It was a magical night in New York when two extraordinary artists shared the stage at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, one of the most beautiful theaters in New York City. This elegant jewel-box venue provided the perfect setting for an evening filled with energy, soul, and unforgettable music. Catherine Russell and her special guest, Cyndi Lauper, brought together two very different musical worlds, creating a concert that was thrilling from beginning to end.

Catherine Russell is jazz royalty. Music is in her blood. Her father, Luis Russell, was the longtime musical director for Louis Armstrong, while her mother, Carline Ray, was a pioneering multi-instrumentalist and vocalist. With such a rich musical heritage, Russell has developed a distinctive style that combines jazz, blues, swing, and the great American songbook.

Russell began recording and touring as a backup singer for major artists in 1980. In 2005, she launched her solo career and has since released nine albums. Two of her projects, Harlem on My Mind and Alone Together, earned Grammy nominations for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Beyond performing and recording, Russell is also dedicated to education, teaching master classes and private students and sharing her knowledge with the next generation of musicians.

One of the pleasures of Russell’s performance was the way she reached back through musical history. Her repertoire traveled from the 1920s through the 1950s, introducing the audience to songs that have become important pieces of the American musical heritage. She brought these vintage selections to life with her distinctive voice, impeccable phrasing, and deep understanding of the music.

Among the highlights was “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” a 1927 gem associated with the legendary blues musician Blind Willie Johnson. Russell also performed “After Hours,” made famous by Sarah Vaughan, “Don’t Take All Night,” associated with Nina Simone, and “Trust in Me,” a song famously recorded by Dinah Washington. Each selection demonstrated Russell’s remarkable ability to honor the original artists while making the songs unmistakably her own.

Joining Russell for this special evening was the legendary Cyndi Lauper. A groundbreaking Grammy, Emmy, and Tony Award-winning songwriter and performing artist, Lauper has sold more than 50 million records worldwide. In 2013, she became the first solo woman to win the Tony Award for Best Original Score for Kinky Boots. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015 and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2016.

One of the evening’s most memorable moments came when Russell and Lauper joined forces to perform Lauper’s mega-hit “Time After Time.” Hearing these two distinctive voices together transformed the familiar song into a particularly moving musical moment. The performance brought the audience to its feet, creating one of those special live-concert moments that performers and audiences share together.

The combination of Russell and Lauper made for an especially exciting evening. Each artist brought her own personality and musical identity to the stage, yet they complemented one another beautifully. Their performances demonstrated that great music can cross genres and generations.

They were backed by an extraordinary group of musicians: Anthony Hervey on trumpet, John Allred on trombone, Evan Arntzen on reeds, Lauren Sevian on baritone saxophone, Matt Munisteri on guitar, Ben Paterson on piano and organ, Tel Ronen on bass, and Dominick “Domo” Branch on drums.

The musicians were not simply there to accompany the singers. Each was given generous opportunities to step into the spotlight, and their solos added excitement, depth, and spontaneity to the concert. The band created a powerful musical foundation that allowed both Russell and Lauper to shine.

The Rose Theater itself added to the magic of the evening. Its intimate yet grand atmosphere makes it an extraordinary place to experience live music, and on this night, the theater seemed perfectly matched to the artistry onstage.

This was more than a concert—it was a celebration of musical history, individuality, and the continuing power of live performance. Catherine Russell and Cyndi Lauper proved to be a thrilling combination, delivering a night that was truly magical and one that the audience will not soon forget.

Gerrilyn Sohn brought her cabaret show Timeless: A Tribute to Bernadette Peters to Don’t Tell Mama in New York City, celebrating one of Broadway’s most beloved performers while making the evening distinctly her own.

Sohn did not attempt to imitate Bernadette Peters. Instead, she sang the songs that helped make Peters famous, bringing them to life in her own voice and with her own personality. It was a refreshing approach to a tribute show. Rather than trying to duplicate an iconic performer, Sohn showed why these songs continue to resonate with audiences.

