ALMOST LIKE BEING IN LOVE
CD Review
Piano Bench Of My Mind
Confessional to Can-Do: The Female Spirit, Set to Song
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: October 8, 2007
for The New York Times
“Out of the Mouths of Babes: Women Who Dared,” Barbara Brussell’s cabaret anthology of songs by female songwriters from the last 75 years, evokes a collective picture of women struggling for self-fulfillment. That process is pithily expressed in “Pick Yourself Up,” the intrepidly cheerful Dorothy Fields-Jerome Kern standard from “Swing Time,” which declares that the wisest strategy after a personal setback is to “pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.”
Richard Termine for The New York Times
Barbara Brussell in “Out of the Mouths of Babes.”
“It’s Not Where You Start,” another Fields lyric (with music by Cy Coleman, from the musical “Seesaw”), exalts the same spirit of can-do willpower on the road to victory.
Ms. Brussell, whose strong pop voice is fortified by a zany sense of humor and dramatic instincts that occasionally go overboard, casts a wide net. The majority of songs are show tunes, but she also delves into folk music, a style that is not her forte.
“Women Who Dared,” which plays Thursday evenings through Nov. 1 at the Metropolitan Room, finds Ms. Brussell most at home with pop-leaning art songs that fall outside conventional stylistic niches. Two Dory Previn tunes, “Beware of Young Girls,” Ms. Previn’s autobiographical account of losing her first husband, André Previn, to Mia Farrow, and “20-Mile Zone,” a bitterly funny description of a psychological meltdown that is interrupted by a police officer, are self-lacerating confessions that have lost none of their immediacy after more than 30 years. On Thursday Ms. Brussell and her accompanist, Alex Rybeck, did them proud.
When Ms. Previn recorded those songs in the early 1970s, they were appreciated as much for their gossip value as for their superior craft. But her commercial success was limited because her music belonged in the generic no man’s land outside the soft-rock mainstream. The time may be ripe for a Dory Previn revival.
Another woman Ms. Brussell finds simpatico is Francesca Blumenthal, a New York songwriter whose witty miniature tour guide, “Museum,” a musical survey of the kind of men you meet in art museums, includes the delicious line, “It’s certainly no folly if you dally at a Dalí.”
The show is also larded with quotations from women like Sally Field and Nancy Reagan. My favorite is an unsentimental bon mot courtesy of Ingrid Bergman: “Happiness is good health and a bad memory.”