The November 2017 issue of Cry Me A Torch Song – The Video Version. Piers Ford reviews albums from Janie Dee (Janie Dee at the BBC: “A set which keeps you guessing all the time”); Meredith Braun (When Love is Gone: “A narrative arc traced with an absorbing mixture of classic pop and theatre songs”); Sophia Marshall (Bye Bye: The influence of Americana is clear but Marshall is no pale imitator”), and Jude Adams (This Girl This Woman: “The life-affirming result of a pile-up of influences from a voice that commands attention”).
The April 2017 issue of Cry Me A Torch Song – The Video Version. Piers Ford reviews albums from Betty Buckley (Story Songs: “Adventurous in her song choices and fearless in her commitment to them”), Sound of the Sirens (For All Our Sins: “A wonderfully cohesive, mature sound which will hold its own on the global stage”), Anna Coogan (The Lonely Cry of Space & Time: “Yma Sumac meets Americana… a sweeping, arresting exploration of the state of the world”), Patricia Kaas (Patricia Kaas: “Polished, expertly crafted chansons, full of complex, subtle emotions”), and catches up with Songs of Separation (“A celebration of the female voice, but also a resonant, bold statement for our times”).
Welcome to the December 2017 issue of Cry Me A Torch Song – The Video Version. Piers Ford reviews albums from Katie Melua (In Winter: “Real moments of choral beauty”), Ange Hardy & Lukas Drinkwater (Findings: “Exemplary musicianship”) and Joan Ellison (Symphonic Gershwin: “She doesn’t just blow off the dust – she gets inside the raw material and inhabits it”)
There’s no Sondheim on Ghostlight but in the absence of more current video content, here’s a blast of “Children Will Listen”
Ghostlight: Betty Buckley’s atmospheric new album is effortlessly majestic
I wonder if I was the only one whose heart sunk just a little with the release of Barbra Streisand’s commercially fail-proof duets album. Not because there would be any doubt about the quality – which is as clinically polished and pitch-perfect as we’d expect – but because this great, great artist is treading such predictable water at a time when other mature singers are forging ahead into new territory.
Cue – and all hail – Ghostlight, the shimmering, moody new album from Texas’s finest, Betty Buckley, which sounds positively experimental in comparison. There has always been a freedom in Buckley’s song choices that, while paying glancing obeisance to her status as a Broadway leading lady, suggests an independence and elegant wilfulness.
She has never been a conventional belter, and in this eclectic selection of standards, torchy ballads and soft rock and country songs, she takes some of the most familiar lyrics in the American songbook to darker, outlying terrain – exposing them to the ghostlight of the title and stripping them back to a kind of minimalist perfection. She is joined in her quest by producer T Bone Burnett, a life-long friend, who is responsible for the album’s stark, spacey beauty.
Looking back to a review I wrote of her 1993 record Children Will Listen for The Gramophone Good Musicals CD Guide, I note my remark that Buckley is “Refreshingly unafraid to try something different… [her] voice is unusual – husky and intense – often falling away almost to a murmur…” I would change little about those observations today, beyond adding that the years have simply brought greater depth and resonance to her interpretations.
She never forces the issue – as these beautiful versions of “Body and Soul”, Bewitched” and “This Nearly Was Mine” aver, pressing all the right emotional buttons without ever going over the top. Heartbreak is only a note away. “Lazy Afternoon” takes on an extraordinary air of mystery, hinting that anything could materialise out of the haze.
But the most interesting tracks fall in the album’s second half. There’s a sublime take on the Jefferson Airplane number “Comin’ Back to Me”, with its exquisite string arrangement, a poignant “Take it With Me When I Go”, and an honest, lyrical reading of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “When Time Stands Still”. Effortlessly majestic.
Dance me to the End of Love: just one of Carrick’s clever song choices
Let’s Fly: Mary Carrick’s voice is reminiscent of great torch singers from the past
You don’t hear too many voices like Mary Carrick’s in popular music these days, beyond the boundaries of operetta or traditional musical theatre. Her clear, mellifluous soprano might not quite have the resonance of, say, Audra McDonald’s, but it is pleasingly elegant and molten – and all the more refreshing for its lyrical clarity in an age when diction in singing doesn’t always seem to be a priority.
In her technique, Carrick harks back to the intimate, low-key drama of the great Helen Morgan and her sister torch singers of the 1920s and 1930s.
At first glance, Let’s Fly looks like another album of standards. And in a crowded market, your instinctive response is to ask, what’s different about this one? The answer lies in Carrick’s clever song choices.