Sohn has long been fascinated by Peters and feels a special connection to her. During the performance, she shared with the audience that she had actually met Peters and was deeply impressed by her warmth and friendliness. That personal connection gave the evening an added dimension, making the tribute feel genuine and heartfelt rather than simply a collection of songs associated with a famous star.

Gerrilyn’s performance was further enhanced by several duets with her talented musical director, Tracy Stark. Their musical chemistry added another layer of warmth and spontaneity to the evening. Stark was not only an accomplished musical director but also a wonderful partner onstage, complementing Sohn’s voice and helping bring the songs to life.

The repertoire celebrated the extraordinary range of material associated with Peters, from sophisticated Broadway numbers to songs filled with humor, romance and emotion. Sohn’s performance demonstrated her affection for the material while allowing her own vocal personality to shine through.

The evening was directed by Lennie Watts, whose experience and understanding of cabaret helped shape the performance. Tracy Stark served as musical director, with Marco Panascia on bass.

Timeless was ultimately less about trying to become Bernadette Peters and more about celebrating what makes Peters such an enduring theatrical icon. Gerrilyn Sohn’s admiration was evident throughout the evening, but so was her individuality. She paid tribute to Peters by singing these memorable songs in her own voice—and that made the performance a tribute worth hearing.

Last Night, Brian J. Nash put on a show that could have played to a full house at Radio City Music Hall and satisfied every single person present. At midtown’s GREENROOM 42, he held a rapt audience in the palm of his hand for the entire 80 minutes and proved to be a real “showman.” The bottom line is that Mr. Nash “is” music. His body language and connection to the piano are wild to watch and the guy’s got “moves.” He also loves every minute of what he’s doing.
Nash has arranged, MDd and played for so many popular artists that I wouldn’t do justice to a partial listing, but he is also considered to be part “Broadway Baby” having worked with the likes of Jennifer Holliday, Shoshanah Bean, Deborah Cox, Laura Benanti, Audra McDonald among them. He travels the world and chases the music. You can follow his adventures on social media and he is quite committed to his goals and is charming and funny.  This encore engagement of the gamely titled BLUE JEAN BABY GRAND was, quite simply, a knockout, after selling out back in July. With one of the greatest bands I’ve ever seen or heard, this performer tore up the music of Elton John and Billy Joel. It was a musical education, with some great photos and an adoring attitude for his heroes, having played many of their songs over his 19 and ½ years spent in piano bars. His stories of discovery go back to his youth, when his voice changed and he could no longer sing “On My Own” from LES MISÉRABLES (in the original key) and he discovered the song “Daniel.” The show soared and soared and soared and the chemistry between the “boss man” and his musicians was built on love, respect and talent. Crazy talent. The pacing and running order of the song list was diabolical. No exaggeration. One of the reasons Eda and I were able to see it was because in July the video they filmed didn’t  work, so this was a “take two” of sorts and, if tonight was captured, it will be something to behold. Bravo to all and if you see Brian J. Nash advertised to appear anywhere near where you are, RUN! You’ll thank me.

The Band: Elena Bonomo, Drums, Mohan Ritsema, Bass, Will Shishmanian, Guitar, Tom Regouski, Reeds, Andrea Neumann, Trombone, Alphonso Horne, Trumpet

BRIAN J. NASH

BRIAN J. NASH

BRIAN J. NASH

BRIAN J. NASH

BRIAN J. NASH

BRIAN J. NASH

BRIAN J. NASH

BRIAN J. NASH

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CARLOS CLEMENZ

ROGER DAWLEY, NICHOLAS YENSON, BRIAN J. NASH

NATALIE DOUGLAS & BRIAN J. NASH

ANDREW LIPPA & FRIENDS

RICHARD JAY-ALEXANDER & BRIAN J. NASH

TOM REGOUSKI & ANDREW LIPPA

EDA SOROKOFF & CARLOS CLEMENZ

CAROLOS CLEMENZ, STEPHEN SOROKOFF, BRIAN J. NASH

I have a problem with Slam Frank. Actually, I have several problems with Slam Frank, the audacious new musical now playing at the Orpheum Theatre. I also think its cast is beyond, beyond, beyond talented, Andrew Fox’s score is fabulous, and there is so much theatrical invention exploding across the stage that I suspect this show is going to develop a cult following and remain with us for a very long time. Therein lies my problem.

