Tom Toce: Songwriter in the House

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Tom Toce

Songwriter in the House

Metropolitan Room, NYC, December 5, 2015

Reviewed by Victoria Ordin for Cabaret Scenes

Tom-Toce-Cabaret-Scenes-Magazine_212Tom Toce bills himself as a “pure songwriter” who loves songwriters as much as the art of songwriting. His Songwriter in the House is the 2014 MAC winner’s first foray into solo cabaret performance. Approaching what he calls a “significant birthday,” Toce began with “Younger than My Years (Toce on guitar and Jon Burr on bass). After decades of writing songs for other cabaret performers—and, in so doing, successfully avoiding the spotlight—Toce realized that his folk-rock material influenced by the music of the 1960s and 1970s wouldn’t get heard unless he picked up a mic.

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Though not a trained singer, he delivers an entertaining hour of story and song.

“Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda” reveals why Toce won last year’s MAC award for Special Material (“Shalom Santa”). As a longtime producer and host of cabaret shows (most recently the outstanding Harvard-Yale Cantata at Feinstein’s/54 Below), he skillfully weaves together anecdote and music. Lovers of folk will enjoy the show from start to finish, but fans of more typical cabaret fare may be less interested in the opening material. The show really takes flight with the edgy “One Fair City,” a macabre song about the resilience of New Yorkers in the wake of a bomb that “flattens Manhattan” (a terrific rhyme). Nervous giggles gave way to full-throated laughter about the best and worst of New York City. After the song, Toce thanked the audience for laughing at what, following Paris (to say nothing of 9/11) was an artistic risk that succeeded wildly: “If you don’t laugh at that [song], the terrorists have won.”

Toce performed three covers: Ben Folds’ “Still Fighting It,” John Prine’s “The Other Side of Town,” and the beautifully harmonized “Eight Days a Week” (in his words, “the quintessential Beatles song”). Prine’s song, about a man whose mind wanders when his wife goes on a little too long (mostly about his faults), was a hit, as was the beloved Lennon/McCartney tune.Both guest singers, Chris Ryan and Mike Skliar, contributed something different but consistent with the show’s overall feel. “Radish Rose,” the only song with piano, was a jazzy, minor-key tribute to Madison, Wisconsin, Ryan’s home for 17 years. The singer-songwriter’s strong vibrato and phrasing lent emotional depth to what I found the most poignant number in the show.

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As acerbic as Ryan’s number was earnest, Skliar’s “What I Meant to Say” examined the tension between intended and actual speech. Hence “I like your dress” becomes “You must have put on some pounds.
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” Likewise, an adult son’s request for salt from his father at the dinner table becomes “You ruined my life, you son-of-a-bitch.”

Riffing off his wife in the audience, Toce sang “Better Than Rock and Roll,” an upbeat “list song” about love, with conviction. A show about the influence of the 1960s and 1970s would not be complete without one “preachy” number. Toce did not disappoint. Noting wryly that no one much likes such songs, but that most folk singers write them anyway, he struck just the right balance between sincerity and mockery in “Walk in Another Man’s Shoes.” The funny song about empathy and openness to alternate points of view grew out of the Omega Workshop, a “crunchy granola yoga retreat” with a songwriting program led by Dar Williams.
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No shoes were allowed in the midst of a “tic-infested forest”; the humor of this was not lost on Toce. The song’s moral: exposing yourself to other perspectives will “at the very least amuse.” Songwriter in the House does that and more.
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