The old-school standards – “Come Rain or Come Shine”, a mash-up of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning”, and Cole Porter’s “So in Love” are deftly handled to be sure, but they are mainly the cornerstones of a record which celebrates more contemporary song-writing talents. And the contrast is fascinating.
The album opens with the delicious fatalism of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Time”, and takes in Jason Robert Brown (“Stars and the Moon”) and Stephen Schwartz (the sublime “Meadowlark”) – all holding their own alongside the masters of the American songbook.
Carrick really nails her singing colours to the mast at the heart of the set with two numbers. The first, an impassioned take on Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” confirms that wistful ballad as one of the great pop songs of the 20th century. The second, a sizzling interpretation of Barry Manilow’s “Man Wanted”, is a reminder that he, too, is one of the finest songwriters of our time.
The final number, an echoing, sweeping version of Craig Carnelia’s “Flight” is a moving and inspirational note on which to end.
It takes a singer with Carrick’s vision and a passion for story-telling to weave songs like this into compelling and unexpected combinations. And she succeeds with the help of a fine band – three of whom, pianists J.Gawf, Todd Brooks and Eric Andries, also take credit for the pristine arrangements.
Mack the Knife: Shulman and Zalkind whip up a little vortex of menace
Lost in the Stars: standards for grownups
Lost in the Stars is a classy little jewel of an album. It takes a couple of listens for the sheer quality and uncluttered lustre of Deborah Shulman’s vocals to take hold, so understated and subtle are they. But once they have you in their thrall, they yield refined treasure.
The album is based on songs from a trinity of musical theatre composers – Weill, Bernstein and Sondheim – who need no further introduction. The delight is in the ease with which Shulman teases out nuances and revelations from numbers that you might think you know inside out.
There’s an eerie, unsettling version of “Mack the Knife”, for example, which sweeps you up into a little vortex of menace, light years from the bravado that most singers ladle on. And if “The Ladies Who Lunch” replaces the traditional self-scorning attack with a more observational, modulated treatment, it’s certainly a fresh approach to some of Sondheim’s most visceral lyrics. That clarity extends to “Children will Listen”, a lilting “I Feel Pretty” and an assured, stark and mournful “Losing My Mind”.
Shulman’s restraint pays such dividends that it almost seems a shame not to hear how she might handle “My Ship”, here an elegant instrumental solo for her brother-in-law, the trombonist Larry Zalkind, whose contribution to the album is equally fascinating. He leads an accomplished band of accompanists who provide Shulman with some intriguing counter harmonies to work against. The texture they bring to the gently swinging “September Song” and the washed-up, after-hours blues of “Ain’t got no Tears Left” is sublime. Serious without once sounding earnest or worthy, this is an album of standards for grownups.
After a short interview, Tracie Bennett sings “Just in Time” on the Paul O’Grady Show
Tracie Bennett Sings Judy: never a mere impersonation
She might have missed out on an Olivier Award – and surely it was by the narrowest of margins – for her performance as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow, but Tracie Bennett’s insightful and committed interpretation of the role will be her calling card for years to come.
Her six-month sell-out season at the Whitehall Studios will soon be followed by a UK tour and then, early in 2012, a US run in Minneapolis – on the doorstep of Garland’s birthplace in Grand Rapids – with Broadway the ultimate goal.
In truth, it’s Bennett’s Garland, rather than the play itself, which has generated this momentum. Her Judy, plummeting headlong into an emotional vortex, repels and compels in equal measure, a fascinating study of a legend in rapid decline. And then there are the songs, each embodying in some way the unique spell that Garland held over her audience, even when it was tainted by the lurid voyeurism that too often featured in her late performances.
In the role, Bennett’s portrayal of the Garland concert persona – the twitches, the hair tugging, the restless strutting, that flicking of the microphone lead – is an extraordinary dramatic feat. And her vocal performance, an uncannily accurate blend of Garland’s trademark tics, the on-the-edge tremolo and smudged consonants, goes way beyond mere impersonation.
All of which makes the cast album – for that’s what Tracie Bennett Sings Judy: Songs From End of the Rainbow and Other Garland Classics essentially is – an interesting prospect: are we listening to Tracie or Judy?
Bennett obviously has serious vocal gifts of her own, but they are necessarily subjugated to the role in a way that doesn’t usually impact so specifically on a leading lady’s singing performance. Without its dramatic context, it would have been all too easy for the album to dwindle into mimicry, serving neither the artist nor her subject.
Happily, this is never the case. Co-producers Chris Egan and Gareth Valentine have lovingly created an authentic, contemporary, brassy sound that supports Bennett’s throaty timbre – the key to her approximation of the Garland voice – and allows her to showcase the essential emotional highpoints of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “The Man That Got Away” without ever tipping into parody or sound-alike karaoke.
