Eric Comstock & Barbara Fasano: Sun! Skin! Sin! Sinatra!

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Eric Comstock and Barbara Fasano

Sun! Skin! Sin! Sinatra!

Birdland,  NYC, July 17, 2016

Reviewed by Elizabeth Ahlfors for Cabaret Scenes

Photo: Bill Sensenbrenner
Photo: Bill Sensenbrenner

Count on it. If it’s summertime, pianist/singer Eric Comstock and chanteuse extraordinaire Barbara Fasano will be around to musically salute the season.

This year applauds Sun! Skin! Sin! Sinatra!, examining life, love and yesterdays with songs reflecting city Sundays, blues skies and a shining sea. If last weekend’s jam-packed Birdland was any indication, everyone still in the city had come out of the heat to hear this stylish duo welcome their favorite season.
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Fasano electrifies pop and jazz with flavors of steamy romance and snaps of wit.

With grace and humanity, she illuminated the sensual reminisces in “The Shining Sea.” Her natural charisma, sharp acting and vocal talent showed her as a sensitive interpreter of lyrics punched up by a formidable jazz sense. No surprise there, since she has long idolized Lena Horne, obvious with Fasano’s rendition of Horne’s hit “As Long as I Live,”  in duet with Comstock.

Certainly Fasano is influenced by the encyclopedic musicologist/pianist/husband and frequent partner Eric Comstock.  He explores the cool irony of life and reflects it in his music.
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After extolling “Sunday in New York,” he quipped, “On the other hand…” and took a bleaker second look on “The Great City” with Curtis R. Lewis’ warning, “I’ll tell you one thing worth thinkin’ about/If you come in be sure you can get back out!
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” Or just hang out the Nick and Charles Kenny sign “Gone Fishin'” (in duet with Fasano) and get out of town—three well-crafted songs that deftly started off a breezy show.

Speaking of Sinatra, the couple paired a couple of Ol’ Blue Eyes’ numbers— Comstock with “Witchcraft” and Fasano with “How Little We Know”—with a teasing bass by Sean Smith behind the latter. The couple also presented Fasano’s haunting “Incurably Romantic” with Comstock’s sensuous Latin beat in “It Could Happen to You.”  

Elegant, creative and fiercely multifaceted, consider Comstock and Fasano the haut monde of cabaret and jazz.

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Elizabeth Ahlfors

Born and raised in New York, Elizabeth graduated from NYU with a degree in Journalism. She has lived in various cities and countries and now is back in NYC. She has written magazine articles and published three books: A Housewife’s Guide to Women’s Liberation, Twelve American Women, and Heroines of ’76 (for children). A great love was always music and theater—in the audience, not performing. A Philadelphia correspondent for Theatre.com and InTheatre Magazine, she has reviewed theater and cabaret for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia City News. She writes for Cabaret Scenes and other cabaret/theater sites. She is a judge for Nightlife Awards and a voting member of Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle.