Colleen McHugh’s show, Prêt-à-Porter: Cole Porter’s French Connection, concentrates on the French-connected portion of the Porter songbook, or, as McHugh put it, “You’ll realize on the drive home that the title works on so many levels.” McHugh, dressed in silver lamé (as a “glamorous robot” as she put it), is a sassy, brassy presence, with warm humor and incredible musicality.

The theme of the evening allowed McHugh to focus on a delightful slice of the Porter repertoire and yet have a great variety of moods: joyous on “C’est Magnifique”; pensive on “Do I Love You?”; explosive on “Find Me a Primitive Man”; or heart-wrenching on “When Love Comes to Call.” And her version of “Can-Can” was a textbook lesson on how to build the performance of a multi-verse patter song. The Tedd Firth arrangements brought amazing freshness to chestnuts (or are they marrons glacés?) such as “Let’s Misbehave,” “Night and Day,” and “I Love Paris,” and he and bassist Adam Neely combined with McHugh for a musical seamlessness.

A danger of a themed show like this is that it can easily feel like a lecture, but McHugh leavened the proceedings with her own feelings about Paris and Porter in a way that was charming and totally captivating. For her encore, she told a story about singing at a friend’s wedding in France and re-created her after-party performance of “True Love” with such tender spirit that it transported us to an auberge an ocean away.

Michael Miyazaki
Cabaret Scenes
July 30, 20110
www.cabaretscenes.org