Cynthia Clarey
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?
Rudolph Ganz Memorial Hall, Chicago, IL, November 15, 2015
Reviewed by Carla Gordon for Cabaret Scenes
In What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, Cynthia Clarey offers thoughtful, sometimes funny reflections on romance gone bad…but not all bad. Though a classically trained mezzo-soprano (although she brings a low register of near-baritone oakiness), she gets what cabaret is.
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Cabaret is so much about words and Clarey’s patter between songs is thoughtful and engaging and relates the musical numbers to her theme and to each other. As her show opens, she conveys the longing in John and Johanna Hall’s “Dance with Me.
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” Jason Robert Brown’s “Stars and the Moon” is performed often in cabaret, but this reporter has not heard it done better than by Clarey, who brings the mature woman’s sense of regret to the story. “A Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific is joyful and fun. She finds the despair and bewilderment in Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do?.” The in-your-face pairing of “I Wanna Be Around” and “Goody Goody” had just the right balance of feisty “screw you” and underling pain. She lands the jokes in a goofy parody of “Strangers in the Night” about online dating disasters ranging from the Mama’s boy to the secretly married charmer and then to the convicted felon.
Ganz Hall at Roosevelt University is a grand, gilded concert hall, but it comes with some acoustical challenges. And, while Beckie Menzie provided sensitive musical direction, at times the concert grand piano nearly drowned out the vocalist. The sound technician needs to address this. Clarey’s show ends on a hopeful note with “Being Alive” from Company and “Here’s to Life.” Clarey indeed conveys to us what becomes of the broken hearted. We heal and, most of the time, look for love—yet again.
