Noël Coward said, “Star quality, I don’t know what it is, but I’ve got it.” Down in the depths of 54 Below, Patti LuPone showed what star quality is in her spectacular show, Far Away Places, officially christening Broadway’s new cabaret room.  Whatever it is, she’s got it and she knows it, and so did everyone else as soon as she stepped on stage singing “Gypsy in My Soul” (Clay A. Boland and Moe Jaffe).

John Lee Beatty designed 54 Below with the cosmopolitan ambiance of Maxim’s and a dash of kabarett coziness. It has the echo of a seductively tarnished past, a perfect setting for LuPone’s theatrical panache. Svelte and chic, she radiated confidence, her voice in top form, a golden trumpet, clear diction and a well-crafted song list focused on her love of travel through the years and around the world.  Far Away Places was put together with polish, its point of view steady with each witty anecdote leading to just the right song, and her acting prowess well honed.  Working the stage, she recalled a trip to Sicily, where her roots run deep, and hilariously delivered Johnny Mercer and Sadie Vimmerstedt’s “I Wanna Be Around,” a woman’s deadpan revenge, Sicilian-style, for a guy who done her wrong.  On the other hand, her pensive “September Song” (Kurt Weill/Maxwell Anderson) was poignant, but never approached maudlin.  She opened Cole Porter’s “Come to the Market in Old Peking” as a suggestively friendly invitation and ended in a dizzying rap blowout. With sharp timing, she relished the humor in “I Regret Everything” (Bill Burnett and Marguerite Sarlin) and mined the building tragedy of “Hymn to Love,” Edith Piaf and Marguerite Monnot's homage to Marcel Cerdan, the great love of Piaf’s life.

Notable was a segment with Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Ah, the Sea is Blue” and the fierce “Pirate Jenny,” “I Cover the Waterfront” (Johnny Green/Edward Heyman), and Stephen Sondheim’s “By the Sea” (Sweeney Todd). As her encore, she included David Yazbek’s “Invisible,” her lament in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and a show-stopping finale, “As Long As He Needs Me” by Lionel Bart for Olive!

LuPone acknowledged her long link to cabaret.  During the run of her breakthrough show, Evita, she would dash down to the club, Les Mouches, for some late-night cabaret singing. Reminiscing about those early New York days of Times Square before Disneyfication (“It was fabulous!”) and the disco heyday, she described the era with the spare simplicity of Willie Nelson’s “Nightlife.” She followed with a crowd-pleaser, Weill/Brecht’s sinuously sly, “Bilbao” and later showed she still had the moves to the disco beat of the Bee Gees’ “Nights on Broadway.”

Conceived and directed by Scott Wittman with arrangements by pianist Joseph Thalken, the musicians— Antony Geralis on accordion and keyboards, drummer Paul Pizzuti, Larry Saltzman with guitar and banjo, and Andy Stein on violin and saxophone—were all dapper in black tie, a swanky touch. More important, of course, was their music, delivering evocative sounds of pre-WWII Weimar, 1970’s New York, jazz and big band.

Far Away Places had plenty of peaks and, for me, no valleys. Maybe someday I will think of another cabaret show as close to perfection as this one, but today, none comes close.

Ms. LuPone’s engagement has been extended through June 23.

Elizabeth Ahlfors
Cabaret Scenes
June 12, 2012
www.cabaretscenes.org