CD Reviews - 2005
Musicals101.com
by John Kenrick
 		   Barbara  Brussell - Lerner in Love

Fellow fans of Alan Jay Lerner are in for some rich listening with this handsomely produced CD. Fresh, intimate arrangements and Brussell's warm, sensitive vocals let more than two dozen Lerner lyrics shine out in all their glory. Along with familiar standards are some delicious rarities, such as "You Haven't Changed at All," a personal favorite from The Day Before Spring. Brussell gives lyrics and music equal attention, making this one of the most enjoyable cabaret recordings in recent years.

Kudos to pianist Tedd Firth, producer/arranger Todd Schroeder and executive producer Frank Skillern for such a classy  presentation -- and to Ms. Brussell for such a worthy tribute to a master  Broadway lyricist and his gifted composing colleagues. 


http://www.musicals101.com/cd2005.htm#Brussell
 		  
Rob Lester

October, 2005

   BARBARA BRUSSELL’s “LERNER IN LOVE”
(LML Records)
by Rob Lester

I am flat out in love with Lerner in Love and think it's a remarkable achievement. Barbara Brussell wraps herself up in Alan Jay Lerner's lyrics and relishes so many individual words and turns of phrase in a way that makes me appreciate singer and song more than ever. What strikes me is that she is so present at each emotional point in the story of each song. Very much an actress, Barbara makes the most of each moment, making often unexpected choices in phrasing. One of the things I remember most in reading about the lyricist and playwright is how he often took weeks on various drafts, tweaking, rewriting, going back to the drawing board. When this interpreter takes such care in bringing out the craft of the rhymes and images, I can't help but be grateful for the fruits of that labor.

I didn't think I'd find so many new ways of looking at these songs after knowing the various cast albums plus countless cover versions of the hits, and Lerner collections by vocalists Julie Andrews, Brent Barrett, the jazz duo Jackie & Roy, an old album with Kaye Ballard and the man himself, and Ben Bagley's Alan Jay Lerner Revisited, plus three concert tributes.

Barbara is a fearless singer. She is more than willing to be revealing, fragile, even foolishly and naively romantic. She dives right into the romantic waters, but most of the songs chosen are the happier ones, so she's not drowning in treacherous seas. Whether belting or taking a turn at quiet reflection, the singer is commanding. Her fuzzy, fizzy voice is well suited to a sense of awe and wonder as in "Gigi" or "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face." In these numbers where a character is thinking out loud and discovering something, she is so "in the moment" you'd swear she didn't yet know what the next line is. I was especially happy to hear two selections from the Broadway score Carmelina: the perfect mood-establishing album opener, "It's Time for a Love Song," and one of the most perfect bittersweet songs ever, "One More Walk Around the Garden."


Although Barbara can rip the roof off and rip your heart out with a torchy turn such as "What Did I Have That I Don't Have," I think she's even better at the most unabashedly romantic numbers. Four songs from Brigadoon, Lerner's first hit show, are especially glorious in this category, with their majestic Frederick Loewe melody lines. With a generous 71-minute playing time and five tracks being two-song medleys, the beguiling and breathy ballads are wisely varied with powerful and passionate pleas, like "Anyone Who Loves," a call for tolerance from Dance a Little Closer (1983) with Charles Strouse's music. That show's title song is successfully partnered with "I Could Have Danced All Night," one of four from My Fair Lady. The classic score's "Show Me," usually sung in explosive fury, is slowed down considerably and revealed to be seductive rather than assertive. It's the major reinvention here among many smaller, more subtle creative ideas.

This is a high-class, high-gloss production with high marks for the arrangements and the work of all musicians. Barbara is reunited with Todd Schroeder who produced, orchestrated and played piano on her only other solo album, Patterns, which also showed off her quirky and comic side, back in 1998. Here he produces and sings one duet quite effectively ("You Haven't Changed At All") but only plays piano on three tracks. He shares arranging credits with Scott Harlan and Tedd Firth, the main pianist. Tedd is one of the most skilled and sensitive players I've seen and heard in cabaret and jazz. Other top jazz players are present: Steve LaSpina is on bass and the wonderful Gene Bertoncini on guitar. Trumpeter Warren Vache makes valuable contributions on three tracks and Robert Kyle sits in on sax on "There's Always One You Can't Forget." Likewise, this album is one you can't forget: it stays with you.

Although these interpretations sound fresh and spontaneous, it's all been developed and honed in live engagements since the first month of 2004.  Next, she's turning her attention to Johnny Mercer. I can't wait.



 		  
NEWS FROM WWW.TALKINBROADWAY.COM TOP TEN CDS OF 2005
By Rob Lester

BARBARA BRUSSELL

Moving from vocalists who sing their own material to those who mine The Great American Songbook, cheers to Barbara Brussell whose CD is virtually all love songs, all the time. She's come up with a radiant and smart love fest. Although mostly ardent, she has the variety of some trouble in paradise.  Lerner in Love is her second album and it's delicious. Surveying songs with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, she visits Camelot, Brigadoon and more. With classic show tunes and a few rarely done, she sings with an actress's instincts and a canny cabaret singer's skills. Barbara is very present in a moment-by-moment way in her interpretations, sounding very wrapped up in whatever point a love song's lyric finds her. She clearly loves to explore a lyric and finds new ways to phrase and shade familiar lines. She can also belt!
With musical director-pianist Tedd Firth and other fine musicians like the veteran guitarist Gene Bertoncini, this is a class act. With the man who wrote the lyrics for My Fair Lady, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Gigi, etc. - all represented here - Barbara had a wealth of literate lyrics on love to choose from and gets to 25 of them (five tracks are pairings). The album is from LML Records, which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2005.
The New York Times CABARET REVIEW 
'Almost Like Being in Love'
Danny's Skylight Room

