Jeanne MacDonald is one of New York's favorite cabaret performers, and rightly so. She's been honored with awards and lauded for her way with a song. But even established sharpshooters can miss the bull's eye, and Time Between Trains needs a second look on the part of MacDonald and Rick Jensen, her musical director and arranger.

If the show's title, Time Between Trains, is relevant to a theme, it's left for the audience to work out how or why. The minimal patter never indicates any pattern or direction. Of course, the title song's lyric indicates a thwarted love life, with "Yes I'm waitin' at the station / With my old friend sublimation / ...it's a long time between trains."

And there's "Trav'lin' Light" (Because My Man is Gone), "Walkin' After Midnight" (Searchin' for You), and Jimmy Webb's classic "Didn't We" (almost make it... this time?) But, to confuse the issue, there's also "I May Be Wrong (But I Think You're Wonderful)," "No Other Love (Have I)," and MacDonald's smashing rendition of Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne's "Time After Time" (I tell myself that I'm / so lucky to be loving you).

It's not that MacDonald has lost her ability to deliver up a lyric to make one tingle. Just listen to her sing Rupert Holmes's "The People You Never Get to Love," Randy Newman's provocative "You Can Leave Your Hat On," or "Takin' a Chance on Love." It's that, at least from this reviewer's perspective, with no hints provided, the audience is left on its own to figure out the show. Also, from where I sit, MacDonald shines brightest when she's offering the softer ballads that she does so masterfully, and less so with Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," Paul Westmoreland's "Detour," or when she and Jensen juice up the arrangements -- and her volume -- in a reach for a more contemporary sound.

Time Between Trains plays again at The Hideaway Room on April 21st and April 28th.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
April 14, 2007
www.cabaretscenes.org