Julie Budd: Remembering Mr. Sinatra
Julie Budd
Remembering Mr. Sinatra
Metropolitan Room, NYC, September 10, 2015
Reviewed by Ron Forman for Cabaret Scenes
I first saw Julie Budd when she was an extraordinarily precocious 14-year-old performer in a long-forgotten Catskill Mountains resort hotel. Amazingly, since that first sighting, decades ago, she keeps growing as a performer and vocalist. In her new show to introduce her latest recording, Remembering Mr. Sinatra, Budd smoothly intertwined stories of her experiences working with Frank Sinatra, with songs that he performed when she opened for him.
As he has, since Budd was a teenager, musical director Herb Bernstein’s arrangements and piano solos blended perfectly with the beautiful sound of Budd’s voice. She opened with the number Sinatra opened with when they worked together in Las Vegas: “I’ve Got the World on a String, ” followed by “All the Way” and the song whose title is printed on Sinatra’s tombstone, “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Budd then seamlessly put together, romantically, a medley of “More Than You Know,” “The Very Thought of You” and “The Nearness of You.” Showing off her chops as a belter, she performed a rousing “Come Rain or Come Shine.” Recalling her mother’s singing to her as a girl segued into a very different, beautifully slow-tempoed “How About You?.” Mixing in an imitation of Jimmy Durante, Budd performed the seldom-heard “The Song’s Gotta Come from the Heart,” introduced by Sinatra and Durante in the film It Happened in Brooklyn. Budd spoke briefly of the low point of Sinatra’s career, before performing a heart wrenching “I’m a Fool to Want You.” Matching Sinatra in his ability to seemingly not breathe between songs in a medley, Budd breathlessly put together six songs by George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart. The closing number, “I’ll Be Seeing You” had the overflow crowd in the Metropolitan Room on their feet cheering.
Category: Cabaret Reviews, New York City, New York City Cabaret Reviews
