It’s not often that a performer lives up to his hype. In the case of Joe Stilgoe, however, the hype was almost not enthusiastic enough.

He’s the son of Richard Stilgoe, the brilliant British comic and musician who wrote the lyrics to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express and collaborated with Charles Hart on the lyrics to Phantom of the Opera. With his impressive pedigree, it does appear that the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Joe had the unenviable task of making his New York debut at Feinstein’s late show, following Linda Eder and Michael Feinstein who performed to an almost full house. By the time Stilgoe took the stage, the room’s energy seemed quite deflated. But that was before he started to play! Once he began, the room, literally, lit up!

He opened with a rapid-fire, nimble-fingered, leg-stomping “Take the A Train” and, within seconds, he had his audience sitting up and listening with rapt attention. His looks are boyishly handsome with a chiseled face and perfectly cleft chin (think George Clooney). He has a sly, Cheshire Cat grin that he uses often when delivering seemingly spontaneous banter. His varied song list included several original songs: “We Should Kiss”; “(That’s the Way It Crumbles) Cookies Wise”; and his closer, “Nothing Could Be Finer.” Each could easily find their way onto a page in the Great American Songbook.

His virtuosity at the piano (he started playing at five), his imaginative arrangements (including all kinds of creative musical quotes, comments and surprise sound effects) and his incredible rock and roll-style energy all worked to enhance his keen understanding of what each song, original or standard, was all about. Those nimble fingers and flexible vocal chords of his just seemed to take him wherever he wanted to go.

In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” for example, he varied the tempos effectively, starting the song with a solid swing feel, “popping” his cheek, stamping his feet and rhythmically tapping the microphone and the piano itself. He ended the song slowly, quietly and beautifully, elongating and illuminating every word, and making the song very much his own.

"Like father, like son," but displaying his own brilliant musical dexterity and creativity, the younger Stilgoe took song requests from the audience and wove them together musically into an instrumental tour de force that was as memorable as it was mind-boggling! He explained that, after years of performing on cruise ships, humorously calling them “floating tanks of misery,” the experience gave him the opportunity to polish his skills and master a formidable repertoire of standards. He’s virtually unstumpable!

He’s also inherited his father’s quick wit and love of word play. In Rodgers and Hart’s “I Wish I Were in Love Again,“ while singing his favorite rhyming couplets in the phrase “when love congeals, it soon reveals the faint aroma of performing seals, the doublecrossing of a pair of heels” he used his expressive eyes, à la Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms, to full comedic advantage.

And speaking of “eyes,” that would be my one and only quibble. He needs to keep them open more, despite all that must be going on in his lightning sharp brain, so that he doesn’t lose the audience connection that he so comfortably establishes at the outset.

All hype aside, however, he is every bit the musical marvel that his last name might suggest. You’d do well to remember it since, I trust, you’ll be hearing a lot more from Joe Stilgoe in the future.

Lynn DiMenna
Cabaret Scenes
September 14, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org