The handful of songs from the show are joined by a selection from the legendary Carnegie Hall concert – the reference for many of Egan’s arrangements – and the title song from Garland’s last film, I Could Go On Singing. There are also cracking versions of “When the Sun Comes Out”, “Come Rain or Come Shine” and Chaplin’s evergreen, “Smile”.
At times, the similarity with the real thing is breath taking. Bennett is ever respectful of the legend. But there are also occasional moments when she takes off on a little riff – or in “The Trolley Song”, a chuckle – that reminds you this is a dramatic interpretation rather than an imitation.
Helena Blackman sings “If I Loved You” live at The Kings Theatre, Portsmouth
Helena Blackman: pretty in pink and commanding of voice
Helena Blackman might have been the runner-up in the BBC’s 2005 quest to find a Maria for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s revival of The Sound of Music. But as her debut album, The Sound of Rodgers & Hammerstein, reveals, she was never going to settle for perennial bridesmaid status.
The diversity of Blackman’s CV since her television talent show days is telling, and suggests that coming first is far from everything. Connie Fisher was such a quintessential Maria that she was the only possible winner – and consequently seems destined to play the role on the road forever. Similarly, it’s hard to see I’d Do Anything winner Jodie Prenger playing anything other than variations on her hearty Nancy, while runner-up Jessie Buckley has, like Blackman, developed a potentially stellar career as a singer and actor based on the breadth and variety of her talents.
That said, I must confess that I approached The Sound of Rodgers & Hammerstein with somewhat muted enthusiasm, simply because there are more than half a century’s worth of similar anthologies out there. Do we really need another one?
Well yes, it turns out that we do. Blackman’s producers, Neil Eckersley and Paul Spicer, and conductor Mike Dixon, have treated her to a substantial orchestra – much bigger than you’ll find in the average West End pit today. And yet the playing of Richard Rodgers’ soaring melodies is so restrained and sympathetic that the songs emerge as chamber pieces, clear and nuanced, with Blackman in commanding form as she traces their underlying emotional content with obvious pleasure, as if she’s discovering treasure in each line.
With a pure soprano voice that would easily straddle the divide between operetta and musical theatre, she’s something of a throwback to a golden age of pre-pop performers who knew all about lyrical interpretation and melodic lines.
At the same time, and supported here by some sharp, pared down arrangements, she’s quite capable of giving a refreshing twist to familiar material without resorting to contemporary vocal gimmicks. “What’s the Use of Wondrin’?” becomes an unexpectedly modern, gentle piece of introspection, for example, and the wistful “Love Look Away” is beautifully reinvented as a stately ballad, delivered with controlled power.
If the track list contains no real surprises, the real delight is to hear Hammerstein’s words and phrases delivered with such crystal eloquence. There are duets with Jonathan Ansell (“I Have Dreamed”) and Daniel Boys (a profoundly romantic “People Will Say We’re in Love”). The album is book-ended by numbers from The Sound of Music,“I Have Confidence” and that ripe, wise old anthem, “Climb Every Mountain” – perhaps not an obvious choice for a singer whose voice rings with youthful clarity but it’s an unbeatable show stopper to end on and Blackman proves herself more than equal to the task.
In between, other highlights include characterful stalwarts like “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of my Hair”, “Some Enchanted Evening” and a splendid “The Gentleman is a Dope”.
A trailer full of plaudits for Tracie Bennett – with a tantalising snippet of “Over the Rainbow”
Tracie Bennett: inhabits the role of Judy Garland with assurance and commitment
Two triumphant aspects dominate End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s play-with -music that explores Judy Garland’s turbulent season at London’s Talk of the Town in 1968, months before her death, whose run at the Trafalgar Studios has been extended to April.
The first is Tracie Bennett’s visceral, committed performance as the brittle icon nearing the end of a tether already frayed to breaking point. Bennett inhabits the role with tremendous assurance, layering the multiple nuances between fragile hope and bleak despair with such brilliance that you leave the theatre exhilarated and exhausted in equal measure.
She leads a two-hour guided tour of the ravaged landscape of Garland’s pharmaceutically ravaged psyche, veering from brazen diva-dom to wretched neediness via a clawing desperation, without resorting to a single gimmick or clichéd gesture. And that’s just the acting.
