The ‘Bold, Fresh Original’ Cabaret Sociology of Ann Hampton Callaway and Susan Werner
Cabaret’s Self-Described Thelma and Louise Cruise Landmark Stage
“Girls Rule!” raved critic Ann Latner of AnnReviews.com when Susan Werner appeared with Red Molly at the Landmark a few years ago. The self-described “Thelma and Louise of Cabaret” (credit an Ann Hampton Callaway fan with first making the connection) of Hampton Callaway and Werner carried their fans into what, in a different universe, might have been Thelma and Louise in a regular appearance at Feinstein’s.
The connection is apt. The film appeared long before #MeToo intensified awareness of the exploitation endured by women, but did surface the scant recourse given women by the justice system. How had things changed since 1991? Stay umm, tuned.
Tamely themed “Alone and Together,” the evening delivered a pleasing anti-subtext of songs from both singers’ catalogs. By fully inhabiting the lyrics and liberally drawing satirical comparisons to contemporary circumstance, the women were character witnesses for the film icons.
Ann Hampton Callaway (Thelma)
The Ann Hampton Callaway (“AHC”) segment kicked off the evening with a fun, “too-white-to-sing-the-blues blues” song — foreshadowing the playful sarcasm that would characterize both performances. She set the cabaret tone (more poetically, “Noisetone” | See below) by deftly pulling off credible imitations of trumpet and sax with vocalizations. Her version of the classic “Funny Valentine” included a bit of John Pizzarelli-inspired unison piano / vocal improv.
Few in the audience may have known it, but among the 300 original songs penned by AHC lies “The Nanny Named Fran,” the upbeat theme song for her Flushing compatriot (she and her sister were raised in Long Island’s Huntington) Fran Drescher’s TV show.
“My accountant says it was my best moment as a songwriter,” she mused.
In addition to reprising her TV theme song, Ms. Callaway offered her version of “I’ve Dreamed of You.” With obvious relish, she retold the story of how her lyrics to this Rolf Lovland song, sung by Barbara Streisand at her wedding to James Brolin, came about. It was a “Bergman-esque” effort, she explained, referring to Streisand collaborators Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Though it did require her to imagine the Hudson as the somewhat more substantial Pacific Ocean.
The highlight of the Ann Hampton Callaway segment was her fully improvised song incorporating audience-chosen names, places and themes. The result, featuring Jenny and stud muffin Mark, was a lightweight affair (even as its locale drifted east toward Port Jefferson).
Doing this in real time, and making it look easy, requires a certain professional flair.
Susan Werner (Louise)
Both are prolific songwriters, but Werner’s can be the more incisive, even caustic at times. She started her set with the Latin-inspired “1855 Chevy Bel Air” (from An American in Havana), which she covered surprisingly well on guitar sans ensemble.
It’s probably Werner’s witty lyric writing that prompted Callaway to dub her performing partner “the Dorothy Parker of the American Songbook.” Recall Ms. Parker as the person who quipped, “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue” and “They sicken of the calm who know the storm.”
More caustic was the next tune, “What have you done to your face?”(from Eight Unnecessary Songs) featuring the lines “You’ve smoothed your brow / you got it flatter than Nevada somehow / and your chin’s tucked in / so tight your boobs go up whenever you grin.”
Writing about what has become a Werner favorite, “I Can’t Be New,” Mike Joyce wrote in the Washington Post back in 2004 that her collection including that breakthrough title song comprised “several delightfully crafty and concise tunes that place classic pop mood-making in a contemporary light.”
Also in Ms. Werner’s solo set were the Dylan-inspired “May I Suggest,” “The Night I Ate New Orleans,” “Nobody Loves You Like Me,” and, “Dog,” which featured the memorable “You kissed your dog on the mouth / that’s when it all went south” — and, of course, sarcastically more.
Front Seat with AHC and Werner
The program’s predicable third segment featured the two performers together. With Ann Hampton Callaway at the Landmark Steinway and Susan Werner alternating between an e-keyboard and guitar, the two switched into duet mode as though they’d been playing together for years.
The two had arranged “I Love Being Here with You” (Peggy Lee), “Black Magic,” and, prompted by Ms. Werner, a favorite from the Callaway catalog, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” From the Gershwin trove of genius, they brought out “Love is Here to Stay,” which reminded this reviewer of the Gene Kelly / Leslie Caron 1951 version (full disclosure: they dance to a violin solo).
It’s play, but even in play the two artists showcase their respective versatility: Callaway’s surprisingly wholesome improvised melodies, and Werner’s range of vocal color, surfacing in one phrase as what she calls “defeated flugelhorn.”
When the show closed with the James Taylor classic “You’ve Got a Friend,” the two performers seemed to be channeling a Thelma and Louise sisterhood as much as the song’s expression of affection.
More fearless than vulnerable, the singers seemed at that moment out of place even in Kurt Weill’s cabaret. There were in the front seat of a 1966 T-Bird.
Three Part Harmony: “Bold, Fresh, Original”
Roger Ebert called Thelma and Louise “bold, fresh and original.” The film, written by Callie Khouri, is iconic for its memorable closing scene, but decades after it was first shown, also generally underestimated.
The University of Hawaii’s film and narrative studies specialist Glenn Man explained. He writes:
In transforming the classical heroine, Thelma and Louise frames new fantasies for spectator appropriation, those that link the feminist desires within the film’s audience to those of its female protagonists. The attempt is no less to construct a new way of seeing, a new bearer of the look, as it is to deconstruct traditional male structures. What the narration of Thelma and Louise attempts to do then is to inscribe both women as subjects and agents of the narrative, give authentic voice to their desires, and mute the discourses of the male characters. . . Thelma and Louise overturn the classical paradigm in two important ways. They take over the dominant roles normally assigned to men, and they resist to the end the enticement to compromise or recuperate. In both cases, they undermine the passivity, self-sacrifice, and masochism associated with the conventional roles of wife, mistress, daughter, mother, girl in love that have haunted the Hollywood screens of the past.
The film promotes “an authentic and discrete female agency,” Glenn Man writes, not just sisterhood.
The mid-career confidence of Ann Hampton Callaway and Susan Werner was as much agency as entertainment or competence. In the last act of the evening, they had cruised onto the Landmark stage buoyed by wit and pitch, gone airborne, remain suspended in air so long as these songs are loved and remembered.
Lately Doings
Ann Hampton Callaway’s 2018 album, “Jazz Goes to the Movies,” is her 16th. If you’re not familiar with her work, you’ve got some catching up to do.
Susan Werner’s latest project is NOLA: Susan Werner Goes to New Orleans, a loving shout-out to the Big Easy. Easily [sic] the most memorable of that album’s fruit, “Free Your Ass,” includes the lines “Of course I didn’t listen / I was brimmin’ with ambition” and the helpful prophylactic laxative “. . . Free your ass / and your mind will follow / . . . loosen that bum / with bourbon and rum.”
Next at Landmark
Landmark Radio Theater’s latest production is an original adaptation of the classic 1942 film The Man Who Came to Dinner. Join at 4p Sunday October 6, 2019.
Poetry Echo
. . . or so they say in Barcelona when air is dry.
In our country it is a water sprinkler that hints, “rinsed green.”
Colors often break themselves into separate hues
of noisetone. In a Barcelona cabaret when green is
overtaken,
it is stirred into the mint color of a drink.
The spirit is lifted among primary colors. Nine rows of color.
The future writ in white spaces.
From “Noisetone” by Barbara Guest
A full version of this review is posted on Darkviolin.com.
