Sara Zahn: Re-Touching My Roots

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Sara Zahn

Re-Touching My Roots

Metropolitan Room, NYC, May 11, 2015

Reviewed by Barbara Leavy for Cabaret Scenes

Sara-Zahn-Cabaret-Scenes-Magazine_212If a parade can be understood as a metaphor for the highs in life – moments to celebrate and of joy – there are few persons who have not experienced the dampening effects of the rain that can spoil such times. For others, the downpour can seem so intense and prolonged it would seem as if they could never be dry again. According to friends who know her, Sara Zahn’s return to New York cabaret follows such a period of misfortune and travail, including an illness that threatened her ability to sing. By the time in her show, Re-Touching My Roots, that she actually sings Jule Styne/Bob Merrill’s “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” the audience knows that she means it when she also sings “The Best Is Yet to Come.” If it rains, she will just put up her performing umbrella.

Zahn’s is a multi-media show with images of her life and career projected on the room’s back wall as she performs. Those are pictures from the past, and there is a striking counterpoint between photographs that evoke time gone and Zahn’s announcement as her first number in the show that she has “A Lot of Livin’ to Do.” The theme is repeated throughout the show, but not in a tiresome repetitive fashion. Zahn also performs such songs as “New York, New York” (Bernstein/Comden & Green) and “Make Someone Happy” (Styne/Comden & Green), but a little thought about these choices reinforces the pattern she has chosen for this show. There are many possible meanings to her title, Re-Touching My Roots.

Roots and continuity come together in one of the most beautiful songs in Zahn’s show: Maltby and Shire’s “The Story Goes On” from the Broadway musical Baby. Past, present, and future merge. The singer has come to realize that what she feels her mother felt before, that a “chain of life began upon the shore of some dark sea has reached to me,” that “my child is next in the line that has no ending.” Pictures of Zahn’s children were among the images projected on the Metropolitan’s wall. A lot of living has already been done and there will be more on that chain that has no ending. There will be sun after the rain on the parade.

Barry Kleinbort directed the show. Allan Kashkin was Zahn’s musical director/pianist.

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Barbara Leavy

Literary critic and author of books on literature, folklore and mythology, Barbara Leavy has been a contributor of features and reviews to Cabaret Scenes from the magazine’s earliest issues. Retired as a full professor of English at the City University of New York’s Queens College, she retains her honorary appointment as Adjunct Professor of English in Psychiatry at Cornell University’s Medical College. When not at cabaret, her current work in the realm of crime fiction. Barbara’s latest book, published by Poisoned Pen Press, is a second edition of The Fiction of Ruth Rendell—Ancient Tragedy and The Modern Family.