Nancy Dussault: Life Upon the Wicked Stage
Nancy Dussault
Life Upon the Wicked Stage
Tom Rolla’s Gardenia, West Hollywood, CA, February 18, 2016
Reviewed by Les Traub for Cabaret Scenes
Nancy Dussault’s opening number, “A Cock-Eyed Optimist,” set a bright, upbeat tone for the evening. Moving into the anchor piece, “Life Upon the Wicked Stage,” as written, she added her own special lyrics to several revisits to the song during the show. This effectively served to bridge sections of her life and career and demonstrated her very keen wit and clever way with words.
While her song selection was based around her life and career, it didn’t limit her to strictly a biographical portrait. Theater stories, punctuated with that keen wit, made for highly entertaining patter. Her personal, imaginative take on the songs was a pleasure to listen to. In addition to dedicating the show to the teachers that made her career possible, she also dedicated it to her husband, Valentine Mayer, who directed it flawlessly. She saluted him in a slow and emotional version of “Get Me to the Church on Time” which gave a wonderful, new reading to the familiar Broadway showstopper. She followed it with one of the best versions of Company‘s “Getting Married Today” I’ve ever heard, in which every phrase throughout the song was treated not only vocally appropriately but accompanied with facial expressions and gestures that added an extra special dimension to it. An interesting bit of information about the song that she related was that her friend, George Furth (the bookwriter of Company ) told her it was inspired by her wedding to her first husband.
The show was full of highlights, but, at the top, had to be her “Salute to Summer Stock,” with a medley of about two dozen songs from that many shows she had appeared in. This was the second time she stopped her own show, the first being after “Getting Married Today.”
A well-deserved tribute to her brilliant musical director, Christopher Marlowe, came in the form of a medley leading off with “I Love a Piano.”
Category: Cabaret Reviews, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Cabaret Reviews, Regional
