Bebe Neuwirth’s Stories with Piano #3 is mature, clear-eyed, and performed by an artist at the top of her interpretive powers.  Her voice may waver a bit, but each song was given its due, becoming a little one-act play that she expressed with her entire body, eyes, arms, hips.  With her Musical Director/pianist Scott Cady providing intimately detailed accompaniment, she explored love and loss, never weighing down her versions with histrionic gimmicks.

Herman Hupfeld’s iconic “As Time Goes By,” verse and all, was all gentle musing.  Kander & Ebb’s “Ring Them Bells,” stripped of some of its ethnic coloring, was amusing, nonetheless.  She did several Kurt Weill numbers, including the classic “Bilbao Song” and “Surabaya Johnny,” both written with Brecht (English translation by Michael Feingold), and “Susan’s Dream” with Lerner.  All three were about dreams gone sour, whether it was passionate love or domestic bliss eroded by reality, and Neuwirth was moving in three different ways.

Novelty came in the form of ”The Coffee Song” (Bob Hilliard/Dick Miles), “One Hundred Ways to Lose a Man” (Bernstein/Comden & Green), and Sondheim’s marvelously dirty “I Never Do Anything Twice,” all list songs, the first a maracas-shaking ditty about coffee in Brazil, the second a humorously self-critical number in which the lady explains why she can’t keep a man, and the last about naughty sex.  She had fun with all three, particularly the Sondheim. Sondheim was also represented by “Another Hundred People,” which Neuwirth handled fiercely with no twenty-something wonderment.  Similarly, she stripped Kander & Ebb’s “But the World Goes ‘Round” of anything but world weariness.

Standing in her beautiful, glittery, black strapless dress—a chic, slender figure—her final song, “I’ll Be Seeing You” (Irving Kahal & Sammy Fain), had both hope and an ineffable longing.

Joel Benjamin
Cabaret Scenes
November 19, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org