Review: The holiday doctor is in

This review originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Ken Haller and Marty Fox

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The doctor is in, and he's got the cure for your holiday blues. All of them.

Happy Haller Days!, the latest show from singer/actor/pediatrician Ken Haller, is a romp through a full calendar year of three-day weekends, starting with Christmas and working around the calendar. Peppered with insights from Mr. Haller's life in medicine and theatre, the evening is fun and funny, but also touching and profound.

The song choices are varied and sometimes even inspired. Memories of the hard life of Mr. Haller's Swedish grandmother, for example, introduce an Independence Day segment that features a low-key version of Neil Diamond's "America." For Labor Day, reflections on his days as a resident physician on Manhattan's posh Upper West Side lead to Harburg and Lane's rarely heard "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich" from Finian's Rainbow.

Perhaps the most emotional moment, though, comes with the return to Christmas, as Mr. Haller's thoughts on his decade as a pediatrician in poverty-stricken inner city East St. Louis, make way for an inspiring arrangement of "Light," from Next to Normal. Based on an arrangement for the Gateway Men's Chorus by the late Neal Richardson, it blends the voices of Mr. Haller and his pianist and music director Marty Fox in tight and powerful harmony. The song's hope that the light will make "wasted world we thought we knew...look brand new" feels particularly relevant in the context of today's bleak political landscape.

Balancing out the drama are some true comic gems, like "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas," which the ten-year-old Gayla Peevey took to number 24 on the Billboard charts in 1963. Mr. Haller does an impressive job of channeling his own inner child in his charming performance. Perhaps the biggest laughs of the evening, though, came from the Valentine's Day entry, Marilyn Miller and Cheryl Hardwick's "Making Love Alone," a hymn of praise in beguine tempo to (ahem) taking matters into one's own hands. Bernadette Peters brought the house down with it on The Tonight Show in 1989. The Haller and Fox team got even more mileage out of it by taking it just a bit slower, giving the audience room to laugh at the song's many jokes.

As I have written previously, Mr. Haller never fails to deliver a combination of theatrical smarts and vocal authority that has made him one of our town's principal cabaret exports. He and Mr. Fox also have a great rapport on stage, something that was obvious in their last effort, The Medicine Show. Expert direction by Gaslight Cabaret Festival producer Jim Dolan kept everything moving at a good pace and helped insure the sense of a dramatic arc that, in my view, is a major characteristic of a well-designed cabaret performance. The capacity crowd at the Gaslight Theater clearly loved what they saw.

That said, I have to note that while it may be true that, as the old wheeze goes, an elephant never forgets, there's no escaping the fact that people do. On opening night, Mr. Haller occasionally got lost in a couple of lyric-heavy numbers, which suggests to me that there might be too many of those in the show. That's a very minor complaint, though, which is why it's at the very end of this review.

Ken Haller and Marty Fox will reprise Happy Haller Days! at 8 p.m. on Thursday, November 9, at the Gaslight Theater in the Central West End, as part of the Gaslight Cabaret Festival. It's a tremendously entertaining evening from one of our best and most prolific cabaret stars; go and enjoy.

Cabaret Review: Susan Werner provides a fine finish to the fall Gaslight Cabaret Festival

Susan Werner at Thalian Hall
in 2009
susanwerner.com

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Susan Werner's two shows at the Gaslight Cabaret Festival this past weekend marked her first solo appearances locally in over seven years, and that's far too long.

When I saw her for the first time back in 2008 at the Cabaret at Savor, I observed that her performance was creative, smart, hip, devilishly clever, and just downright entertaining. I'll second that now. When the Chicago Tribune's Howard Reich called her "one of the most innovative songwriters working today" in 2006 he was only stating the simple truth.

Due to accidents of history as much as anything else, the image of the singer/songwriter in the popular mind is often strongly linked to artists who draw their inspiration primarily from the folk/old-time tradition. Think of July Collins or Phil Ochs in the 1960s or Nanci Griffith today. Werner did, in fact, start out making a name for herself on the folk circuit, and her songs certainly include elements of what's now called "traditional" music, but that's only one color in a palette that includes jazz – traditional and modern – torch songs, American Songbook standards, and even some remnants of her classical conservatory training.