Life for an Overlooked Career
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Friday, December 10, 2004

Hardly anyone remembers "Dance a Little Closer," the 1983 Charles Strouse-Alan J. Lerner musical, which opened and closed on Broadway in one night. But that ill-fated show produced a brilliant nugget, "There's Always One You Can't Forget," which has gained a tentative foothold in the skimpy catalog of modern Broadway standards. This rueful ballad about pinning your lost hopes on a missed romantic opportunity distills the secret regret tucked in the back of most people's hearts. It may be the most poignant if-only ballad ever written for the stage.

That song is one of many revelatory moments in Barbara Brussell's anthology of Lerner's surprisingly overlooked career, "My Fair Lady" notwithstanding. "Almost Like Being in Love: The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner," which plays at Danny's Skylight Room on Wednesday evenings through Dec. 29 (it will probably be extended) is a 100-minute cabaret show seeking a larger space and a two-act format.

It ought to establish Ms. Brussell as a singer and storyteller ready to join the dozen or so performers on cabaret's top rung.

Ms. Brussell conveys a flighty off-center charm and glamour that suggest Renée Zellweger as a late-50's torch singer. At the same time, she wields an intensely dramatic voice similar to Betty Buckley's at its middle and lower end.

Ms. Brussell's concept, borne out by her program, is that Lerner (who married eight times) was a lifelong romantic whose workaholism and perfectionism attested to the same obsessive quest for the ultimate. That perfectionism is evident in the wordplay of "Hymn to Him (Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?"), whose complexity and wit match anything by Porter or Sondheim. Lerner drove himself half crazy trying to come up with a more accurate term than "crashing through the ceiling" (from "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"). People crash through floors, not ceilings, he worried out loud to his collaborator Frederick Loewe, who advised him to cool it.

As for his romanticism, "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" says it all.
Singing that and other famous ballads, Ms. Brussell and her pianist, Tedd Firth, strip away layers of musical formality to unearth the feelings beneath the official trappings.
BACK STAGE Bistro Bits
BY DAVID FINKLE
November 12-18, 2004

Brussell Sprouts!

Barbara Brussell’s evolution is something to track.  When she arrived in Manhattan from California a decade or more ago, she’d already accumulated an impressive set of credentials as a musical-comedy performer.  Talented as actress and singer, nubile and apple-cheeked, she looked a safe bet for a boile future.  Within a shorter time than many others have managed, she was in the Oak Room at the Algonquin, where she instantly looked as if she belonged.  The usual awards, including a 1997 Bistro nod from this publication, collected around her.

Some career trajectories aren’t as predictable as others, however, and Brussell’s hasn’t been.  For reasons about which I won’t speculate, the Carmel thrush’s path has taken a curious but commendable turn.  She no longer sticks to the kind of formula that keeps a performer reliably on, for instance, the Oak Room radar.  Instead, she’s going in another, trickier direction:  presenting herself – or someone convincingly like herself – on full display as a woman with insecurities.

There’s nothing new, needless to say, about autobiographical acts.  They’re often advised as the smart ticket for succeeding in intimate venues.  But what Brussell does these days is not your mother’s autobiographical act.  It’s not the standard set of facts about birthplace, showbiz path, blah, blah, blah.  Brussell is doing something few others do or have done:  psychological autobiography.  She isn’t counting on patrons to like everything they see and hear, just to understand it’s 100% authentic.  (Maybe only irascible Nina Simone ever did anything similar when, in her concerts, she refused to mask her churning moods.  Janis Joplin’s singing also seemed to issue directly from the darkest recesses of her turbulent psyche.)

Take Brussell’s breathtaking interpretation during the recent Cabaret Convention of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”  This was no expression of joyful ardor; it was a confession of how disorienting love can be from someone who appeared to know more about it than she cared to. The rendition came as no surprise to anyone who’d seen last year’s Danny’s Skylight Room visit, “The Piano Bench of My Mind:  Songs I’ve Been Sitting On for Far Too Long.”  For the acclaimed stint, Brussell sang material that clearly and deliberately reflected a woman’s conflicted state of mind.  She might just as easily have called the show “Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”

This year, in “Almost Like Being in Love:  The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner” at Danny’s Skylight Room, Brussell would seem to have backed off that shaky cabaret limb to do another of her songwriter tributes.  The program is that, of course, and a deserving one for a wordsmith who – in this Sondheim age – has been shamefully overlooked.  But the often-married Lerner was writing his lyrics from a shadowy place with which Brussell obviously also relates.  Once again, Brussell, gesticulating agitatedly, brings a fragile intensity to many of the intricately etched inclusions.  There are no conventional readings here.  “What will she do next?” the audience comes to wonder.  She doesn’t disappoint with a medley like “You’re All the World to Me” and “Too Late Now” (both with music by Burton lane).  And forget about “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?” (also Lane’s melody).  Or don’t forget about – see if you can even try.

