The Wall Street Journal
March 12, 1993
Immediately upon passing through the etched glass doors, one heard the buzz, the unmistakable sound of a New York hit. The usually sleepy Algonquin Hotel lobby was crowded with fur, basic black and good jewelry, some of it in a waiting-list line, the rest clustered around the doorway to the Oak Room. Inside, waiters were squeezing in extra handkerchief-sized tables in a hopeless effort to accommodate all who wished to enter.
For 16 weeks this fall and winter, Andrea Marcovicci sold out the Oak Room, an unprecedented success for a cabaret singer in modern times. Yet she can’t really sing, not in the conventional sense. She has pitch problems, tone troubles in the middle and high registers, and a capricious sense of when to sing loud or soft.
Her appeal goes beyond the vocal: There’s her wry humor and her intelligence; her mixture of old-fashioned charm and modern bite; her innate sense of what song to sing when; her enthusiastic quest for new songs; and her delighted discoveries of old songs. It’s the way she sits crosslegged on the piano lid in an evening gown. It’s the look of vulnerability as she stands in the crook of a piano on an oversized doormat of a stage with listeners at both elbows. It’s her wide smile and the tears in her eyes.
In other words, it’s her way with cabaret, of which singing is only one part and not the most important. To put across an American popular song in a small room with only a piano for company, you need to be an actress. Unlike some other performers such as Julie Wilson, Ms. Marcovicci sings the songs more or less straight and saves her acting for the space between songs, filling the void with a barrage or entertaining patter.
Talk gives the 85 or so minutes a structure and, most importantly, gets her a laugh. “I don’t get my approval from applause, I get it from laughs,” the 43-year-old entertainer admits. “I don’t know a singer who needs laughs the way I do.”
She may read aloud from a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay, her favorite poet, or quote from an E.B. White essay to set a mood. She pairs songs with opposing viewpoints, and makes neat transitions. For instance, at one performance, after “The Man That Got Away,” a bitter song by Ira Gershwin and Harold Arlen, she said, “That’s how Judy Garland would have handled the situation. We need to hear how Ethel Merman would handle it. We need to hear from [lyricist] Dorothy Fields. ‘When there’s no doubt the fire’s out, a lady needs a change,’” sang Ms. Marcovicci with a mischievous smile.
Her asides are delicious. George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” she announced one evening, “was from the musical, ‘Oh, Kay!’ Gertrude Lawrence sang it to her rag doll–in case anyone is going on ‘Jeopardy’ and Gertrude Lawrence is a category.” Tiny pause. “We should live in such a world.”
It all sounds improvised and casual, but in fact the patter is carefully conceived over a long period of trial and error first at home and then in the Gardenia, a tiny club in her home town of Los Angeles that serves as her lab. Each show has a theme and typically takes about two years to prepare, structure and refine.
“I never write it down, resolutely refuse to, so there’s always that little extra bit of terror as to how it will be said tonight. I do it that way because it’s honest and it’s emotional and it’s dangerous, and I like all that,” she says.
Ms. Marcovicci’s rigorous approach to putting together a show has changed the face of cabaret. A performer starting out doesn’t dare get up and just sing, a la Rosemary Clooney; he or she must have a concept, a theme, a reason. Ms. Marcovicci’s inventive themes have included ”Home for the Holidays.” about New York and the concept of “home”; “Love Songs of World War II” (the live recording, complete with patter, is on Cabaret Records); and “Just Kern” (a richly orchestrated version is available on Elba Records).
The next Marcovicci project will he a radical departure: an entire show of modern songs. Although she has performed the occasional contemporary song, and is more open to new material than most, her shows have all been rooted in the theater music of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, traditional cabaret repertoire. But while she was at the Algonquin, composers and lyricists sent her lots of new songs, which she tried out in informal “salons” in the afternoons. “I felt like Mabel Mercer,” she says. It was like a forum. I found the kind of music I’ve been looking for: eccentric, deeply poetic, difficult, art song music.”
Each night, she slipped one of the songs into her show, reading straight from the sheet music, with the composer at the piano. Songwriters included Stephen Schwartz, Bill Finn, Robert Waldman, David Israel, Phillip Namanworth, John Bucchino, Craig Carnelia and her pianist, Glenn Mehrbach. The performances had an exciting, ink-still-wet quality.
They harkened back to the early days just seven years ago, when she would spread out all her music on the dressing room floor and conceive the act minutes before show time in San Francisco’s Plush Room. Back then Ms. Marcovicci was singing for a sprinkling of people, many of whom did not understand her or cabaret.
She performs for much larger audiences nowadays–witness the mob scene that greeted her each evening this season at the Algonquin. But she still has two feet planted firmly on the ground.
“Every now and then,” Ms. Marcovicci says,”when I’m feeling the most puffed up, I’ll run into somebody In the lobby who says, ‘Are you our vocalist for the evening?’ and I’ll know they don’t have a clue. And I’ll say to myself, that’s good., that reminds me. I may be having this marvelous, lucky and thrilling success, but it’s still an area of music that is hardly mainstream.”
Ms. Orgill is a free-lance writer in Hoboken,
N.J.
Back to the listing of Andrea’s Reviews.
Back to Andrea’s Home Page.