When the back wall of William Dudley’s fantastically evocative set – an expensively vulgar, late 1960s Ritzy hotel suite – rises to reveal the band, it becomes the Talk of the Town stage. And Bennett is also revealed as a superb singer, conjuring the throaty Garland vibrato with such uncanny accuracy that at the height of many of the numbers, it’s easy to forget that you’re watching a play about a long-dead show business superstar.
In this, she is helped immeasurably by Terry Johnson’s meticulous direction and the musical supervision of Gareth Valentine, who discretely helms the band while Garland’s conductor and accompanist Anthony (a nice turn by Hilton McRae, his sympathy for the fading star ebbing torturously away as she becomes ever more unreasonable) effects control on stage.
Using Chris Egan’s sympathetic arrangements with flair, Valentine whips up the authentic sense of a Talk of the Town band of the time, its slightly desperate bounce and verve signifying the authentic struggle for attention over the clatter of cutlery, the chatter of the audience and constant popping of champagne corks – and the battle to keep pace with the capricious demands of the volatile performer they were obliged to serve.
The play is peppered with a selection of Garland classics: “The Trolley Song” and “Come Rain or Come Shine” are typically frantic moments for the band, while “The Man That Got Away”, the inevitable “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the defiant “By Myself” give Bennett the chance to extend her performance into the stratosphere. Despite the bang-on-target timbre, at no point is this ever an impersonation or a tribute. You won’t find a more complete dramatic interpretation anywhere on the West End stage.
Judy Garland in her final months: a problem subject for playrights
All of which helps to disguise some weaker moments in the play itself. Garland herself is a huge part of the problem. The histrionics, the unstable behaviour, the drink and the drugs, are all so well known that there is nothing new to say about them. Genuine revelations about Garland’s plight are well nigh impossible, and the play’s point occasionally becomes muddled. A previous attempt by Terry Wale in 1986 to dramatise her life (Judy at the Strand Theatre) stumbled in the same way, although it featured an equally compelling and award-winning performance by Lesley Mackie in the title role.
Peter Quilter’s decision to focus on such a specific moment towards the end of Garland’s life, making it a metaphor for all her trials, might have been more effectively served by a monologue in the Piaf mould.
The characters of Anthony – a kind of everyman figure who represents kindness, reason and ultimately, abandonment (most of Garland’s friends necessarily chose self-preservation in the end) – and Mickey Deans, her fifth husband, who was with Garland at the end, are rarely more than ciphers for Garland to fence with. And in the end, she was mainly fencing with herself. Deans, in particular, remains a shadowy character whose influence on Garland as her talent and life drained away could take more scrutiny than End of the Rainbow allows. So, too, could her relationship with her audience – by this stage in her career frequently combative and abrasive, with an unhealthy dash of sadism on both sides.
But if the play isn’t always quite the thing, Tracie Bennett certainly is. Her performance alone is worth the price of a plane ticket and a hotel in town. And with an album of songs from the show in the pipeline, this role places her fairly and squarely on the top rung of musical and dramatic stage actors. Whether you are a Garland fan or not, catch her while you can.
Montage from last year’s Broadway production of Sondheim on Sondheim
The following review also appears in the current issue of The Sondheim Society’s magazine. A London production of the show is anticipated for 2011.
Sondheim on Sondheim: a welcome new approach to revues based on the Broadway composer's work
Does Stephen Sondheim really play pinball on his Mac when the muse doesn’t show up? The sound effects during one of the recorded asides that punctuate “God”, a witty, self-deprecatory number written specially for Sondheim on Sondheim certainly suggest it. I hope it’s true because if he relies on the odd bit of displacement activity – and a vodka shot or two – to get his writing gear working, it would make the rest of us see all the hours we spend procrastinating, dawdling and daydreaming in a much more positive light.
Such revelations pepper the revue, which arrived on Broadway to coincide with Sondheim’s 80th birthday celebrations last April and has been preserved in a two-disk original cast recording that artfully balances entertainment with documentary. And in many ways, they are among the bravest and most revelatory comments he has ever publicly made about himself as a human being and a working artist.
There is an intimacy about his observations that is far more profound than anything Jude Kelly managed to extract, for example, during their interview at the Royal Festival Hall in October. This alone makes for a listening experience that, while completely different from seeing the production at first hand, is compelling –and often touching – in its own right.
On stage, Sondheim’s narration was conveyed through specially filmed interview footage presented on numerous flat-panel screens so that he became a fully integrated character, acknowledged by the performers who could interact with him at several key moments. In a purely aural medium, his commentary inevitably becomes more detached. But thanks to producer Tommy Krasker, a veteran of 14 Sondheim cast recordings, there are still moments of connection that make you blink at the loudspeakers in wonder, not least the final number – “Anyone Can Whistle” – in which you’re suddenly aware that a new singing voice has joined the eight-strong cast for the last stanza; it’s Steve himself, tentatively suggesting that if we whistle, we could do so for him.
