The New York Times-20080125-Diva as Broadway Baby- -Review-
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Diva as Broadway Baby; [Review]
Full Text (857 words)What is an imperial Wagnerian soprano to make of Mary Poppins? When she administers that spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, how bitter should it taste behind its sickly sweet camouflage?
In Deborah Voigt's interpretations of songs made famous by Julie Andrews and other Broadway sopranos, she graciously leans forward from her throne but doesn't leave it. It is safer for an empress to remain elevated above the riffraff than to mingle with them beyond bestowing a gloved hand.
That majestic attitude defined the interpretations of songs associated with Ms. Andrews, Barbara Cook, Nanette Fabray and others at Wednesday's opening-night performance of Lincoln Center's American Songbook series in the Allen Room.
The American Songbook is celebrating its 10th anniversary. After some initial fumbling the series found its footing several years ago by settling on an informal pop-recital format that accommodates Broadway, pop, rock, jazz and country music. It is a wonderful showcase.
For all its flexibility the format has its limitations. Beat-heavy body music, including hip-hop, techno and hard rock, doesn't suit it. The series has a decidedly classicist perspective. Songs, not grooves, are the focus. The word songbook means what it says. Harder music would have to be scaled down to an MTV Unplugged level of intensity.
The format is well suited to the kind of crossover concert that Ms. Voigt performed in two shows on Wednesday. The Allen Room, with its spectacular view over Central Park South, is glamorous but welcoming. It encourages the kind of relaxation that an opera singer requires to perform popular music persuasively. Smoothing out the vibrato, reining in the impulse toward grandeur, swinging loosely when a fox-trot pulse kicks in are needed to effect the transition.
Ms. Voigt on Wednesday remained on the conservative side, not entirely comfortable softening her magnificent steely voice into a more intimate mode. There is the sense of her withholding her power.
Her strongest moments were songs that most closely approximate operatic tradition. The most glorious was the set piece from the end of Act I of Sweet Adeline, the 1929 Kern-Hammerstein musical that came after their Show Boat. Performed by Ms. Voigt, with her musical director Ted Sperling as vocal partner, Some Girl Is on Your Mind was interwoven with other melodies from the show, including its most famous number, Why Was I Born? It suggested a scaled-down ensemble from Der Rosenkavalier.
Just as delicious (and sinfully rich) was Willow, Willow, Willow, an even more obscure semi-operatic song from the short-lived 1961 musical Kean, written by Robert Wright and George Forrest of Kismet fame.
As he did recently at the 92nd Street Y's Lyrics and Lyricists tribute to Sammy Cahn, Mr. Sperling filled in the blanks with his capsule descriptions of the musicals and with personal anecdotes, one of which involved his childhood obsession with Mary Poppins. Suave and knowledgeable, with a taste in arrangements that runs toward slightly dry semi-classical chamber pop, he is an appealing crooner with enough sense not to push too hard. The show, he explained, was conceived as a tribute to the kind of soprano he called an endangered species on Broadway.
Conducting from the piano, Mr. Sperling led a quintet whose other members were Antoine Silverman on violin, Peter Sachon on cello, Mark Vanderpoel on bass and Billy Miller on percussion, including a prominent xylophone. The arrangements evoked the conviviality of a Viennese chamber group: marzipan encased in multiple flavors of chocolate.
Ms. Voigt, who was also charming, recalled playing Agnes Gooch in a high school production of Mame, and her version of Gooch's Song was the show's least operatic performance. As she and Mr. Sperling uncorked their versions of songs by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, Weill and the inevitable Sondheim, it was clearer than ever that the endangered species' principal enemy has been heavy amplification.
Equally imperiled is that quaint archetype the Broadway soprano: the simpering, twittering goody-goody spoofed in the show's opening number, The Ingenue, a wickedly funny Gilbert and Sullivan parody by Wally Harper and David Zippel. Nowadays the closest thing to an ingenue in popular music is early Britney Spears, a virginal tease wriggling down a pole. Ms. Voigt is about the furthest thing from that kind of flibbertigibbet as a trained soprano can get.
To hear Ms. Voigt singing Broadway was also to recognize the enormous differences among sopranos' personalities. Where Ms. Andrews conveyed a militant optimism of a dedicated caretaker, Ms. Voigt's attitude in a song like A Spoonful of Sugar was admonitory: You'd better watch your step. Ms. Cook, for all the perspective she expresses, emotionally melts into songs. When she sings Losing My Mind, you feel her pain and confusion.
At the end of that song on Wednesday, Ms. Voigt, denying her character's vulnerability, lashed out in frustration. Where Ms. Cook spins out high notes in a trance of dreamy reflection, Ms. Voigt's vocal peaks are fiery blasts of triumph, commanding exhibitions of power announcing there will be no surrender. The empress will not be deposed.
[Illustration]PHOTOS: DEBORAH VOIGT: At the Allen Room, in the American Songbook series. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD TERMINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)