Numbers Game

Here are the top 10 things you should know about the musical Bingo:

1) You get free popcorn on your way into the theater.

2) You get a couple of free Bingo cards and a dauber in order to play the game during the course of the performance. Winners actually get some money.

3) There is a door prize given to one audience member. (At the performance we attended, it was a bag of peanuts.)

4) The cast of this Off-Broadway show is extremely impressive. Among the folks in Bingo are Liz McCartney (who played Big Sue in Taboo), Chevi Colton, Janet Metz, Klea Blackhurst, and Liz Larsen (she was out of the show when we saw it due to a back injury, but understudy J.B. Wing did a good job). They are all much better than their material.

5) The show needs every scrap of help it can get, and director Thomas Caruso has provided some good gags.

6) The show is about 90 minutes long and has no intermission.

7) The book, by Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid, is so silly that it isn’t worth description. In fact, it’s one long effort at stretching the show to “feature” length.

8) Beth Malone, playing the daughter of one of the characters, admirably performs an extremely demanding comic song from a supposed Off-Off-Off-Broadway musical based on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, titled Cuckoo. Now, that’s a show we’d like to see!

9) The two games of Bingo that the audience gets to play are more fun than the show. A lot more fun!

10) You get a little piece of packaged pie on your way out.

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Two for the Oak Room

It doesn’t get any classier than having the ageless Sandy Stewart at the microphone and her Grammy-nominated son, the peerless jazz pianist Bill Charlap, backing her up on the 88s. So it’s no surprise that putting the two of them together in the sophisticated surroundings of the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room spells perfection. Stewart is an exquisite interpreter whose phrasing young singers could (and should) go to school on. When she sings standards like “Two for the Road,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” “Spring Fever,” and “The Man I Love,” you don’t miss a word — and the words come out meaning more than you ever imagined.

When she gives Charlap the solo spotlight, Stewart leaves the audience in two very good hands. His wildly imaginative rendition of “It’s All Right with Me” will be more than all right with you. You’ll love it! While he was playing, we occasionally glanced over at jazz legend Barbara Carroll, one of the notables in a celebrity-strewn opening night audience that also included Tony Bennett plus Elvis Costello and his wife, Diana Krall. From the joy in Carroll’s face, we could tell that she felt she was hearing something special. You will the feel same way

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Major Barbara

If there’s one thing we’ve come to know about the Transport Group, it’s that the company takes chances. By Off-Broadway standards, its production of The Audience was mounted on a gargantuan scale. The current Transport show, Normal, may be smaller in size but it is no less ambitious in its own way. We readily concede that this musical, about a teen suffering from anorexia and its effect upon her family, is flawed; but in an age of safe choices, one can’t help but admire the creators’ attempt to tell a serious story in an artful way. And the show certainly has its moments, mostly in its songs.

So, before Normal closes on Saturday, we want to cite three of the numbers (written by Cheryl Stern and Tom Cochran) that impressed us: “Pretty to the Bone” explains a young girl’s need to starve herself to perfection, and Erin Leigh Peck as the anorexic teen is both adorable and heartbreaking when performing it; “Nicaragua” is romantic and funny in a melancholy way, delivered by Barbara Walsh as a frazzled mother who fantasizes about running away with her handsome psychiatrist; and “Write This,” performed by both Peck and Walsh, is the emotional high point of the show. Indeed, Walsh is giving what may be the finest performance of her distinguished career in Normal.

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[To contact the Siegels directly, e-mail them at siegels@theatermania.com.]