If this is showbiz sentimentality, it’s of the highest order and repeated listening doesn’t diminish the impact, coming as it does after Sondheim has analysed his love of theatrical collaboration as compensation for the lack of family life that blighted his youth. As he explains during the course of his commentary, his songs are character and situation based. They are not autobiographical. And yet for those who know and love his work, it’s impossible at certain moments while listening to Sondheim on Sondheim to escape the sense of an artist reaching out to his audience in search of understanding and affection.
“Anyone Can Whistle” is the culmination of a revue that is presented as memoir rather than chronological autobiography. Themes and artistic challenges rather than specific events are the triggers for many of Sondheim’s observations. All that has been important in his life – personal as well as creative – is alluded to.
Important influences and collaborators – Oscar Hammerstein II, Hal Prince, Mary Rodgers – are celebrated. Sondheim’s difficult relationship with his mother is pithily summarised, its long-term ramifications acknowledged. The revelation that he first fell in love at 60 comes almost casually, sandwiched between the charming “The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me” (Bounce) and numbers from Passion, by any standards one of his most emotionally intense pieces.
The songs, carefully culled, interspersed and, occasionally, amalgamated in telling medleys (never more poignantly than the combination of two of his most dazzling torch songs “Losing My Mind” and “Not a Day Goes By”), become a commentary on Sondheim’s narration. And as has become traditional with a Sondheim anthology, the show’s creator and director James Lapine seizes the chance to raid the archives for songs that were eventually replaced in original productions or revivals. This time, Company proves a fascinating source, the tale of its three endings serving as an excuse to revive two complex numbers: “The Wedding is Off” and “Happily Ever After” (which evolved into “Being Alive”) are worth hearing again, even if they also confirm that sometimes a producer’s reservations about a particular song are spot on.
With great economy, Sondheim describes the process of artistic creation, demystifying his own contribution as part of a collaborative effort, explaining that his work is not self-referential, but that writes for the specific circumstances of a character at that particular moment in the story. “God” is a delicious deconstruction of his own myth, poking gentle fun at his detractors and supporters alike.
It’s ironic that the biggest star of this cast recording is the recorded voice of the show’s central character when the hard work is done by the performers who bring the songs to life with some lightly scripted joshing and interplay that helps to maintain the loose sense of a developing story.
Barbara Cook: one of the wonders of Broadway
Chief among them is Barbara Cook, whose voice remains one of the wonders of Broadway. It might be thickening now in the middle register but the soaring beauty of one of musical theatre’s great sopranos remains a potent force, serving some of Sondheim’s signature numbers – “Not a Day Goes By”, “Send in the Clowns”, “Take Me to the World” and two of Fosca’s ominous, brooding soliloquies “I Read” and “Loving You” – with supremely intelligent interpretations.
Vanessa Williams is under used on the album, although she contributes a rich, creamy “Losing My Mind”. Among the male voices, Tom Wopat delivers a stunning “Finishing the Hat”, Norm Lewis wrings every sliver of meaning from “Being Alive” and Euan Morton brings the developing writer’s dilemma to life in “Franklin Shepard, Inc”.
Sondheim on Sondheim is an expertly produced double album that complements rather than replicates the original stage production. Michael Starobin’s orchestrations are restrained and elegant, supporting some shimmering ensemble work, so that the overall effect is of a holistic collage rather than a staccato series of standalone numbers. This sets it apart from most previous revue-style anthologies and in many ways harks back to the purity and simplicity of that original pioneer piece, Side by Side by Sondheim, albeit with a 21st century angle on the material.
There are some omissions, from the recording at least. Pacific Overtures, one of Sondheim’s most challenging and rewarding pieces, is never mentioned. More puzzling, neither is Sweeney Todd. Given that it is one of his most popular and frequently revived musicals, this seems odd and as the final chords die away, there is inevitably a nagging sense of something missing. But even without the demon barber, Sondheim on Sondheim is a fitting 80th birthday addition to the library of recordings of his work – and one of the best of its kind.
Someone who sings about love and loss, and the pain of experience. The power of torch-singing lies in its effect on the listener. For me, it transcends musical genres. These pages explore the dazzling, and sometimes dark, world of the female singer through history and in the present. Concert and CD reviews, interviews and articles combine to create a comprehensive view of this vital strand of popular culture. Why not share your views and experiences of your favourite artists, suggest performers you would like to see featured - and let me know what makes a torch singer for you?
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