If you’ve heard any of Ms. Foster’s Broadway cast recordings you already know that she has technique to burn. Yes, hers is a classic “Broadway belter” instrument (making the traditional cabaret microphone largely unnecessary), but it’s a finely tuned one the can do pianissimo as easily and attractively as fortissimo. Her voice is also seamlessly integrated, top to bottom (although she used the former more than the latter, I thought), so the overall effect was really quite impressive. There were places were her elocution could have been better but, really, that’s quibbling.
Ms. Foster is, of course, more than just a pretty face and spectacular voice. On stage she radiates a self-effacing cheerfulness that’s instantly charming and demonstrates the kind of solid acting skills you’d expect from someone with her resume. If I have a complaint, it’s that her resume was also, for the most part, the alpha and omega of her patter. Only at the very end of the show, in the introduction to an impressive but unsurprising performance of Sondheim’s “Being Alive”, did we get a glimpse into her personal life.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Her resume is, after all, a remarkable and interesting one, and the biographical aspect of cabaret can be (and all to often is) overdone. It’s just that I would have welcomed a little bit less of Sutton Foster the star and a bit more of Sutton Foster the person. Your mileage may vary.
While ostensibly a solo act, a good cabaret show is always, I think, a team effort. In this case, the team of Ms. Foster, her music director and pianist Michael Rafter and her director Mark Waldrop was a winning one. The program, to begin with, was nicely balanced between old favorites like “Something’s Coming” (which seems to be everyone’s favorite opening number) and less-familiar material such as the 1957 Dakota Staton hit “The Late, Late Show” and “Say That” - re-write of the Paul Denniker/Andy Razaf classic “S’Posin’” intended for and then dropped from Thoroughly Modern Millie. There were a few lovely ballads such as the classic “Once Upon a Time”, delightful novelty numbers like “Air Conditioner” by Christine Lavin (who apparently doesn’t know how to write a bad song) and, above all, show stoppers along the lines of Drowsy Chaperone’s “Show Off” and (inevitably) Millie’s “Gimme Gimme”.
Mr. Rafter is a talented and sympathetic accompanist as well as an ingenious arranger. Evidence of that showed up early in a medley that skillfully blended songs from three of Ms. Foster’s Broadway hits – Annie, Millie and Little Women – into a seamless whole and continued in his inventive piano parts for simple pop songs like “Sunshine on My Shoulder” and “Up on the Roof”. As for Mr. Waldrop, it’s hard to tell where his ideas end and Ms. Foster’s begin, but whoever came up with the amusing conceit of what I’d call the “Random Show Stopper Moment” surely deserves praise.
The gimmick is that Mr. Rafter selects the titles of five songs from a three-ring binder labeled (I think) “The Big Book of Really Really Hard Songs”, drops them into a gaudy goblet, and has an audience member pick one for Ms. Sutton to sing. It appears to introduce an element of improv show randomness into the evening and perhaps it does, although I suspect that someone with Ms. Foster’s professional acumen would have rehearsed everything in that book well in advance. Certainly her performance of the selected song – Stephen Schwartz’s lovely “Meadowlark” – was a solid as one could want. So, for that matter, was her second dip into the goblet for what was either the third or fourth encore of the evening, Schwartz’s “Defying Gravity”. Still, theatre is all about illusion and you can’t argue with success. She sounded great and her fans – which is to say, nearly all of the audience – loved it.
I say the audience consisted mostly of her fans, by the way, because of the overwhelming enthusiasm of their response. When people start clapping the minute the lights go down and give the performer a standing ovation as soon as she walks on stage, it’s hard not to feel as though you’ve been transported back in time to an early Beatles concert. I mean, nobody screamed, fainted or threw unmentionables, but this was certainly a level of affection that one rarely sees at Cabaret St. Louis shows. Hence the well deserved multiple encores.
This performance of An Evening With Sutton Foster was the first in a series of tour dates, so those of you outside of St. Louis may soon have a chance to appreciate this sparkling talent for yourselves. Visit her web site, suttonfoster.com , to find out where she will be and when. As this is being written, she has appearances scheduled in Cleveland, San Francisco, Naples (FL) and Charlotte (NC). For those of you here in St. Louis meanwhile, the 2010 Cabaret St. Louis season kicks off officially with Tyne Daly and our own trusty and well-beloved John McDaniel February 10 through 13; visit cabaretstl.org for details.
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