In my relatively brief experience as a cabaret show reviewer, I’ve found few things more exciting that witnessing a solid and entertaining debut—something that I’m guessing doesn’t happen often. Newcomer Lynly Forrest is the latest performer to make her mark on the cabaret scene with an impressive career launch through her show Paid in Full or what she called “songs and stories of our travels on the toll roads of life.”

And the Texas native has done a lot of traveling and had plenty of experiences. The petite, perky and attractive brunette with bangs down to her eyebrows admitted early in the show to holding 35 different jobs (in what has to be less than 20 years), but had only been fired from a few. “I keep having to tell people I’m not on the lam,” she joked after opening with Amy Grant’s country rocker “Curious Thing” (Grant/Wayne Kirpatrick), a song about how the vagaries of life can change someone’s destiny.

On “Curious Thing,” the Dixie Chicks recorded bouncy revenge song “Goodbye, Earl” (Dennis Linde), Sheena Easton’s performed “Who Knows” (Sally Dworsky/Scott Axiana Wilk) and Bobbie Gentry’s “Fancy,” Forrest reached into her Texas roots and proved she can deliver a countrified riff with the best of them. But she can also transition her pleasant alto to a more sophisticated ballad on a dime, following “Earl,” with a beautiful rendition of Craig Carnelia’s “Nothing Really Happened,” from the 1982 musical Is There Life After High School, which featured stirring bass work from Michael Blanco. Later, standing far stage left, a dramatically dimly lit Lynly turned Carly Simon’s “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be” (co-written with Jacob Brackman) into a soaring torch song thanks to a superb arrangement by her musical director and pianist Steven Ray Watkins.

With MAC-award winning director Lennie Watts guiding her way (coupled with her experience taking workshops at the Singers Forum Vocal Academy), Forrest exhibited a veteran performer’s ease and confidence on stage, with seamless script transitions between numbers. She even showed off her sense of humor through the hilarious “The Aida Song” (Chuck Coleman), about the deterioration of the love affair between the Ethiopian princess and the Egyptian commander Radames (I’m not a big fan of profanity in song lyrics, but Forrest makes the F-word adorable), and on “The Scream,” the Cheri Coons/Beckie Menzie tune about an obsessive collector of anything bearing the famous Edvard Munch expressionist painting.

Forrest held her own during the show’s difficult penultimate number, Watkins’s clever mash-up of “That’s Life” (Dean Kay/Kelly Gordon) with Kander and Ebb’s “But the World Goes ‘Round,” and ended the show on a beautiful and appropriate note—given the show’s “life travels” theme—with the Marilyn and Alan Bergman/Michel Legrand ballad “On My Way to You.”

“I took the long way to get here,” Lynly told the audience before beginning the finale, perhaps referring to the stage at Don’t Tell Mama, “but it’s where I was headed all along.” Now that she’s finally made it here, we should be seeing Ms. Forrest grace  cabaret stages for many years to come.

Stephen Hanks
Cabaret Scenes
November 8, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org