With first Blossom Dearie and now Maude Maggart, Phillip Officer, and Brussell, the Danny’s Skylight Room folks are establishing a once-or-twice-a-week long-run policy that’s turning out to be extremely valuable.  It gives some of the city’s most outstanding if exploratory performers a place to show their bold, chancy wares.  Brussell is benefiting from the approach, and the feeling is mutual.  Big thanks to all concerned.
The New York Observer

11/8/2004

The Fair Lady Sings
by Rex Reed

Every Saturday night in November, Barbara Brussell, the wittiest of girl singers, is interpreting the songs of Alan Jay Lerner, the most urbane and literate of lyricists, with the dreamy support of Tedd Firth, one of New York’s most sensitive pianists. This treasure of good fortune is happening at Danny’s Skylight Room on West 46th Street, in the middle of Restaurant Row. You’d be a fool to miss it.

I’d like to share with you a Reader’s Digest condensed version of what she does that is so special, but this relative newcomer to the first ranks of cabaret royalty wears so many hats that I know when I’m licked. Behind that sunny, blond California Doris Day veneer hides the violent mayhem of Betty Hutton. That’s why investing so much energy and sincerity into the colossal repertoire of the equally eclectic Alan Jay Lerner really pays off. He wrote as many different kinds of songs as she has moods, voices and mannerisms. The harvest from such a daunting assembly of styles is bountiful.

Playing around with tempos, buttering love songs with a crusty sob in the throat, sucking the sap out of comedy material like nectar from a honeycomb, Ms. Brussell can fulfill every fantasy with a snap of her fingers. Tackling songs previously claimed by Louis Jourdan, Fred Astaire, Robert Goulet and Maurice Chevalier, she stamps them with a branding iron of her own authentic invention.

And she’s such a fine actress that she can shine a flashlight on the subtext of a Lerner lyric in fresh ways that make you feel like you’re hearing it for the first time. Classics from an 18-year collaboration with Frederic Loewe that produced theatrical history are inevitable, but believe it when I tell you they never heard an "Almost Like Being in Love" like this in Brigadoon. The way she approximates the talk-sing style of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady or makes "If Ever I Would Leave You" from Camelot tremble and shimmer with passion, makes me wonder why so many women always stick to the obvious Julie Andrews songs in both shows. The men’s songs were much better.

Exploring Lerner’s partnerships with other songwriters, she unmasks luscious gems by Burton Lane, Charles Strouse and Kurt Weill. From the hilarious "Economics" from an early failure called Love Life to Jane Powell’s evergreen "Too Late Now" from the MGM musical Royal Wedding, Ms. Brussell gives every tune a unique spin, distilling the essence of life’s changing seasons. She is real, she is tender, she is wacky. And the well-researched biographical material that links the musical themes is cogent, pithy and informational, reminding us that Mr. Lerner had one eye and was just over five foot six, yet still managed to write some of the greatest love songs of all time and marry eight wives. I’ve never heard the conversational chatter in a cabaret act inserted so zanily into patter that I can only describe it as Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness fused with bump-and-grind show-business sequins.

The highlight of the show is the hauntingly beautiful Lerner-Strouse ballad "There’s Always One You Can’t Forget" from the one-night misfortune Dance a Little Closer. It reminds me once again that great songs often come from flop musicals. Ms. Brussell and her tastefully chosen, sometimes obscure but always memorable songs make me wonder out loud: Where have they been all my life?

You may reach Rex Reed via email at: rreed@observer.com.
back to top

This column ran on page 28 in the 11/8/2004 edition of The New York Observer.

 

Cabaret Scenes Magazine
October 8, 2004		 Barbara Brussell
Almost Like Being In Love

by Peter Leavy


Danny's Skylight Room



Barbara Brussell not only finds her métier with Almost Like Being In Love, she fashions a show with Alan Jay Lerner’s lyrics that is sure to hit lists of this year’s Ten Best. There is little doubt that presenting this show is a labor of love, one she shares with her audience as she weaves a tapestry of songs, biography, anecdotes and theater history that devotees of musical theater will relish as being as fascinating as it is charming.

Over four decades, Lerner collaborated with Broadway’s and filmdom’s finest composers. In addition to co-writer Frederick Loewe, with whom he crafted Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, Camelot, Gigi and, of course, My Fair Lady, Lerner also wrote with Burton Lane, Charles Strouse and Kurt Weill.

Brussell has a voice as satisfying as a fine cello in a virtuoso’s hands, and with the backing of Patrick De Genaro’s excellent keyboarding, Lerner’s oeuvre of melodic and romantic songs is a treasure trove of perfect material for her.  The show—and Brussell—is in turn poignant, informative, joyful and absorbing. In the course of the evening, she touches all the bases. Which is appropriate, because with Almost Like Being In Love, Barbara Brussell hits the cabaret ball right over the outfield fence.
 

The 
New York Times

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

A Scrapbook of Songs That Adhere to a Life

November 25, 2003

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

At a time when most cabaret shows are organized around strict thematic concepts, it takes a certain courage to buck the trend and use one's own messy life as a subject. But Barbara Brussell, who grew up in Carmel, Calif., and now lives in New York, carries it off with aplomb.


Her show, "The Piano Bench of My Mind," which plays at Danny's Skylight Room on Friday and thereafter on Saturdays in an open-ended run, is a seriocomic potpourri of personal favorites, subtitled "Songs I've Been Sitting On for Far Too Long." The wildly eclectic program ranges from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Joni Mitchell.

