Sharon McNight
Alive and Well at The Duplex!
The Duplex, NYC, July 28, 2015
Reviewed by Joel Benjamin for Cabaret Scenes
Sharon McNight seems to revel in her bawdiness. To be fair, it’s not a façade. She’s tough, bigger-than-life and a tad foul-mouthed, but underneath this surface is a complex, intelligent, emotionally rich artist whose every song—comic or bluesy—reveals many levels of emotion. She sings as if each song is her autobiography.
She opened her Alive and Well at The Duplex! with Shel Silverstein’s country/western tinged “Queen of the Silver Dollar,” giving life to the bittersweet story of a woman whose life exists only in the titular honky-tonk. She found all the irony in Bob Dorough and Fran Landesman’s “Small Day Tomorrow,” leading directly to Amanda McBroom’s bluesy lament, “It’s Gonna Be One of Those Days,” in which everything that could go wrong does.
McNight’s between-song patter included talk about her sex life, light-hearted diatribes against the idiots in her life, and a sweet, loving tribute to her close friend, the late Julie Wilson.
Mary Liz McNamara’s “Haiku” twisted this delicate form of poetry into a very funny tale of a writer too lazy or busy to write a novel, who instead turned everyday awfulness into 17-syllable bits of philosophy. Janis Ian came in for the McNight treatment in two songs. The first, the darkly sad “Jesse,” was somehow combined with the schlocky German folksong “Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen.
” The second was “I’m Still Standing Here,” a powerful statement about claiming one’s life for what it is.
The encore, Craig Carnelia’s “The Kid Inside,” was a heartbreaking look back at the first, stumbling attempts at romance. You could hear the longing in her voice and see it in her eyes.
Ian Herman was her solid, witty musical director/pianist, providing a solid base for McNight’s soaring emotional flights.
Sharon McNight has two more shows at The Duplex: August 4th and 11th.