Austen Horne, Amelia Louise Barr, and Olivia Bernábe in Slam Frank_Photo by Shawn Salley Photography

I am not particularly a parody person. I understand what parody is trying to accomplish intellectually, but when the subject being used as the vehicle is The Diary of Anne Frank, I cannot entirely separate myself from the story underneath the joke. Anne Frank was a real child. She hid from the Nazis. She was discovered, deported and murdered. There is something about using that particular story as the framework for this satire that I found offensive, even while understanding that offending us is very much part of what Fox and book writer Joel Sinensky intend to do.

They have a great deal they want to offend us about.

Olivia Bernábe as Anita (with ASM Walker Stovall) in Slam Frank_Photo by Shawn Salley Photography

Slam Frank takes Anne Frank and turns her into Anita Franco (Olivia Bernábe), a queer Mexican girl whose diary is written in Spanish. Her family and the people sharing the annex have been reinvented through virtually every contemporary discussion surrounding race, gender, sexuality and identity. The production then throws all of this against the Holocaust while simultaneously parodying the conventions of modern musical theatre. Dear Evan Hansen, Spring Awakening, Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, In the Heights and the musical vocabulary associated with Lin-Manuel Miranda all wander through the evening in one form or another.

Alex Lewis at Peter Van Daan in Slam Frank_Photo by Shawn Salley Photography

Here is where Fox does something remarkably clever. You recognize exactly what is being parodied without leaving the theatre singing the musical being parodied. He captures the musical language without simply stealing the song. That is much harder than it sounds, and his score is one of the strongest things about the evening. The music understands the joke even during moments when I wasn’t convinced the book did.

Rocky Paterra, Jaz Zepatas, Olivia Bernábe, Alex Lewis, Austen Horne in Slam Frank_Photo by Shawn Salley Photography

Bernábe is sensational as Anita. She has the voice, timing, energy and complete fearlessness necessary to stand in the center of this insanity and somehow make us follow her. Anita is part Anne Frank, part Maria from West Side Story, part contemporary musical-theatre heroine and part creation entirely unto herself. Bernábe understands all of those layers and commits to every one of them.

She is surrounded by a remarkable company. What continues to boggle my mind is that these actors are non-Equity. There is an astonishing amount of talent on the Orpheum stage, and nobody is treating this outrageous material as an excuse to coast on the joke. They sing it, act it and play the absurdity as if the stakes were completely real.

Rocky Paterra’s Otto is gay. Austen Horne’s Edith has been reinvented as a fiercely sexual Black feminist. Alex Lewis’s Peter is non-binary. Jaz Zepatos’s Mrs. Van Daan has her own sexual and feminist awakening, while John Anker Bow’s Mr. Van Daan represents a magnificently pompous strain of male superiority. Eventually, practically everyone seems to be coming out to everyone else while the Nazis remain, somewhat astonishingly, outside.

Then there is Margot. The fabulously vocal Amelia Louise Barr spends much of the musical almost mute, which makes what eventually happens with her considerably more startling. I don’t want to destroy the surprise because this is one of those shows where telling you everything that happens would rob you of the experience of sitting there thinking, Did they really just do that? Yes. They did. Repeatedly.

That is both the pleasure and the difficulty of Slam Frank. Things happen in this musical that will make people argue about it for days. I certainly did. Some will find it liberating. Some will find it hysterical. Some will find it offensive. Many will probably experience all three reactions before reaching Second Avenue.

