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Anna Blair: Music Reaches Places |
April 11, 2009
Reviewed by Steve Callahan
Some bright talents are appearing in the burgeoning St. Louis cabaret scene, and the lovely Anna Blair is right up there with the best. Cabaret in our town had so strong a beginning some years ago with the top-flight series at the Grandel. After it lost the Grandel it tried to establish itself upstairs at the Sheldon, but that's a less than gemutlich venue. The cozy, tiny Savor offered brief hope, but is now gone. Now at the Kranzberg in Grand Center we have very congenial, nicely-located small home for this art. And the intense, quality training that has been offered recently is producing a fine crop of estimable cabaret artists.
Miss Blair's evening is entitled "Music Reaches Places". The phrase is from a Fran Landesman lyric, and Anna's music does indeed take us "where nothing else can reach"-into love and memories, into loss, into aspiration and disappointment, into family-into the heart. Warm and charismatic, she glows in her slinky tangerine gown-sexy, a little retro, and with a slightly tarty elegance.
She has done a superb job of selecting her program! Most of the songs were quite unfamiliar to me-and that's always a treat. But there are standards, too: she does a beautiful pair of "lullabies"-"Lullaby of Broadway" followed by "Lullaby of Birdland", in which it's impressive to hear her voice continue to grow in strength as she rises up into her higher registers. Throughout the evening she shows fine control of dynamics and color-from the soft and intimate to the belting, from the breathy to the brassy.
Much of the evening is given to "story songs"-and here she is a gifted musical raconteur. My very favorite was an oddly engaging, pathetic, inspiring song about a dry-cleaner from Dayton who sings while he works. Here accompanist Neal Richardson sings a lovely "Oh, Holy Night" in sweet polyphony while Anna sings the story of his innocent, privately-funded evening in Carnegie Hall. The critics are heartless, but back in Dayton his musical soul remains undaunted. You'll laugh-and you just might shed a small tear. Sweetly done, and as in all her work, Anna Blair shows great sensitivity to the lyric.
"Nothing Really Happened" is a beautifully believable story of a teen-aged girl's crush on the pitcher of her school's baseball team. A wonderful lyric and Anna makes it so real!
She includes a few novelty numbers that are amusing or touching-one in which a caddish young fellow tells the overweight girl that she's "only fifteen pounds away from my love." In another the lady complains to her over-casual lover who far too soon is always puttin' on his shoes.
Her songs of family are sweet and painful. She always makes the lyric believably her own. Her mother is honored with a fine "You and Me Against the World", and her father in a beautiful "Old Man, Look at My Life".
The persona Anna presents is engaging indeed-confidant, easily intimate, and with more than a few bumps on her road of love. It's just what we want in a cabaret artist. Her version of "I Will Be Loved Tonight" is strong yet haunting.
Guest singer Jeffrey Wright does lovely work with Anna in "Take This Sinking Boat".
But the presiding angel at this cabaret evening is surely Fran Landesman. Anna's shared evening of cabaret with Ms. Landesman last fall was clearly an inspiring event in Anna's life. From the Landesman book Anna sings "Music Reaches Places" and the two great jazz standards, "Ballad of the Sad Young Men" and "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most". In the latter she effortlessly masters the quite strange and difficult intervals with which the piece concludes. Landesman's poetic lyrics tend to make the work of some of the more commercial and conventional songwriters included in the program seem uninspired and cliché
Anna Blair has a deep history in musical theatre, and now she's made a triumphant entrance into the world of cabaret.
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