Review: Maude Maggart Thrilled with A TINY MATCH at Birdland Jazz

Cabaret star Maude Maggart made her annual New York appearance at a sold-out Birdland Jazz concert on December 29 with her new show, A Tiny Match. Maggart, who had long residencies at the legendary, long-gone Algonquin Room back in the day, is a former New Yorker who now makes her home in California. She is a unique performer, a marvelous storyteller, with a lovely, old-fashioned singing voice out of classic Hollywood movies, and who herself looks like she magically walked off the silver screen and into Birdland.

The star comes from a family of entertainers. Maggart’s parents, Brandon Maggart and Diane McAfee, met while performing in Applause on Broadway, and her sister Fiona Apple is a Grammy-winning recording artist. Her grandmother, Millicent Greene, was a dancer, and her grandfather, Johnny McAfee, was a big-band vocalist and woodwind doubler. Brandon Maggart recently had his final appearance at the celebrated Gardenia in West Hollywood to celebrate his 92nd birthday, shortly before the venue closed its doors forever at the end of the month.

Maggart’s longtime musical director and pianist, Gerald Sternbach, was her sole accompaniment. Many of her song choices were obscure story songs that seemed written just for her.

The star opened with a list song, “On Such a Night as This” (Hugh Martin and Marshall Barer). Maggart, like Michael Feinstein, is a champion of Barer, a Broadway lyricist and family friend, whose unique lyrics were often quite charming and whimsical. Just as this writer noticed that Maggart’s lilting voice brought to mind a young Judy Garland or Jeanette MacDonald (for whom, it turns out, the song was written), both women were name-checked in the lyrics with these glorious couplets:

"'Twas such a night as this / When Judy Garland swore / 'I just adore him / How can I ignore the boy next door?' / On such a night / Did Gershwin write / His Rhapsody? / On such a set / Did young Jeanette / Sing, 'Lover come back to me'?"

Maggart went way back in time with the 1912 song “Take Me to the Cabaret” (William A. Dillon), filled with timely references … from 1912, and Noel Coward’s “This is a Changing World.” Maggart’s expressive eyes and physicality are a great part of her appeal. Honoring her grandmother, who was a dancer in George White’s Scandals of 1926, she performed a pair of songs associated with the series, “Lucky Day” (Ray Henderson/Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown, featured in her grandmother’s show), and a remarkably obscure George Gershwin tune, “Drifting Along With The Tide,” written for the 1921 Scandals with lyricist Arthur Jackson, not his brother Ira. The sweet song was putty in Maggart’s hands.

Maggart is a marvelous and funny storyteller who had the audience in the palm of her hands. In an extraordinary segment, she opened with the very rare lyric for “Kiss of Fire” (Lester Allen and Robert Hill, adapted from A.G. Villoldo’s 1906 instrumental “El Choclo”), a very familiar melody, which was a show highlight and also featured a very spirited solo by Sternbach. Maggart then paired the standards “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” (Irving Berlin) and “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” (Jerome Kern/Otto Harbach) with “Hôtel” (Francis Poulenc, from a poem by Guillaume Appollinaire), a French song for which she provided a very funny rough translation before starting the medley.

Sternbach played the French segment of the medley very slowly and delicately, filled with tension and set off by diminished chords, finishing with a callback to “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” “Hôtel” was filled with seemingly unrelated, rhyming French words, phrases, famous names, and song titles, making it something of a bookend to the opening list song. Maggart’s timing here was spectacular, rather adorable, and well appreciated by the Birdland audience. She even managed to get the audience to sing along with an instruction spoken in French that was somehow understood by all.

There were a number of notable songwriters in the house, including Christine Lavin, Tom Toce, and Hillary Rollins. Maggart performed the show’s title song, “A Tiny Match” (Hillary Rollins/Kevin Kelso), an evocative story song with great visuals, the kind of song you might be able to see play out like a movie if you listen with your eyes closed. She morphed the song into “Do You Hear What I Hear” (Noel Regney/Gloria Shayne Baker), ending with a gorgeous a cappella coda.

Maggart, at that point well under an hour into the show, thanked the audience and left the stage, returning for an encore. A stunning, mostly rubato reading of Kurt Weill’s “Lost In the Stars” ended with a piano quote of the nursery rhyme “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” A brief second encore of “This is a Changing World” followed.

This was a wonderful, charming, delicious show for which the only criticism is that Maggart finished far too early, by about 15 minutes (most shows are 75 minutes). Still, it was a scrumptious hour. She’d have left you wanting more no matter how long it was.

Learn more about the singer at www.maudemaggart.com.

For more great shows at Birdland Jazz, visit www.birdlandjazz.com.