The New York Times-20080124-All Sides Now Of a Seasoned Performer- -Review-

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All Sides Now Of a Seasoned Performer; [Review]

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The moon, like to a silver bow new-bent in heaven, reads Shakespeare's poetic description of an enchanted evening in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Those words also evoke the sound and aura of the singer Judy Collins on a midwinter night. At Tuesday's opening performance of a six-week engagement at the Cafe Carlyle her voice, clear and vibrato free but inflected with delicate little shivers, stole through the room like a shaft of light falling through a stained-glass window. When surrendering to the ethereal spell she casts, your impulse is to turn your head up, close your eyes and tune in to messages from far, far away.

Singing is almost the least of what Ms. Collins does in her new show, An Evening With Judy Collins, in which she alternates between playing the guitar and piano. (While she is strumming, her right-hand man, Russell Walden, fills in on keyboard.) The program, in which singing, reminiscence and reflection blend into a carefully modulated stream of consciousness, is a big step in the right direction toward the one-woman, potentially Broadway-bound show she has been preparing for the last several years.

Ms. Collins conveys the authority of a woman who has been there and done that. If you remember the '60s, you weren't there, she remarked. But she was there, and she remembers. As a fresh-faced folk singer she was the American Idol of 1957, she joked. The show, which changes from night to night, was seasoned with references to Irish Alzheimer's (forgetting everything but still holding grudges) and the Irish virus (alcoholism), along with political barbs. After singing Cat's in the Cradle, Harry Chapin's song about parenthood, she remarked that if Mr. Chapin, the singer-songwriter and left-wing activist who died in 1981, were alive today, he would be looking for words rhyming with indictment. But the darker moments of her life were referred to only glancingly.

She conjured a detailed and moving portrait of her father, Chuck Collins, a radio personality and musician who was blind and who introduced her to classical music. There came a time, she recalled, when she had to choose between Rachmaninoff and The Blue Tailed Fly. Although she chose the second, her solid classical training remains a fundamental ingredient of her musicianship.

That training came to the fore when Ms. Collins sat at the piano and performed Leonard Cohen's Suzanne, Since You Asked (her first original song, which Mr. Cohen pushed her to compose), Born to the Breed (written for her son, Clark, who later committed suicide) and My Father.

Performing several Lennon-McCartney songs from her beautiful recent album, Judy Collins Sings Lennon and McCartney, her voice underscored the purity and freshness of the melodies, which for all their apparent simplicity transcend cliche. As she sang the words Oh I believe in yesterday, that yesterday -- most of all the '60s -- seemed both very near and more distant than ever.

Judy Collins appears through March 1 at the Cafe Carlyle, at the Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street, Manhattan, (212) 744-1600, thecarlyle.com.

[Illustration]PHOTO: Judy Collins's songs conjure the past during her program at the Cafe Carlyle. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD TERMINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)