In addition to a great voice and commanding stage presence, it takes guts to take on one of the members of the singing pantheon. Whether it’s Jolson, Crosby, Garland, Sinatra, Streisand or Elvis, a performer must have supreme confidence so that approaching the entertainment edge won’t send him or her over the cliff.

Nat King Cole is one of those vocal elite: a singer who possessed such a unique and singular style that paying tribute in a cabaret show is fraught with peril. You must capture the entertainer’s essence while eluding the pitfalls of impersonation or mimicry.

In his recent show at Urban Stages (as part of the non-profit theater’s Musical Legends Tribute series), the veteran cabaret and nightclub singer Cleve Douglass brilliantly delivered 17 songs in a way that not only conjured Cole’s distinctive delivery, but also put his own interpretive stamp on the Cole classics.

With a large black and white photo of Nat perched on an unused piano behind him, Douglass wasn’t the least bit intimidated having the specter of the great singing stylist observing his take on the Cole songbook. Supporting Douglass throughout was his own version of a Nat Cole Trio—Musical Director Tony Romano on guitar, Steve LaSpina on bass, and Matt Kane on percussion—which provided the smooth jazz groove that was an intimate departure from those familiar 1950s and ’60s studio recording arrangements and allowed Douglass’s scat improvisations to serve as a vocal keyboard.

As with many cabaret tribute shows, one of the performer’s biggest challenges is in selecting a story-lined set out of a huge song catalog, but going with the jazzy arrangements helped make Douglass’s decisions for him. He banged out a medley right out of the box with “Unforgettable,” “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” “Sweet Lorraine” and “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons.” While Douglass’s middle and lower range isn’t as deep and rich as was Cole’s, he had Nat’s delicious diction down pat. The audience definitely got a kick out of “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” which featured the band on a mid-song jazz riff before Cleve’s song-ending scat improv.

While Douglass and director Lee Summers resisted turning the show into a Nat Cole biography, Cleve did reveal that his subject never regarded himself as a great singer, that Cole was the first to use a guitar in a piano-based trio, and how Nat’s 1956-57 NBC TV variety show—the first ever hosted by an African-American—couldn’t get a national advertising sponsor. Cleve’s between-songs patter wasn’t always as smooth and confident as his singing, but it was brief and unobtrusive.

The two highlights of the set book ended a ballad medley of “Mona Lisa,” “Tenderly” and “Smile.” Douglass and his terrific trio’s take on “Nature Boy” didn’t just remind one of the song’s haunting aura, but reinvented it as a dissonant jazz number, including a bebop underscoring, an “I Am the Walrus”-sounding bass from LaSpina, and a funky guitar break from Romano, which accompanied yet another Douglass scat session.

Douglass and Romano then teamed up after the ballad medley with a riveting rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” (written when he was just 16), and lush was the operative word for this interpretation. Although Cleve offered four more numbers, the show could have ended right there and nobody in the audience would have been disappointed. While this reviewer was hoping to hear one particular Cole classic that didn’t make the cut, the performance was still filled with “Stardust.”

Stephen Hanks
Cabaret Scenes
March 5, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org