husband’s First Wife” (music by Jerome Kern) are mined for all their humor, bite and decidedly feminine viewpoint.

Marcovicci, always an actress, turns each ballad into a miniature drama, inhabiting the character and breathing life into the lyric. Irving Berlin’s “Say It Isn’t So” is deeply emotional and her rendition of Libby Holman’s hit, “Body and Soul,” is stunning. The show highlights torch singers Helen Morgan (“Why Was I Born?”) and the great Ruth Etting (“Love Me or Leave Me”), but brings it up to the current era with Francesca Blumenthal’s witty “Lies of Handsome Men,” written in 1986.

Steve Murray
Cabaret Scenes
July 19, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org