So, yeah, she did play the guitar, but she switched back and forth between it and the baby grand with ease, all the while humming riffs that led into the next number. It's as though singing was as natural to her as speaking, and the songs were just an extension of the stories that bridged them.

As for the songs themselves, Ms. Werner writes really great ones. She writes the kind of songs that make people like me want to go out and buy copies of the sheet music so we can learn them. She writes songs that can be funny, sad, wry, world-weary, romantic, cynical, cheerfully upbeat, and politically subversive – sometimes all at once.

Want some career advice? She's got it in "Don't Work With Your Friends." Need a good comeback when you encounter a friend who has just had cosmetic surgery? Consider "What Did You Do to Your Face?" There was sound advice about living for the moment in "May I Suggest" (as in, "May I suggest that this is the best part of your life"). And for fans of the Second City, she's got a great hymn to her home town in "Give Me Chicago Any Day," complete with an unexpected vocal nod to Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong.

There was more political material in this show than I recall hearing in the last one, but it was quality stuff. And the messages in those songs didn't beat us over the head. They were often laced with humor, as in "Our Father" ("Deliver us from those who think they're You") or in "Herbicides Done Made Me Gay." Or they grew naturally out of a narrative, as in the pro-choice "Manhattan, Kansas" or "Cuba Before" and "Cuba After," which were inspired by a trip to that formerly blockaded island.

There was even, as an encore, one song that Ms. Werner didn't write: Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne's "Time After Time" (first sung by Frank Sinatra in the 1947 film "It Happened in Brooklyn") and dedicated to her long-time partner and now (thanks to the Supreme Court) her spouse. It was a lovely "unplugged" moment, sung seated on the lip of the stage with acoustic guitar.

It was also a bit daring, but Ms. Werner was able to pull it off because she's a good a performer and she is a songwriter. She took us on a musical journey and told us stories that were worth hearing. She enjoyed herself immensely and included all of us in the fun. So the audience responded warmly and enthusiastically, even when the material got openly political.

Susan Werner's show brought the fall edition of Jim Dolan's Gaslight Cabaret Festival to a fine conclusion. The festival will start back up again in the spring. For more information: gaslightcabaretfestival.com.

Cabaret Review: An auspicious debut by Gina Otto

Who: Gina Otto
What: The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me
Where: The Gaslight Theatre, St. Louis, MO
When: April 9, 2015

Our town's newest cabaret headliner, Gina Otto, made an auspicious debut at the Gaslight Cabaret Festival with "The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me." Although not without its issues, the show was well received by a sold-out house that clearly included a lot of Ms. Otto's fans from the local country club circuit, where she performs regularly.

The evening was distinguished by intriguing song choices, including one I'd never heard before: "You Don't Love Me," from Dutch jazz singer Caro Emerald's 2010 album "Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor." It's an upbeat, verbally inventive little number along the lines of The Cherry Poppin' Daddies (or, for those of you from my generation, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks) that suited Ms. Otto's light voice well in one of many smart arrangements by pianist and music director Carol Schmidt.

There were other songs that I thought worked especially well. A lyrical "Hopelessly Devoted to You," for example, was enriched by Ms. Otto's memories of singing with her father. "I Can Cook Too," a rarely heard comic number from "On the Town," was amusingly prepped as relationship advice, and the way it segued into a parody version of "McArthur Park" was a nice touch. I've never been able to take those lyrics with a straight face anyway, and Ms. Otto had some well-deserved fun with them.

Throughout the evening Ms. Otto was engaged and charming with the audience. I found the overall emotional range of the evening a bit limited, though. She did not often delve deeply into lyrics, and the overall tone seemed more suited to a supper club environment, where the singer is not so much in focus for the audience. When Ms. Otto really connected with a lyric at a deeper level—as she did in a torchy "The Man I Love"—she was more compelling. I wished she had done that more often.

I also wished she had not held the mic directly in front of her mouth quite so much. It partly blocked the view of her expressive face.

That said, it was a lively first show and the audience was clearly entertained. The local cabaret scene continues to grow and new faces are always welcome.

Gina Otto's appearance conclud the spring edition of producer Jim Dolan's Gaslight Cabaret Festival at the Gaslight Theater on North Boyle, which concluded on April 11th. For information on upcoming shows: gaslightcabaretfestival.com.