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Hats Off! has performers, needs concept
BY ELLEN PFEIFER
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Hats Off! Much Ado About Broadway
Cabaret featuring Kathy St. George, Bobbie Steinbach, and Robert Saoud. Directed by Bill Castellino. Music direction by Timothy Evans. At Stoneham Theatre through August 10.
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Although they have busy separate careers in straight plays and musical theater, it’s clear that Kathy St. George, Bobbie Steinbach, and Robert Saoud love to perform together. Their fourth collaborative cabaret venture, Hats Off! Much Ado About Broadway, opened last week at Stoneham Theatre. A sequel to last summer’s popular Much Ado About Broadway and the earlier Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, it follows close on the threesome’s irreverent Yuletide show, Holidaze (A Christian, a Jew, and a Ho-Ho-Homo Too). None of the performers is an exceptional vocalist, but their stage chemistry, the way their different personas blend and contrast, the obvious affection they feel for one another, and their individual abilities to "sell" a song make for a winning formula. They are also backed by the terrific music direction of Timothy Evans. Unfortunately, in Hats Off!, all those strengths are undermined by the weakness of the concept. In previous outings, the singers have "worn many hats — literally and figuratively" in assuming different characters. Here, they take off the hats (at least metaphorically) and play themselves. They explain that they want to give the audience a glimpse of their real personalities and their lives as actors. The result is too self-referential, too concerned with the nitty-gritty of auditions, head shots, and maintaining one’s psychological equipoise in the face of frequent rejection. Why can’t they just get on with the music? Well, there is music in frustratingly small bits. Saoud is hilarious "auditioning" with the delectable "So in Love." Turning on a dime, he tricks up the song whenever the mercurial producers suggest "swinging it, taking it down a third, singing it like a cowboy, doing some scat, imitating an operatic baritone, and sustaining the money note." At the end of the first half, the trio rush through a medley of show tunes from every decade of the 20th and 21st centuries, but with the distraction of a contest in which the audience must count the number of songs. The performers flash through brief phrases, the excerpts almost as numerous and as seamlessly conjoined as those electronically engineered pop-radio-contest collages. All you can do is count when what you want to do is listen. I would have loved to hear more of edgy urban Jewish grandmother Steinbach imitating the royal accents of Camelot’s Queen Guinevere in "The Simple Joys of Maidenhood." I would have relished Saoud’s further impersonation — all pop eyes and husky timbre — of Carol Channing’s "Hello, Dolly!" In the second half, each performer gets a moment in the spotlight — and the chance to sing a few complete songs. Steinbach is touching in Audrey’s sad little domestic fantasy about life in a tract house "somewhere that’s green" from Little Shop of Horrors. She also sizzles with middle-aged angst in "What Did I Have Then That I Don’t Have Now" (from On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever). St. George, always adorable, offers Annie’s plucky "Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You." Saoud provides a suavely executed "Try To Remember." But then, just as you’re settling into the apparent meat of the show, the cabaret comes to an end. There is one badly chosen encore, a trio (not from the Broadway stage) with a political message deploring violence and urging a ’60s-style prescription of peace and harmony. "We can be kind. We can take care of each other," the singers coo. The audience exits with blood-sugar levels rising.
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