Christine Pedi is one of New York's favorite performers, an accomplished singer and satirist who has appeared repeatedly in Forbidden Broadway, Gerard Alessandrini's long-running spoofs on everything and everyone theatrical. Pedi's current solo show at the Metropolitan Room, Great Dames, in which she has her fun with her female subjects, might well be called her own one-woman version of Forbidden Broadway.

There's the intro to Funny Girl by the fictional but convincing Barbra Streisand, "from my most recent Broadway musical, forty-three years ago." Everybody's favorite, Judy Garland, receives her share of attention as does Liza, and Julie Andrews' Brit sound is faithfully recreated in "A Spoonful of Sugar." Pedi studiously refreshes everyone's recollection of Anna Karenina's suicide by leaping in front of a locomotive and then launches her parody of "The Atchison Topeka and the Santa Fe." Aided by Musical Director Mathew Ward, Pedi shifts gears as smoothly as a limo driver, from Garland to Merman to Katie Hepburn; from a saccharine-sweet "When You're Good to Mama," to a chillingly vengeful warning to Henry Higgins, "Just You Wait."

In fact, Pedi's comedic bent, theatric overstatement, and talent for impersonation make it all too easy to overlook her vocal abilities as Christine Pedi. When she's not taking over another personality, she has her own warm and pleasing voice, on display here during a straightforward tribute to her mother, "Mama a Rainbow." Pedi will probably never give up the comedy, but should she ever want to do a conventional show, she's got the pipes to do it.

Great Dames is back at the Metropolitan Room on July 1st and July 2nd.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
November 20, 2007
www.cabaretscenes.org