New Drury Lane: Night Life Is A Cabaret

By Howard Reich | Tribune critic

    February 20, 2008

If live music returned to a celebrated downtown theater—after an absence of 24 years—would anyone show up?

That was the question Monday night, when a room that once pulsed with the sounds of Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald made music once more. But with the temperature frozen at single digits and a new concert series trying to get off the (slippery) ground, presenters at Drury Lane Theatre Water Tower Place wondered if the house would be half empty, or worse.

They needn't have worried—the place practically was filled. Indeed, had the weather been less hostile, extra chairs would have been needed (lobby seating, anyone?).

Clearly, Chicagoans voted with their ears on this night, which proved a milestone not only for the refurbished Drury Lane but, better still, for Chicago's growing community of cabaret performers. Produced by Chicago Cabaret Professionals, an aptly named advocacy group, the evening attested to the depth of the city's cabaret talent and its increasing savvy in promoting itself.

No longer content to stage just one-man (or one-woman) shows for small audiences in tiny rooms, cabaret artists in the past few years have banded together, presenting ambitious evenings in impressive spaces.

None of these efforts has been riskier or higher in profile than Monday's, titled "My Fair Cabaret: The Music of Loesser, Lerner and Loewe." Though Drury Lane had featured major jazz and cabaret stars in the late 1970s and early '80s, "My Fair Cabaret" had no such marquee power. Moreover, it has been more than a generation since listeners were in the habit of hearing music at Drury Lane, which started showing movies in 1984 and re-emerged as a legitimate theater in 2005.

For this listener's tastes, the remodeled Drury Lane serves music better than it did before, as an in-the-round space. When you're beholding a great singer at work, do you really want to see the galoshes of the people facing you, from the other side of the room? The new proscenium focuses attention where it belongs—on the artists.

How and why Joan Curto came up with the idea of dispatching "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" in a jazz context is a bit of a mystery. Yet it worked. Stripped of cockney clichés, slowed to a crawl, swathed in blues expression, the song sounded reborn.

Baritone David Edelfelt probably sounds great singing the weather forecast, he's just blessed with a luxuriant instrument. But his version of "Luck Be a Lady" produced low notes that you could get lost in.

Tom Michael implied swing rhythm in "I Hear Music"; and Heather Moran let loose with plenty of sound in "Adelaide's Lament."

If Claudia Hommel overplayed the drama in music from "My Fair Lady" and Bradford Thacker borrowed from Maurice Chevalier in songs from "Gigi," there was consolation in Laura Freeman's heady performance of "The Night They Invented Champagne."

hreich@tribune.com

© Anomalous Media 2015