Review: AN EVENING WITH SUTTON FOSTER at Emerson Colonial Theatre

It often seems as if there isn’t anything that Sutton Foster can’t do on stage.

Two years ago, in concert with the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall, the two-time Tony Award-winning Foster (“Anything Goes,” “Thoroughly Modern Millie”) became the first artist to break out crochet needles and yarn to add a few rows to an in-progress blanket mid-performance.

That handmade afghan was nowhere in sight, however, when the singer returned to Boston on a bitterly cold night last week for a sold-out concert at the Emerson Colonial Theatre. Instead, Foster warmed her audience with a well-chosen program of Broadway and pop-music favorites, beginning, appropriately enough, with “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” Expert at charming her listeners, Foster customized Johnny Mercer’s lyrics in the Hoagy Carmichael song with Boston references, and even some Colonial-specific mentions.

Customized lyrics could also be heard on the sweet “Love Somebody,” where Foster cleverly switched out the lyric “I love somebody, but I won’t say who” for “I love somebody and his name is…,” stopping short before actually mentioning her low-key but high-profile romance with Hugh Jackman, the Harold Hill to her Marian the Librarian in the 2022 Broadway revival of “The Music Man.”

Foster did get a little more personal when sharing heartfelt and funny stories about her nine-year-old daughter Emily, who inspired her mother to perform two very different songs – “Raining Tacos,” the Parry Gripp novelty song that took streaming services by storm in 2012, and the gentle ballad “Goodnight, My Someone,” Meredith Willson’s tender ode to a mother’s love from “The Music Man.” As it did on Broadway, the latter provided the perfect showcase for Foster’s clarion-clear soprano.

With her longtime accompanist and arranger, Michael Rafter, at the piano, Foster – in a white jumpsuit sparkling with golden threads –moved smoothly from “The Nearness of You,” another Hoagy Carmichael standard, to the deliciously suggestive “Undecided,” the 1938 Sid Robin and Charlie Shavers’ song recorded by everyone from the Ames Brothers to Ella Fitzgerald and Natalie Cole.

Seen most recently in the 2024 revival of the Mary Rodgers’ musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” Foster made those and other visits to the American Songbook but she always returned to Broadway, as when she recalled originating the role of Princess Fiona in 2008’s “Shrek: The Musical,” with music by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire, with the upbeat “I Know It’s Today.” The star was joined by two more recent Fionas – Livia Quist, a 10-year-old from Beverly, and Emerson College student Arianna Arocho.

A larger group of Emerson musical theater students joined Foster and Arocho for “On My Way,” from Tesori’s “Violet,” in which Foster played the title role on Broadway in 2014. Foster also briefly ceded the stage to the Emerson students so they could have their own moment in the spotlight on Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.”

The genius of Porter’s music and lyrics was also on display on the title song from his 1934 musical “Anything Goes,” which had tap dancer extraordinaire Foster – Reno Sweeney in the 2011 revival – surrounded by a talented tap troupe from Hanover’s South Shore Dance Ensemble.

In an inspired blending, Foster sang “I Got Love” from the 1970 musical “Purlie,” by Gary Geld – with lyrics by Peter Udell and book by Ossie Davis, based on his 1961 play “Purlie Victorious” – in a duet with Boston Conservatory at Berklee student Abby McDonough who sang “Gimme Gimme,” originally performed on Broadway by Foster in the 2002 Tesori musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

After delivering a bouncy “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” a pop hit by composer Ray Henderson and lyricist Lew Brown first introduced by Ethel Merman in “George White’s Scandals of 1931,” the evening wound down with Foster serving up an unusually thought-provoking  “Love Is All Around,” the Sonny Curtis-penned theme song from the Minneapolis-set “The Mary Tyler Moore,” perhaps as an unstated nod to the recent news coming from that city, and “Never Alone,” the 2007 Gary Burr, Sarah Buxton, and Victoria Shaw tune that became a hit for Jim Brickman and Lady A.

For her rapturously received encore, Foster chose “Till There Was You,” a duet from “The Music Man” that details the blossoming love between Harold and Marian, once again teasing her burgeoning relationship with Jackman.

As the audience filed out into the frigid night, however, some, rather than pondering nascent love, might have been wondering whatever became of Foster’s made-on-stage afghan and whether they might borrow it for their walk along Boylston Street.

Photo caption: “An Evening with Sutton Foster” was presented on January 24 at the Emerson Colonial Theatre. Photo by Jenny Anderson.