Projecting an off-kilter blend of zaniness and pathos that suggests the unpredictable mood swings of a Renée Zellweger character, Ms. Brussell, accompanied on piano (Mark Nadler substituted for her regular musicians last Friday), is a quick-change artist who injects an element of surprise into everything she sings. Her medium-strength voice, with its astringent edges, rides on a rapidly pulsating vibrato.

"I Cain't Say No" — Ado Annie's signature song from "Oklahoma!" — is slowed down to become the unblushing confession of a boy-crazy woman who swoons over every syllable of cheap sweet talk poured into her credulous ear. Ms. Mitchell's early ballad "I Don't Know Where I Stand" becomes the ditzy effusion of a romantically besotted teenager.

Many of the songs are prefaced with anecdotes and offbeat references. Marc Blitzstein's "I Wish It So," is offered as a commentary on Helen Keller's yearning to communicate. "And This Is My Beloved" from "Kismet" is introduced by a poignant passage from Liv Ullman's 1976 memoir, "Changing." By understating the flowery lyric and inflecting it with a tinge of humor, Ms. Brussell turns this piece of romantic kitsch into something genuinely real and touching.
NEW YORK OBSERVER
ON THE TOWN WITH  REX REED
November 19, 2003

by Rex Reed 

Captivating
Barbara Brussell is a new singer with wit, style, warmth, drive and impeccable musical taste. She also has incredible chops. You can catch her every Friday night in November at Danny's Skylight Room on West 46th Street. She will captivate you.

Without losing any of its humor, she finds a brand-new way to act the subtext of Ado Annie's "I Cain't Say No," and she can twist your heart into the shape of saltwater taffy on the exquisite ballad "Strangers Once Again".

She treats music like architecture-slowly, meticulously building songs by Harold Arlen, John Bucchino, Tommy Wolf, Craig Carnelia, Cole Porter and others, brick by brick, until the mortar is in place and a total mood is created. Her voice is a happy voice, with a husky edge that can be sexy and slap-happy at the same time.

Every number bears her unique stamp, and that includes the surprising aria "This Is My Beloved" from Kismet, performed in an introspective style refreshingly devoid of the usual histrionics. Whether she's examining Joni Mitchell or Oscar Hammerstein, she holds notes on descriptive words the way a great actor breaks up the thought patterns in a monologue.

The voice is sunny, the arrangements are definitively B.B. (Before Barbra), and any singer who moves from Marc Blitzstein to Joni Mitchell in a matter of pulse beats has got to be called sophisticated. In a cabaret world that is glumly turning nightmarish, Barbara Brussell is a dream come true. "   rreed@observer.com. 
TIME OUT NEW YORK
Top live shows

Barbara Brussell
Danny's Skylight Room

by James Gavin

Cabaret singer Barbara Brussell looks like a composite of the great Hollywood blonds, from Harlow and Monroe to Goldie Hawn. And in her heart-tugging roller coaster of a show, she's everything those women are onscreen: childlike, desperate, flirty, madcap, sad. 

Brussell is no kid; for 20 years she has led a choppy bicoastal career in clubs and musical theater. The motor-mouthed title of her new act - The Piano Bench of My Mind: Songs I've Been Sitting on for Far Too Long - should tell you what a handful she is. Laughing through tears, she details her journey from one disastrous romance to another - and her eagerness to throw herself back in the ring for more.

Onstage, this fearless singer-actress draws on a madly eclectic bunch of songwriters to tell her story: Rodgers and Hammerstein; '60's folk dreamboat Richard Farina; Leo Ferre, France's anarchist poet laureate.

Singing Joni Mitchell's “I Don't Know Where I Stand" in her sweet, plaintive voice, Brussell becomes a wistful flower child.  She delivers the tragic aria from South Pacific, “This Nearly Was Mine," in a tone of sheer terror as she sees another Prince Charming slip away.  But by the time she's reached And This Is My Beloved," a hymn to fairy-tale love from Kismet, Brussell is Cinderella again, so endearingly starry-eyed that every word of her fantasy rings true.
                                                        
The Beverly Hills Outlook
A Biweekly Review of the Arts and Culture in Southern California Cabaret


Barbara Brussell at the Gardenia. 8/9/03
BY GINA ZOLLMAN

To me, the art of cabaret can be summarized in just two words: Barbara Brussell. It's like I'm a fan of all that is excellent and true and honest and full of wonder and awe at life itself, and this is Barbara. She can be eclectic and New York and hip, and real and imperfect at the same time, and make you feel lost in the moment of her most earth-shattering revelations, and you never feel the remotest bit alien or other. You are a part of her private world, which is accessible and full of love. This brings mind to her latest show, fresh from its New York debut, "The Piano Bench of my Mind: Songs I Have Been Sitting on for Too Long." A show full of life and love and heart and soul, not to be missed and only to be ignored if you choose to avoid the greatest talent in cabaret today.


She started off with a very enchanting duet of songs, "Let's Love/Taking a Chance on Love," a loving start to a very intimate show. Barbara's rap is very personal and engaging, how you describe it? Like she is talking to a girlfriend in private, so sweet and innocently personal. This is the apex of cabaret, the mind-blowing singer who can reel you in to her own private world with a laugh and a story that is at once interesting and a journey of knowingness from which there is no return. Now you are part of the initiated. Now you know Barbara. Now you are part of an elite club who knows what it is like to be reached in the dark and known personally for all your flaws and intricacies. Brussell is not merely a talent, she is an experience, a revelation, a star. Now, if you don't believe me, go to her website (www.barbarabrussell.com) and read what the New York critics have to say. I'm not alone in my regard for this artist. I just dare to say what most people who have seen her already know: she is a genius at communicating and acting a song. There, I said it. Is it so hard to believe there are geniuses among us?


