Cabaret Review by Ron Fassler . . . .
Confession: I’ve been a fan of Leslie Uggams for more than sixty years, going back to when I first saw her on television as a small child. Of course, she was just a small child herself when she began in show business at age six onstage at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. That marked the beginning of a rich career that is still going strong, perhaps even stronger than ever. Not only by virtue of some choice acting parts of late, but by the majestic sound of her singing voice on full display Wednesday night for the opening night of her new show, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue—continuing tonight and Saturday, March 23 at 7.00 PM at 54 Below. Scheduled for three shows, the chance to bliss out on seeing Uggams live is not to be missed.
Turning eighty-one in May seems to be no impediment to what she can do onstage. Singing songs from her 1968 Tony-winning performance in Hallelujah, Baby! in their original keys (!), the lush richness of her voice has to be heard to be believed. It is thrilling to hear her hit and sustain long and difficult notes, investing them with a depth of feeling that comes from years of telling stories in song with full-on sensitivity and commitment. The term is overused, but in this case calling the evening a master class is appropriate to the occasion.
Upon entering to a jubilant and sustained ovation, Uggams told the sold-out crowd, “I haven’t done anything yet!” Then, in reference to her recent milestone, she cried out “Welcome to the 80’s!” Honestly, except for moving a bit slowly on and offstage, there was no evidence whatsoever that this was an octogenarian strutting her stuff. In song after song, Uggams brought the experiences of a life well lived (she has been married to her husband and longtime manager Graham Pratt for fifty-nine years). The choice to mine the catalogs of Lennon and McCartney, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jule Styne and Comden & Green, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, Harold Arlen, Jerry Herman and Jerome Kern made for an evening of all-star music and arrangements. For a special treat, she was joined by her daughter, singer Danielle Nicole Chambers, for a rousing rendition of Jackie DeShannon, Randy Myers and Jimmy Holiday’s “Put a Little Love in Your Heart.” And her band, consisting of musical director Don Rebic (on piano) and George Farmer (bass) and Buddy Williams (drums) provided superb accompaniment throughout.
Highlights included a smashing “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” followed by the true story of one particular rainy night some thirty years ago. If anyone is still unfamiliar with the story, it occurred when an outdoor July 4th Washington D.C. concert was broadcast on PBS and Uggams got assigned a song not in her repertoire. Told she would be supplied with cue cards, she was game, and all would have gone fine if not for it having rained for two days, turning the grass to mud. The cue card person slipped and fell, the cards went flying, and there was Leslie Uggams on national television making up nonsense words while she slinked through the crowd to make her way to the stage. Forever the pro, she didn’t allow the fiasco to bother her and when no one said anything about it after, she felt as if she’d made a narrow escape. That is, until a friend phoned her a few years later to say, “Honey, did you know that you are in every gay bar in America?”
Yup, she’d gone viral. And to this day, it’s a very popular YouTube video (the link is here). Showing her sense of humor about it, she pulled out a piece of paper and read the on-the-spot gibberish she came up with, performing a dramatic reading that brought the house down.
Uggams mentioned that she had last appeared at 54 Below a year-and-a-half ago and how she extolled how great things were going for her career-wise. At the time, she boasted of Fox’s “Empire,” a recurring role on NBC’s “New Amsterdam” as Mama Reynolds, and voice-overs on cartoons like Disney’s “Minnie’s Bow-Tunes,” on which she plays Nana Beaver. And now? 2024 brought her a Screen Actors’ Guild Award nomination as part of a Best Ensemble for American Fiction, which was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. The third Deadpool will be out this summer, in which she will reprise her role of Blind Al, and she is going to be featured in the new Amazon Prime series Fallout, based on the video game that takes place in a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation.
All I can say to that is it would take nuclear decimation to stop Leslie Uggams from doing what she does best: performing. A consummate artist, I feel more in love with her than I did when I used to watch her on The Mitch Miller Show on the old black and white TV in my parents’ basement. You’ve come a long way, baby.
Leslie Uggams’ Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue will be performed again tonight, March 21, and Saturday, March 23 at 7PM at 54 Below (254 West 54th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue). www.54Below.com
Photos: Ron Fassler
