MUSIC REVIEW
This Bowl of Cherries Offers Food for Thought
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Christine Ebersole is performing a show of standards and newer songs at the Café Carlyle.
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: January 12, 2011
A sneak attack: that’s what you might call the moment in Christine Ebersole’s brilliant new show at the Café Carlyle when the merriment pauses, and she delivers a riveting dramatic performance of “Another Winter in a Summer Town.” With music by Scott Frankel and lyrics by Michael Korie, the song is a crushing moment of self-awareness and an acknowledgment of personal defeat by Little Edie Beale, whom Ms. Ebersole portrayed in the Broadway musical “Grey Gardens.”
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Recalling the glamour of long-ago debutante days that still seem more real than the present, Edie, now middle aged, acknowledges, “My season ended a long time ago/But no one took the party tent down.” At Ms. Ebersole’s opening-night performance on Tuesday the song was attached to “Drift Away,” a lesser-known number from “Grey Gardens” that further deepened what might be described as an aching Proustian reverie of happier times gone by. The audience response was thunderous.
Although Ms. Ebersole’s emotional raid seemed to come out of nowhere, it was actually a carefully prepared moment of truth in a show whose songs and witty patter are about youth and age and Hollywood illusions. “Another Winter in a Summer Town” was immediately preceded by a truncated, lighthearted rendition of “When the World Was Young” that omitted the grown-up side of this summing-up reflection by a world-weary celebrity.
With her gifted director Scott Wittman, Ms. Ebersole seems to share a telepathic kinship in which multiple personalities reveal themselves as one number segues into another. Her musical director and pianist, John Oddo, leading a quartet that included Charles Pillow on reeds, David Finck on bass, and Jim Saporito on drums, contrived light, sophisticated pop-jazz arrangements that underlined her screwball charm without straining to be cute.
In her frisky mode Ms. Ebersole suggests a blond, rosy-cheeked child, the ideal playmate of your youth when you rummaged through a trunk on a rainy afternoon and dressed up as pirates and princesses. Ms. Ebersole’s zany childlike side was epitomized by a version of “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” from “The Wizard of Oz,” its adult counterpart by a hilarious Sophie Tucker number, “You Can’t Deep Freeze a Red Hot Mama.” (And why can’t you? “You can’t get her temperature down.”)
With several distinct voices in her arsenal of characters, there is something of the ventriloquist about Ms. Ebersole. One of them that pops in every show is a fluttery, trilling Jeanette MacDonald-like ingénue whom Ms. Ebersole simultaneously adores and spoofs. Behind that persona is a dramatic soprano who is not playing charades.
Just when you were recovering from the first sneak attack came a second, in which Ms. Ebersole belted the deceptively chirpy DeSylva-Brown-Henderson tune “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” as a credo, emphasizing its observation:
The sweet things in life
To you were just loaned,
So how can you lose
What you’ve never owned?
By the time the show ended with “Young at Heart,” Proustian melancholy had morphed into the euphoria encapsulated by the wise DeSylva-Brown-Henderson catchphrase that is hard to live by, as easy as it sounds: “Live and laugh at it all.”
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