Her show speaks to the genius inside all of us, if we are present enough to listen. It's not just a string of songs connected by mindless banter, but a vision of life as we know it, or as we'd like to know it, full of radiant love and connectedness with other like-minded human beings. Oh, if the world could only be as Barbara sings it. Isn't that why we go to a show, to be whisked away into another world, one that we wish to be a part of? To enumerate the songs is to miss the point, it's like telling of the brush strokes in a painting: it's the whole picture you want to recall. But I will regale you with highlights such as "And This is my Beloved" (awesome and memorable) and comedic turns such as "The Heel" (hilarious). Barbara's choices are right on target and hand-picked for the overall effect of creating a mood of love and joy and laughter. If you are not in this place when you arrive, you will be there by the time you leave. Her essential self is portrayed in her talking, so inimitable as to make you realize you are in a special place: her audience. This is already too much, and you can hardly believe such accolades, but I go on record when I say that in cabaret, this is as good as it gets. Go see her like you would have seen Garland and tell her Gina Zollman sent you. If this was Japan or Germany she'd be a national treasure. Powers that be, listen up!
THEATERMANIA.COM
Barbara Brussell  Brussel Sprouts

By Barbara and Scott Siegel

Barbara Brussell is one of this city's most "live" performers,...Many artists rehearse their every gesture, word, and inflection to the nth degree; with Brussell, you never really know what you're going to get, but you can be sure it won't be artificially manufactured.

Her current show at Danny's Skylight Room, The Piano Bench of My Mind, is an eclectic mix of songs that she has been sitting on (so to speak) and is finally getting around to performing. A sensitive actress, Brussell brings a depth of feeling to "This Nearly Was Mine" (Rodgers and Hammerstein, from South Pacific) coupled with "Once Upon a Time" (Charles Strouse-Lee Adams, from All American).

What truly sets her apart from so many of her contemporaries, though, is her deliciously loopy sense of humor. She finds fresh ways into such familiar songs as "I Cain't Say No" (R&H again, from Oklahoma!) and infuses less well-known tunes like "The Heel" (Robison-Beach-Ferre) with her excellent comic timing If she's out of her vocal depth in a song such as "And This is My Beloved" (Wright-Forrest-Borodin), Brussell more than compensates with her gift for interpreting the work of some of today's finest writers. She's terrific when singing songs by the likes of Craig Carnelia ("I Met a Man Today"), John Bucchino ("If I Ever Say I'm Over You"), and another Bucchino tune with a lyric by Lindy Robbins ("Strangers Once Again"). A unique performer, Barbara Brussell
continues indefinitely at Danny's with late shows on Saturday nights.
 
CABARET SCENES MAGAZINE
BARBARA BRUSSELL

December 2003

by Elizabeth Ahlfors


We recognize them from old movies-- the world-weary blonde sophisticate and the blonde bonbshell belter.  Barbara Brussell, a soulful musical actress, is a little bit of both.  Her latest show at Danny's Skylight Room, The Piano Bench of My Mind,  opened with the bouncy optimism of, Let's Love and Taking a Chance on Love, but then turned towrad the darker side of romance with a potpourri of songs tied together by personal anecdotes of love and loss.

Accompanied by Alex Rybeck and armed with her own singular vibrato, dramatic phrasing, comic vulnerablilty, and unique audience draw,  Brussell built up the intensity of songs like  This Nearly Was Mine and  Once Upon a Time, I Met a Man Today and a manic The Heel.  Sort of a therapy session in song.

At the end, Barbara Brussell, taking a chance on love and everything else, proved again, to be a one-of a kind chanteuse for these most complex of times.

 

The New York Times

Grown-up Sentiment, Every Word Purposeful

By Stephen Holden, May 19, 2000

Imagine the younger Kathleen Turner crossed with Sandra Dee, and you'll have some idea of the complicated flavors projected by Barbara Brussell, the gifted Los Angeles-born cabaret performer who is making her debut engagement through June 3 at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel (59 West 44th Street, Manhattan). Ms. Brussell, who has diligently worked her way up the New York cabaret ladder, has an utterly distinctive voice: medium-size, with a cottony texture and a quickening vibrato. Her phrasing is curtly emphatic and her dramatic instincts are so carefully cultivated that she gives every word a purposeful intention. The emotional cross-currents in her singing are intriguing. Sometimes in the same song, she projects a theatrical incisiveness reminiscent of Betty Buckley but with an undertone of her baby doll innocence. Ms. Brussell's new show, "I Wish You Love", in which she is accompanied by Christopher Marlowe on piano and Steve LaSpina on bass, is a far-reaching blend of romantic show tunes and inspirational ballads, spiced with some tartly witty changes of pace. Her version of "I've Got You Under My Skin", treats this Cole Porter gem as an unalloyed expression of romantic obsession.

John Wallowitch's introspective "Photographs" and the pained but loving parent-to-child reflections "If I Could", by Ken Hirsch, Marti Shannon and Ron Miller, reveal her fondness for American songs that echo the grown-up sentimentality of Europeans like Charles Aznavour.

