BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

Since her cabaret debut at Eighty Eight's in 1992, Yanna Avis has played every major room in New York and has become one of the most popular international artists, with a fan base that continues to grow. With her new show at 54 Below (on June 18), Make Some Magic, Avis demonstrated why she is so un...

Recently, Migguel Anggelo returned to Joe's Pub in New York City with an encore performance of his latest concert, I, Inmigrante. Like his pervious concert, Between Dreams / Entre Sueños, the set featured music from both of Anggelo's solo albums, his electrifying energy, his brilliant vocal range, ...

On July 5, Carole J. Bufford erupted onto the stage at Birdland for her first Sunday evening as hostess of the club's weekly Jazz Party (which had been helmed most recently by Natalie Douglas and Jane Monheit). The formidable vocalist, glamorous in clingy red, was aided and abetted by a top-notch (a...

In Mr. Lucky, Jeff Macauley's urbane cabaret show featuring the songs of Henry Mancini, (which recently finished a three-show run at the Metropolitan Room) you learn that the famed composer came by his luck and success the old-fashioned way: single-minded purpose fueled by hard work and determinatio...

Monday night at the upstairs library at The Player's Club, young actor/vocalist Evan Stern collaborated with one of cabaret's treasures, the veteran pianist/arranger/vocalist Steve Ross on a show illuminating the influence of a southern upbringing on the work of iconic songwriter and Savannah, Georg...

The latest edition of Scott Siegel's acclaimed series shows the growing number of Broadway musicals without new scores....

From the moment she steps on stage and sings the entire first verse of Gloria Estefan's “Coming Out of the Dark”–-in the dark--you get the impression this is not going to be one of those usual personal journey “I've-been-everywhere-and-done-everything” kind of acts. In her debut show, Wher...

Danny Bacher has the performance ease of an artist who's spent twice his years on the circuit. His preternatural feel for swing delivers scrupulous control, hip, unfussy phrasing, nuanced inflection, and the kind of fluent, savory scat “wordless vocables” I haven't heard from a man in some time,...

As she wends her way towards the stage at the opening of her new show at the Metropolitan Room (performances were on June 15 and 20), Corinna Sowers Adler sings the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II classic “All The Things You Are” with warm, legato phrases that surround the club like a hug. So...

With her new show His Aim Is True: The Singular Songs of Elvis Costello at Stage 72 (second show last night), you'll meet the new Karen Oberlin. Gone are the controlled vibrato, upper range, emotional translucence, femininity, and the playfulness of a purveyor of American Songbook/pop. Prepare for a...

After a four year run in Los Angeles, Brad T. Gottfred's hit comedy WOMEN ARE CRAZY BECAUSE MEN ARE A**HOLES is running Off-Broadway at New York City's Cherry Lane Theatre. The outlandish comedy is about four couples coming together for a brunch to celebrate the minting of a new couple. With a premi...

This year is the centennial of entertainment legends such as vocalists Billie Holliday and Edith Piaf, singer-actors Frank Sinatra and Alice Faye, composers Billy Strayhorn and Bart Howard, and pianist Cy Walter. In its annual tribute concert, The Mabel Mercer Foundation celebrated all these artists...

Linda Lavin's most recent show at 54 Below (which had a three-night run between June 4-6), Starting Over--"Because that's what I've done all my life"--illuminates a succession of chapters in her career. The show bears more than a little resemblance to a 2012 appearance at the same venue. There are r...

One of the joys of reviewing cabaret is being fortunate enough to discover a remarkable talent. I experienced that feeling this past Saturday night at Don't Tell Mama where Christy Frye debuted her New York cabaret show, Christy Frye: Feels Like the First Time – Things I Learned From the Car Radio...

It takes a woman of considerable wit, style, and maturity to tackle (let alone celebrate) the subject matter of men. In her new show, Celebrating Men (Bless Their Hearts), seen last Thursday night at the Metropolitan Room, happily, Charlotte Patton possesses all those traits as she leads us on her g...

In her new cabaret show Thirsty! (which returns to Joe's Pub for a second show on June 1 at 9:30), Scott regales the audience with tales of a young(ish) single woman living in New York City as an aspiring musical theater performer, whose antics tend to run toward the debauched, since she has 'no mor...

On Sunday evening, 54 Below celebrated the 25th Anniversary of the musical Grand Hotel on Broadway in high style with two performances crackling with energy and featuring a talented roster of performers including 13 from the original cast. Splendidly Directed (and Written) by Walter Willison, with M...

Alexis Cole makes it look easy. Even up-tempo, the performer never appears to be less than relaxed and enjoying what she's doing. Somewhere in the middle of her first number Saturday night at Café Noctambulo (at Pangea Restaurant on 2nd Avenue between 11th and 12th streets) the room seems to exhale...

Stacy Sullivan is a warm and amusing storyteller with an entertaining family history. The first six numbers of her new Metropolitan Room show on Thursday night, Since You Asked (after the Judy Collins song), are bridged by tales of her parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and her upbringing in...

With her new show at the Metropolitan Room that opened last night—Groupies: The Muses Behind the Legends of Rock & Roll--the usually smart and meticulous Lauren Fox (as evidenced by her shows that celebrated the music of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen and later the Pop/Rock that emerged from Laur...

I like Megan Hilty because she laughs a lot. She's fun! A young star of stage and screen-- having established herself as "Glinda" in Wicked on Broadway (2005-06) and subsequently becoming a TV star playing complicated and talented Ivy Lynn in the NBC hit musical drama Smash-Hilty opened her current ...

One might easily call Susan Winter's Monday night show at Don't Tell Mama, A Woman for All Seasons: Part Two as half its numbers were in the first show by this name she performed during a run starting last September at the Metropolitan Room. Winter is the kind of class act that would've been lauded ...

Cy Coleman and Ira Gasman's musical The Life explores the human flotsam and jetsam of Times Square in the 1980s--prostitutes, pimps, dealers, runaways, the seedy, lost and desperate. And, of course, this being a musical, some have hearts of gold. The Life began Off-Broadway in 1990 at the Westbeth T...

To paraphrase a Peter Allen song, she could have been a sailor. Instead, she chose to sail the open seas. And now she's singing about it. It all made for a promising theme for the Manhattan cabaret debut of Robyn McCorquodale and her series of four April shows, Diary Of A Piano Girl, at the Laurie B...

Three of Cy Coleman's Broadway leading ladies invite you to a celebratory shindig buoyed by talent, palpably warmed by affection. Sometimes orchestrated as a harmonizing girl group and at others in distinctively different solo turns, Lillias White, Cady Huffman, and Randy Graff offer a banquet of Co...