Brian Stokes Mitchell
Plays with Music
Café Carlyle, NYC, September 15, 2015
Reviewed by Elizabeth Ahlfors for Cabaret Scenes
In a league of his own, Brian Stokes Mitchell—singer, actor, entertainer, musician—opens the current season of the Café Carlyle, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the famed New York nightspot. Mitchell’s debut in the Carlyle is reminiscent of the joy and ebullience embodied by the Carlyle’s legendary signature performer, Bobby Short.
With his sophisticated affability, Mitchell brings fearless theatricality, incisive acting, versatile humor, resonant vocals and instrumental musicality.
His rich theater voice from Broadway hit shows like Ragtime and Kiss Me, Kate perfectly conforms to the intimacy of the small room, serving the cabaret demand of interpreting the song, making it his own and presenting it to his audience. Witness this throughout the show, opening with Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” where he moves like the circus master, inviting one and all to join the exciting world before them. As the title says, these are Plays with Music.
In Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz’s haunting “By Myself” Mitchell shares a loneliness that builds to the next song, the bitter admission of “I Won’t Send Roses” (Jerry Herman).
Camelot‘s “If Ever I Would Leave You” by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner and “Hello, Young Lovers” (Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II) wrapped the room in hushed sentiment. While Mitchell gracefully pulls back in his intimate deliveries, characterizations evolved, like the gay man hungering for “The Man I Love” (George and Ira Gershwin) in an environment of just emerging marriage equality. Outstanding is Stephen Sondheim’s “Getting Married Today,” Mitchell takes on two characters, a nasty old biddy who comments as the bride-to-be wildly unravels.
A high point in the show illustrates what Mitchell calls the “radio in his head,” a mashup of “The Windmills of Your Mind” (Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Michel Legrand) accompanied by Tedd Firth showing his piano power in Bach’s Prelude in C Minor. Also notable is Mitchell’s Portuguese delivery of Ivan Lins’s sumptuous song about starting over, “Começar de Novo” (known in English as “The Island”).
Accompanied by Firth on piano, Gary Haase on bass and Mark McLean on drums, Mitchell’s musical innovations include his own jazz riffs on melodica and, in closing, he goes to the piano to deliver Pete Seeger/E.Y. Harburg’s uplifting “Odds-on Favorite.”
One odds-on favorite, Plays with Music, will be remembered as one of the best cabaret shows of the year.
Brian Stokes Mitchell is at the Café Carlyle through September 26.
