Bebe Neuwirth - Stories with Piano

[IMG:L]Feinstein's at Loews Regency
May 2008

Bebe Neuwirth is an institution we depend on. We may gripe about her, perhaps even have the bad taste to joke about her. But we need her; we'd be poorer without her, as we well know.

In reviewing her current stint at Feinstein's at Loews Regency, I, too, will gripe a bit and, heaven help me, perhaps even indulge in some levity. But take comfort in the realization that criticism rolls off her strong dancer's shoulders like water off a duck's back.

The show is called Stories with Piano because the songs chosen allegedly tell stories. They had better, because Ms. Neuwirth rather doesn't. Unlike other solo performers, she won't tell us much about herself. I recall only one story from her childhood, far too innocuous to be retold here.

And yet she must have been quite a gal and, later, some terrific dame; but we get nary a story of galhood or damehood. So we must try to make do with the songs. But take, for example, the very opening two: "As Time Goes By" and "The Trolley Song." How much of a story is there in "Clang, clang, clang went the trolley,/ Ding, ding. ding, went the bell"? Or even in "A kiss is still a kiss," etc.? Yes, in some of the Weill songs, which she rightly favors, there are stories. Yet even there, you must first tell the singer from the song.

I now have to face what I did my damnedest to stave off: Bebe can sing very well in a musical that, indeed, tells a story, and where she can do a lot of acting, at which she is very good, and dancing, at which she is perhaps even better.

But in a cabaret song act, you should, first of all, have a real singing voice, which happens to be one of the admittedly few things Bebe hasn't got. Not much, anyway, and she knows it. So she does everything she can to sidestep the issue, to minimize the hegemony of the voice.

To be sure, she correctly acts out what is in a song. But she also acts out what isn't. She mugs, gesticulates, and, above all, dances it out. She also readily varies her dynamics from very soft to very loud. Further, she gets good support from her pianist, Scott Cady. But oral interplay with him is rather less than with the bottle of champagne she periodically sips from through a straw. Or with the audience. She takes as good as she—no, not gives—withholds.

Yet she does exude an aura of sexiness and, what with a very short, bouffant skirt, gives her act legs. Thus nicely accentuated, slim ones. She is fun to watch, and the audience loves her. Moreover, she does improve toward the end with some smartly rendered Kander & Ebb and Tom Waits songs.

But one more thing: She shouldn't try to sing in foreign languages, in which she sounds like the typical American tourist. We can barely tolerate her German, but we can't pardon her French. Why does she bother? She does, after all, have her English and her body language; no one is asking her to be tri- or quadrilingual.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.