What Would You Like to Hear Next?
Andrea Marcovicci is not only one of cabaret’s most beloved performers, she’s also one of its savviest. You have to be smart — and very clear about your own abilities — to stay at the top. In her current show at the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, where she has held court for two decades, Marcovicci uses her talents to great effect. Her ace card has always been her personal charm, and here’s a show in which she fully displays that charm through constant interaction with her audience.
As just…love, by request begins, Marcovicci gives each of her patrons a little booklet listing the titles of 202 songs about love — most of them famous — and asks us to write down our three favorites. She then picks up the requests and puts them in her father’s old top hat. Throughout the course of the evening, she sings certain pre-selected numbers but also picks requested songs out of the hat and performs them.
With each selection, she gently extracts information from the person who made the request. Why this song? What does it mean to you? From there, she is off: Witty ad-libs fly and clever observations bubble up, buttressed by her entertaining stories about the songs that have been chosen. Out of the ether of memory, she and her brilliant musical director Shelley Markham deliver one song after another. The night we were there, Marcovicci performed one song — flawlessly — that she hadn’t sung in 10 years. The evening is, in a word, enthralling.
The idea of a request show isn’t original to Marcovicci; in recent years, for instance, Karen Mack and Michael Holland have included such shows in their popular Gashole series. But Marcovicci makes the concept her own. A master of cabaret, she creates a show with an arc, offering a satisfying mixture of up-tempo numbers, ballads, comedy numbers and torch songs. You will almost always hear her exquisite rendition of William Finn’s “What More Can I Say?”, and you can probably always count on hearing a lovely song that was given to her on her wedding day: “Brave and Foolish Thing,” by Tom Toce and David Israel. But each performance is somewhat different — and how smart is that? On the night we were there, Marcovicci was greeting guests who were already repeat customers.
The show continues at The Oak Room through June 10. It has such a winning concept that we wouldn’t be surprised if Marcovicci revives it every spring. In fact, we’d be disappointed if she didn’t.
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[To contact Barbara & Scott Siegel directly, e-mail them at siegels@theatermania.com.]