Sam Lafrage’s direction understands that there is no point in approaching material like this timidly. The production barrels forward, gleefully puncturing theatrical conventions and contemporary sacred cows. Nobody gets much protection, and the cast commits with the kind of confidence required to keep something this deliberately provocative from collapsing beneath its own conceit.

Where I struggle is with Sinensky’s book. It is frequently very funny and occasionally wickedly perceptive, but it is also highly confusing. There are so many targets being fired upon simultaneously that I sometimes lost track of precisely what was being satirized. Is the joke about identity politics? Contemporary theatre? Performative progressivism? The commercialization of trauma? Our insistence upon filtering history through present-day values? All of them are legitimate targets, and all of them appear here, but occasionally so many ideas arrive at once that the satire becomes harder to decipher rather than sharper.

Then there is Anne Frank herself. I understand why they chose her. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I understand it. You cannot create genuinely dangerous satire by selecting material nobody cares about. Slam Frank wants us uncomfortable. It wants to test where our boundaries are and why certain subjects have been placed beyond the reach of comedy. If Fox and Sinensky had chosen something less sacred, the experiment wouldn’t have the same explosive charge. But understanding the choice doesn’t require me to like it and I did then I didn’t  and then I did when  it was explained to me.

There were moments when I could see exactly what the writers were attacking and still couldn’t get past the fact that Anne Frank was the instrument being used to attack it. That may say as much about my relationship to the material as it does about the musical. But criticism isn’t about pretending that intellectual understanding erases an emotional response. Mine remained complicated and strangely, that may be why I think Slam Frank needs to exist.

We complain that theatre has become too safe, too predictable and too frightened of offending anyone. Then somebody creates something genuinely dangerous and we have to decide whether we meant what we said. Slam Frank is dangerous. It takes enormous risks. Some work brilliantly. Some made me uncomfortable. Some confused me. Some offended me, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it. That matters.

I suspect Slam Frank will become a cult musical precisely because people will leave arguing about what they just saw. I would much rather encounter a flawed, fearless piece of theatre that gives me something to wrestle with than another perfectly polished musical I have forgotten before reaching the subway.

The cast is extraordinary. The score is terrific. The book needs clarity. The premise remains difficult for me to accept, yet, would I tell you to see it? Absolutely.

Slam Frank isn’t asking for our approval. It’s asking us to have the argument.

Slam Frank: Orpheum Theatre, 126 2nd Ave until November 30th but I expect this show to extend.

There are few places better suited to celebrating John Kander and Fred Ebb than Dizzy’s Jazz Club. On Sunday, October 4, New York was misty beyond those magnificent windows, the room was filled with Kander and Ebb melodies, and, making the evening even more special, John Kander himself was sitting at the table directly behind me listening to his music come alive.

John Kander

Hosted and curated by Deborah Grace Winer, Songbook Sundays: Life Is Kander and Ebb brought together three very different vocalists—Karen Ziemba, Matthew Scott and Vanisha Gould—with music director and pianist Jon Weber, Mark McLean on drums, Jay Leonhart on bass and Sam Chess on trombone. The talent was unquestionable, the musicianship superb and the surroundings quintessentially New York.

Karen Ziemba

Yet I left wanting more as I know this songbook inside and out.

Vanisha Gould, Karen Ziemba, Matthew Scott Vanisha Gould

Not more talent. There was plenty of that. What I wanted was more Kander and Ebb.

Karen Ziemba opened with “Where You Are,” immediately reminding us why she has had such a remarkable career. Ziemba doesn’t merely sing a lyric; she understands what is underneath it. That quality served her particularly well throughout the show, whether she was having wicked fun with “Don’t Tell Mama,” finding the aching simplicity of “My Coloring Book,” or delivering “How Lucky Can You Get.” Kander and Ebb frequently wrote characters who perform one emotion while another one is quietly breaking through, and Ziemba knows exactly how to live in that contradiction.