The high point of a program that moves from songs of yearning toward deeper expressions of songs of empathy and altruism in her versions of Stephen Sondheim's, "No More," from the show "Into the Woods." As she belts this plea for people to shuck self-destructive fairy tale fantasies and embrace the real world; the California dreamer and the New York sophisticate join hands.

(The New York Times, Friday, May 19, 2000)


Plush Room, San Francisco, California

Barbara Brussell performing
"I Wish You Love"

By David M Schwartz

Some performances defy analysis because of the emotional complexity of the message that is at the heart of the experience and the skill of the artist who is communicating it. Why is it, I asked myself, that certain cabaret evenings remain fixed in memory while others fade? How does the performer create this indelible impression? These questions have been with me for days since I saw Barbara Brussell.

The subject of Ms Brussell's performance was LOVE. This was not to be an evening of fairy-tale happy endings, bathed in pumped-up Hollywood color. No, what Barbara Brussell and her superb musical director, James Followell, set out to do was alert us to the "small print" on lovers' contracts that is only ever hinted at and never heeded when love is in full flight. And yet, she did not set out to play the role of the cynical spoiler. Her mission was to open the eyes of the lovers in all of us and guard us from pain. The essential premise of this magical evening was summed up in the title: "I Wish You Love."

From the moment of her entrance, it was impossible to ignore what was being said or entertain any sort of petty scepticism. Dressed in a black satin gown with a red satin stole, Barbara Brussell appeared to be a cross between the first date you ever took to a school prom and a fairy godmother-in-training. You know the type -- warm, clever and earnest with a strange mixture of naivety and old world wisdom far greater than the sum of her years. As she moved around the tiny stage of the Plush Room, by turns singing and chatting about loves and friendships gained and lost, occasionally hinting at darker moments in her own search for love, telling stories about the many colors of love, I felt compelled to listen; I had no choice.

Brussell's selection of material beautifully illustrated the various aspects of love, starting with a gentle warning about the pitfalls of emotion ("But Beautiful" by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke), moved us right into the deep waters of amour with all its intoxicating stimulation ("Lucky To Be Me" from ON THE TOWN and "It's Love" from WONDERFUL TOWN, both by Bernstein with Comden and Green). From there, it was a short step to that experience that comes with romance of being surrounded by love, as if in a small village "where everyone knew your name" ("Mira" by Bob Merrill from CARNIVAL).

Speaking personally of her yearning for love as a young girl, as viewed through the prism of Broadway love songs ("I Have Dreamed" by Rodgers and Hammerstein from KING AND I), Ms Brussell then began to touch on some of the darker aspects of love and marriage with a remarkable set of songs that touched on a lover's all-consuming obsession for a mate (a very striking rendition of "I've Got You Under My Skin" by Cole Porter) to the often un-voiced regrets of relationships that are based on compromise and unmet needs (Amanda McBroom's stunning evocation of numb suburban marriage, "Putting Things Away" from HEARTBEATS and the David Shire/Richard Maltby Jr poignant ballad "And, What If We Had Loved Like That?"). For me, this was the dramatic heart of the performance, serving as an antidote to the blindly romantic notions of all that went before.

At this point, Barbara Brussell chose to explore the nature of friendships that were sometimes based on one-sided attraction and unacknowledged needs. She changed pace, cooling the temperature somewhat, with the amusing, yet serious, song about saying what one is really feeling while falling in love with someone who is already married ("I Wish" by Babbie Green) before describing the sad end of the remarkable partnership of Lerner and Lowe during the tryouts of CAMELOT and singing their moving song from that show, "If Ever I Should Leave You."

In a short digression, a friendship of youth was now celebrated by having Anne Kerry Ford, a childhood friend who was in town for the Cabaret Convention, join Barbara Brussell on stage for Sondheim's rueful song of marital betrayal, "Every Day A Little Death" from A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC.  Ms Ford then picked up the thread of yearning for love with Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson's "It Never Was You" from KNICKERBOCKER HOLIDAY.

Ms Brussell then set out to tie the threads of her discourse on the many demands of love and the sometimes untidy business of coupling. Starting with "Photographs," a hauntingly beautiful evocation of the past, she asked us to take a long, hard look at our romantic fantasies and recognise how they can often become self-destructive, getting in the way of genuine relating (Sondheim's sobering "No More" from INTO THE WOODS).   She seemed to be saying that by seeing loved ones as they really are (and not how we want them to be) without the baggage of our romantic childhood fantasies would provide the only opportunity to experience love as grown-ups. It certainly is a painful message because many a prince is really a frog and many a princess is really a commoner. Only by facing up to that awful truth can you begin to love the prince or the princess for what they are and not for what you desire and can never attain.

As an antidote to the sadness of "putting away childhood things," Brussell related to us her distinguished grandfather, the late Rabbi Edgar F Magnin's recipe for embracing life (and love) in all its complexities and coupled his posthumous blessing to his grandchildren with song. First there was the deeply moving "If I Could" (by Ken Hirsch, Marti Shannon and Ron Miller), a parent's loving expression of the desire to protect the child (that is all of us) from all the pain that comes with growing up in a world of emotional complexity.

