Ah, the beauty of cabaret!  The genre is a wide net that snares a potpourri of talent and types for the intimate venues. Sandy Bainum has taken a staple of off-Broadway theaters, the one-woman monologue, and with the astute collaboration of her musical director and accompanist, Lanny Myers, has crafted a thoroughly entertaining one-woman musical theater piece.

It may be politically incorrect to admire a performer just because she looks the part, but when the lean and lovely Bainum arrived on stage in a pink gown and pearls to the strains of George Gershwin and Desmond Carter’s “I’d Rather Charleston,” declaring “It was me, Dorothy Parker,” she convincingly was the ’twenties flapper she was about to play.  Assuming the persona of her subject, the celebrated writer, poet, quipster and wit Dorothy Parker, Bainum interwove an hour-plus of biographical banter, song and story.

True-to-the-period selections by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Noël Coward and others were interspersed with eight songs written by Lanny Myers using Dorothy Parker’s poems as lyrics. I’ve long said that poetry doesn’t make workable lyrics, but I may have to admit that six-time Emmy winner Myers (or Dorothy Parker herself) proved me wrong.  Myers’ music for Parker’s now-lyrics was a congenial pairing.  One truly ne plus ultra moment was Bainum defiantly confronting the audience to deliver one of Myers’ song creations as a dyed-in-the-wool rap number.

Other high spots in Bainum’s performance recapturing the essence of the seeming world-weary but worldly-wise raconteur, included Irving Berlin’s “After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It,” and Rodgers and Hart’s “He Was Too Good to Me.”  Most everyone in the audience remembered two of Parker’s most famous lines:  “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,” and the somewhat more risqué “I like to have a Martini, two at the very most; After three, I'm under the table, and four I'm under the host!"

Bainum and her musical cohorts, Myers and bassist Jay Leonhart, created a very pleasing and quite absorbing visit with Dorothy Parker, her writings, and the tunes of her era.  Catch them if you can.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
June 14, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org