Matthew Scott has a terrific voice coupled with genuine acting chops, something especially evident in “Not Every Day of the Week” and “Love and Love Alone.” When he arrived at “Theme from New York, New York,” he wisely didn’t try to compete with the ghosts surrounding one of the most recognizable songs ever written about this city. Instead, he found his own way into it, allowing us to hear the song rather than an imitation of the singers who made it famous.

Then there was Vanisha Gould, who possesses a fabulous smoky, growling voice that sounds as though it was made for the 1930s. There is something wonderfully lived-in about her sound, a little dangerous around the edges, and it gave “Funny Honey” and “All That Jazz” an entirely different texture. “Maybe This Time” allowed her to move beyond the sass and into the vulnerability underneath, where Kander and Ebb so often do their best work.

The musicians were every bit as important to the performance.

Weber knows how to support a singer without disappearing beneath one, and McLean, Leonhart and Chess gave the music the swing and bite it requires. “Sing Happy” put the band front and center, while

Leonhart—whose career has included playing for an extraordinary roster of great performers—stepped into the spotlight to deliver his own “Razzle Dazzle.” It was an irresistible reminder that sometimes the musicians have a few tricks of their own.

Ziemba and Scott joined forces for “But the World Goes ‘Round,” another quintessential Kander and Ebb song about continuing when life has other plans. “Cabaret,” naturally, also made its appearance, bringing us back to the musical that remains inseparable from the Kander and Ebb name.

Which brings me to the one thing that bothered me about an otherwise beautifully performed performance.

Jon Webber and John Kander

Perhaps having John Kander sitting directly behind me made me even more aware of the sheer size of the catalogue being celebrated. Here was one of the architects of American musical theatre, listening to songs from a collaboration that stretched across decades, and I kept thinking about everything we weren’t hearing.

Vanisha Gould, Karen Ziemba, Matthew Scott

There were three selections from Chicago and three from Cabaret, along with two each from Flora the Red Menace and New York, New York. They are terrific songs, certainly, and nobody is going to object to hearing them sung this well. But Kander and Ebb wrote so much more.

John Kander, Matthew Scott

Where was The Happy Time, Zorba, 70, Girls, 70, The Act, Woman of the Year, The Rink, Steel Pier, Curtains, or The Scottsboro Boys? There is an astonishing amount of material in that catalogue, including songs that deserve to be rediscovered rather than allowed to sit quietly in the shadow of “All That Jazz” and “Cabaret.”

That is particularly what I look for from something called Songbook Sundays. A songbook series has the opportunity not merely to celebrate the songs everybody already knows, but to open the book a little wider. Give us something we have forgotten or haven’t heard in years. Give a younger audience a song they didn’t know existed. Let us hear the journey of the writers, not simply their greatest hits.

Kander and Ebb were never just Chicago and Cabaret. Their partnership was far richer and stranger than that. They could be cynical and sentimental, sophisticated and vulgar, politically savage and heartbreakingly romantic. Again and again they wrote about people performing confidence while quietly falling apart underneath it. Their characters keep dancing, keep singing, keep putting on the makeup and facing the world because, as one of their greatest songs reminds us, the world goes ’round.

Maybe that’s why I wanted more.

What Winer gave us was beautifully sung and beautifully played. Ziemba remains a masterful interpreter, Scott impressed with both voice and dramatic instinct, and Gould made me want to hear much more from that wonderfully smoky voice. Weber and his musicians gave us sophistication, warmth and swing.

Outside those windows was a mist-covered New York, while inside sat John Kander himself listening to his songs. Really, how much more New York can you get? Except, of course, for a few more Kander and Ebb songs.

I enjoyed Life Is Kander and Ebb immensely. My complaint is actually a compliment: with a songbook this extraordinary, I didn’t want the afternoon to end with so many pages still unopened.