Coming full circle, Brussell then ended the show with the song that provided the title for this show and expressed her desire that all of us now face the prospect of love and loving with renewed hope, "I Wish You Love" (by Charles Trenet in translation by Albert A Beach). For an encore, Barbara Brussell added a parting token of love with "On My Way To You" by Michel Legrand, Alan and Marilyn Bergman. There was nothing more to be said or sung.

Cabaret is an art of the moment, created in that intimate space between the performer and the audience. All too often it fades like a day-old posy of wildflowers. But once in a while there are certain cabaret experiences, particular rare and unique ones, that have stayed with me as a sort of abiding after-image, like the echo of long-ago voices that can still be recalled down the hallways of memory. This is precisely how I continue to experience this very beautiful and heartfelt examination of love by Barbara Brussell. I wouldn't be surprised if others were equally moved by "I Wish You Love."


Bistro
Bits

Joie de Vivre

By John Hoglund, Spring 2000

Barbara Brussell is making her Algonquin Oak Room debut through June 3, with her new show "I Wish You Love", deftly directed by Scott Barnes. With brilliant musical director Christopher Marlowe at the piano and bassist Steve La Spina, Brussell charms the room with show tunes, trenchant ballads, and songs by contemporary composers. It's all fused with fun, personalized anecdotes and stories about composers--making this one of the more auspicious debuts in a major room in awhile.

Brussell has become such a confident, exciting performer that it's hard to view her as one so new to cabaret. On completion of a stint at the O'Neill Cabaret Symposium in 1995, she made a debut at Eighty Eight's, which became her home for several years. There, she honed her craft, earning terrific reviews and a Bistro Award along the way. She performed at The FireBird earlier this season and now takes her bow at The Algonquin.

Where crooning a standard such as "I've Got You Under My Skin" or using her willowy alto belt on Sondheim's "No More", Brussell has developed the artistic and technical prowess of an established veteran somewhat like Andrea Marcovicci. In the ballad-heavy show, she displays considerable style and has blossomed into a fine singer. But beyond that, she possesses that ineffable quality that draws the audience to her. As various facets of her bubbly personality sparkle during her show, you see a glimmer of assorted famed ladies both serious and kooky. On the right number, Brussell has the kind of vulnerability that commands empathy, and she back this up with blunt phrasing that proves very effective. This was particularly evident on "Mira" from "Carnival". When she sang the line, "Can you imagine that?...Everybody knew my name", she was a wide-eyed kid filled with hopes and dreams. It was full of so much halting yearning the you wanted to offer assurance.

She created a similar moment on John Wallowitch's touching "Photographs" and on Francesca Blumenthal's beauty "Museums". However, Brussell's strength lies in comic interpretations of silly songs like Amanda McBroom's quirky "Putting Things Away" or Bobbie Green's "I Wish". Both were real crowd-pleasers.

Some songs were reprised from Brussell's other shows. And that isn't a bad thing. It all demonstrates how important cabaret is--how old songs can have a totally new life and how new songs by great songwriters can get a start. While I may have had a minor quibble or two in the past about Brussell, I can only report on what I witnessed this time around. In short, Barbara Brussell's combination of talent and star quality is unique for one so new to this sphere. The audience couldn't get enough.

Watching Brussell making a major room debut only a few years after her bow at Eighty Eight's and knowing the cabaret stars of a certain age and ilk will simply not be performing forever, one can only imagine the possibilities before her.


The
Chicago
Tribune

Brussell puts a fresh spin on cabaret classics

By Howard Reich, Tribune Arts Critic, 12 February 99

Cabaret performers who bring an open heart, a sharp intellect and a meticulously controlled instrument to the art of song interpretation are difficult to find.
Yet when the emerge, they inevitably inspire a sense of optimism about the fragile state of cabaret singing in the ’90s.
Certainly Barbara Brussell lifted the spirits of the crowd that heard her first show Wednesday evening at Toulouse Cognac Bar. But even if the applause had not been so vigorous, Brussell left little doubt that she is a formidable interpreter with a unique perspective on familiar and novel repertoire.
Yet during her first couple of numbers, Brussell’s musical and dramatic strengths were not readily apparent. The initially sweet and often tremulous tone of her singing voice, as well as her sometimes coquettish stage manner, might easily have led listeners to underestimate her.
As Brussell’s show unfolded, however, she proceeded to shatter first impressions. With each song, she produced unexpected vocal colors and unorthodox readings that pointed to the arrival of a potentially important song interpreter.
Consider Brussell’s work on two standards that turned up early in her show, which she calls “Come a Little Closer” (after the John Wallowitch song).
If Brussell’s account of Irving Berlin’s “They Say It’s Wonderful” proved musically sensitive but a bit too sugary in tone, her version of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” demonstrated how original a singer she can be.
With pianist Christopher Marlowe reworking the piece by radically altering Porter’s chord changes, Brussell was ready to take the song into uncharted territory. Sure enough, she turned the Porter classic into a thoroughly idiosyncratic lament. Her slow tempo, marked pauses between phrases and changing vocal timbres brought fresh dramatic nuances to one of the most familiar works in the Porter canon.
But this was just the beginning of Brussell’s unconventional journey into the cabaret repertory.
Any singer who can express an explosive mixture of love and anger as persuasively as Brussell did in “And What If We Had Love Like That?” (from the David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr. musical Baby) clearly is as much actor as singer.
That Brussell could turn immediately to the darkly comic strains of Babbie Green’s “I Wish”&emdash;a wickedly funny portrait of a woman who spends too much time doubting herself&emdash;suggests that the singers understands more than just the words and notes on the printed page: She knows the nature of the characters who sing them.
The operatic fervor Brussell brought to “Some Enchanted Evening” and the felicity with which she addressed the quirky rhythms of Stephen Sondheim’s “No More” underscored the point.
- Howard Reich, The Chicago Tribune

