Linda Purl Shows Pizzazz and Poignancy In THIS COULD BE THE START At The Green Room 42

Once upon another time, in the early 1940s, the cute baby daughter of the lawyer of songwriter Jack Lawrence inspired him to come up with a sweet number that began: “When I go to sleep/ I never count sheep/  I count all the charms about Linda.” The little song grew to be more than a little hit, and the lawyer’s little baby Linda grew up to perform with, and marry, another songwriter of note: Paul McCartney.  Counting the charms about one of her namesakes, Linda Purl would result in a pretty big total.  As evidenced in her September show at The Green Room 42, the singer had charms – and chops –  galore.  There’s her joie de vivre, grace, a palpable delight in being on stage, a down-to-earth attitude, humor, vocal panache, ownership of material, and a smile that lights up the room so much that the technical director might be tempted to dial down the power.  

Of course, this Linda would not be crooning the song “Linda” about her own charms, but she did include two songs from that decade of the 1940s, both by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer: the lush “Out of This World” and the lively “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home.” She set up the latter with a comment about her comfort level with her three musicians, saying that being with them on stage or in the recording studio always felt like “home.” The “home” team is in synch; the show’s repertoire drew largely on her new recording with them, This Could Be the Start (plus some picks from past CDs). The gentlemen in question –whose talent is never in question – are from the tippy-top tier of New York cabaret/jazz players: Tedd Firth, pianist and arranger of all numbers, bassist David Finck, and drummer Ray Marchica. “How lucky am I?!” the grateful singer exults. We’re lucky, too. Putting her motions where her mouth is, she respectfully turned to each musician during his solos, watching, (engaged, but never upstaged them), broadly gesturing to them in appreciation that allowed the audience to do the same with applause at the right moment. And those solos—wow!  Although she indicated that she knew many people download music these days, there were actually physical CDs available for sale in the hall, and after witnessing the performance, there’s bound to be more folks bound and determined to grab and hold onto a disc – Purl-clutchers, if you will.   

Linda, as Entertainer (capital E intentional), plays to the audience, with a vast array of facial expressions, gestures, shrugs, nods, and grins, with eyes that twinkle and arms raised triumphantly or reaching out –all to underscore attitudes and specific words. It’s an almost word-by-word/line-by-line road map to each song’s storyline. When she sings the final repeat of the exultant statement “This could be the start of something big,” that last note is very BIG.  She tended to use that M.O. of a BIG sustained note with muchos power to conclude many selections, putting the BIG cherry on the top of the musical sundae to top every cool thing she’d already done throughout a song.  She’s got the power and it’s pretty impressive.  All this is, well, all well and old-school nightclub good, very good — but even more captivating is the non-“Presentational” approach where she remains still, emotionally grounded, too.  She gazes off to some horizon of the past, seemingly immersed in thought or memories or hopes or reverie.  This made “I Have Dreamed” the highlight for me. The second of back-to-back numbers from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s score for The King and I (the first was a higher-energy “Shall We Dance?”) was set up with touching stories about the very long marriage of her parents and their courtship.

Another high point was sung to an older Richard Rodgers melody that had a few totally different lyrics before Lorenz Hart came up with “Blue Moon.” I love that the Purl/Firth treatment included the rarely employed excellent introductory verse. For “Blue Moon” the stage lights were mostly the appropriate blue and when the moonstruck, lovestruck lady came to the line “And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold” — wait for it – the lights turned to a golden yellow.  Does that kind of life-imitates-art magic happen more than once in a blue moon? Maybe, but it works wonderfully. 

Anecdotes shared covered such topics as her joy in painting on trees, hiking, being at a gig this summer in North Carolina where she was advised to wear a helmet due to an expected tornado, and her side business marketing sourdough bread starter. It started well, with hopes that rose yeast-like, but a downturn in business and the being turned down for a program that would help means she wasn’t quite rolling in dough.  But it didn’t turn her sour; her shrugging  off this point of disappointment cued the inclusion of the song “Pick Yourself Up” that tells us to “start all over again.” The advice to push that re-start button is just one thing in This Could Be the Start that makes one stop to think that such a Purl of wisdom is reason to count one MORE of “all the charms about Linda.”

Photos: Alexa Rae Photography

See Bobby Patrick’s review of Linda Purl’s new recording  This Could Be the Start HERE

See The Green Room 42’s calendar of music HERE 

See Linda Purl’s website HERE.

 

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