 

Bistro
Bits

From a review of the 1998 Eighty Eight’s show

By Roy Sander, Fall 1998

I’ve written glowingly before about Barbara Brussell, so let me simply recommend that you catch her new show at Eighty Eight's, where she is working for the first time with director Scott Barnes and musical director Christopher Marlowe. Although in a couple of numbers, she and Marlowe appeared to be on different wavelengths (perhaps more time together is needed), the evening offers ample evidence of why Brussell epitomizes the art of cabaret singing. She doesn't just sing Maltby and Shire's “And What If We Had Loved Like That” she inhabits it&emdash;we can see the emotional scars of a relationship that ultimately failed to make it. Then there are her trenchant interpretation of John Wallowitch’s powerful aria “Photographs” and the dazzling comic timing of her rendition of Babbie Green’s “I Wish.” Performers interested in developing their cabaret skills can learn a lot from watching her.

 

Cabaret
Roundup

From the radio programs on
WRTN 95.5FM & WVOX 1460AM

By Lesley Alexander, Fall 1998

Another ballad heavy show, also at Eighty Eight’s, is offered by Barbara Brussell. However, Brussell breaks up the monotony with amusing anecdotes and witty remarks. And Brussell is one of the finest actresses around. Every song she does becomes a play with music in her hands. You’ve never heard “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” like this before. With an exquisite arrangement by Christopher Marlowe, the song is an exceedingly tender ballad in Brussell’s hands. From the brilliant comic timing of Babbie Green’s “I Wish”, to a gut wrenching rendition of Maltby & Shire’s “What If We’d Loved Like That?” from Baby, Barbara Brussell moves as an emotional powder keg. With an open rich tone and a serious belt at her disposal, Brussell’s voice is better than ever. But why these singers insist on shows with little or no humor and a minimum of up-tempo numbers is anybody’s guess. One thing I can guarantee you though, once you’ve seen Barbara Brussell she’ll get into your soul, you’ll want more and more like a fix you just gotta have, and you won’t care what the heck she’s singing up there as long as she does it just for you. Barbara Brussell is the pick of the month.

 

WLIM
Radio

From the radio program on WLIM radio

By Roy Sander, Fall 1998

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about the art of cabaret singing. Continuing this theme, I’d like to tell you about Barbara Brussell, who’s appearing at Eighty Eight’s in the Village. Barbara Brussell could be the poster girl for cabaret artistry. Last year, she won a Back Stage Bristo Award as Outstanding Vocalist, and if you go down to Eighty Eights, you’ll see why. She puts an indelible and highly personal stamp on everything she does. It could be a ballad&emdash;like a pairing of two John Wallowitch songs “This Moment” and “Come a Little Closer”&emdash;which she uses to establish a warm relationship with the audience.  Or her supberb interpretation of Maltby and Shire’s “What If We Had Loved Like That?”&emdash;she inhabits that song intimately&emdash;we can see the scars of a relationship that ultimately failed to make it. Then there’s John Wallowitch’s song “Photographs” which is less a song than an emotinally potent aria; Barbara’s performance is as extraordinay as the piece itself. And, as if that weren’t enough, she does Babbie Green’s very funny song “I Wish” with dazzling comic timing&emdash;it’s a bravura performance. Barbara Brussell lives in Los Angeles so her New York Performances are all to rare.

 

Time Out
New York
Magazine

Affairs of the Heart: Barbara Brussell explores the long and winding road of love at Eighty Eight’s

By Brian Scott Lipton, Fall 1998

Just as you should never judge the proverbial book by its cover, you should never judge a cabaret act by its opening number. That rule of thumb is particularly true with Barbara Brussell’s new show, Come a Little Closer at Eighty Eight’s. Instead of quickly setting the house on fire as she’s been known to do, Brussell, a California native, who’s made her mark on the New York cabaret scene in the past couple of years, settles for a rather conventional happy-to-be-here four-song medley including John Wallowitch’s title tune that smacks of Cabaret 101.
But less than 15 minutes later, Brussell takes off, subtly charting an entire marriage from beginning to end in a brilliantly arranged (by Christopher Marlowe, beautifully interpreted song cycle; Berlin’s “They Say It’s Wonderful,” sung as an infectious paean to newfound romance; a gorgeously slowed-down rendition of Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” that will instantly speak to anyone who’s ever been prone to unhealthy infatuations; “Putting Things Away”, Amanda McBroom’s stunning summation of disaffected domesticity; and Maltby and Shire’s heart-wrenching it’s-too-late-now ballad “What If We Had Loved Like That?”
If nothing in the show’s second half takes us back to that acme, considerable pleasures still lie ahead; Babbie Green’s clever tongue-twisting interior monologue “I Wish”; a remarkable nonteachy “Some Enchanted Evening” and especially a carefully considered yet passionate reading of Sondheim’s “No More.” Alternating between her ready soprano and her richer lower register, Brussell finds ways not only to touch the heart but to break it as well.
-Brian Scott Lipton, Time Out New York
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