We happened to catch two shows back to back at The Metropolitan Room, Cynthia Crane's The Time Has Come and Jenna Esp'sito's 13 Men...Men and Me. Crane's show has already been reviewed for us by Elizabeth Ahlfors, but it so tellingly highlights the problem with Esposito’s performance that a few words about it seem warranted here.

Crane, a woman d'un certain age (as the French she adores describe it) draws on the wisdom and prerogatives that come with years of living to speak out fearlessly on issues that she feels strongly about, such as permitting gay marriages and ending the war in Iraq. She is not specific about what has made her so powerful a blues singer, but she doesn't have to be. The passage of time itself brings the blues. And her closing number, in which she proclaims her enduring optimism and exhorts her audience to visit their grandmothers, although delivered tongue-in-cheek, evoking a laugh from her audience, speaks volumes. The number celebrates tradition and generational bonding, but also evokes a sad image of lonely grandparents overlooked and neglected in an increasingly youth-oriented culture. Time is Crane's theme, as it is the dominant theme for most poets and songwriters, and she has the maturity to bring the appropriate emotions to her subject.

For grandparents, as well as parents, Jenna Esposito is to judge from her stage appearance the hoped-for child. She is lovely to look at and exudes a basic sweetness that is almost at odds with today's young generation, for whom the dominant adjective is hot. Her voice is a remarkable instrument that has been praised by other critics, although she seems to attribute to belting virtues it does not necessarily have for every song. Her phrasing testifies to the careful study she has made of her craft, suggesting a discipline many in and out of cabaret seem to resist. On the other side, Esposito seems to have been cocooned in the kind of loving family every child longs for: her father is one of her musicians and her musical director, her mother has had a say in some songs Jenna sings, for which this parent receives thanks, and her sister is one of her back-up singers as well as someone who has made Jenna an aunt. Jenna furthermore invokes the paradise of a seemingly ideal past, and her patter is made up of references to her high school jazz band and the college roommate who introduced her to the song that supplies the title of her recently released CD (the show is a presentation of that recording). And therein lies the problem. Sadly, it may not be until Jenna Esposito is expelled from Eden that she will bring to her songs the emotions the songwriters expressed in them, that she will really comprehend the difference between July and September (one of her numbers is "Remembering September in July").

Perhaps no piece exemplifies the problem with Esposito's show as "I Wanna Be Around" (music by Johnny Mercer; lyrics by Sadie Vimmerstedt, a stranger to him who gave him the idea for the song). Jenna needs a musical director who will tell her that this is a song about betrayal, rage, humiliation, pain. Revenge may be sweet, as the song says, but the smile it is likely to invoke will resemble a grimace more than the inappropriately beatific smile that adorns Jenna's face throughout her singing of this song (and the other songs). If a videotape exists of Karen Mason's rendition of "I Wanna Be Around," Esposito should beg a copy and study it closely, over and over again.

No one wants Jenna Esposito to lose the joy that infuses this and her other cabaret performances. Yet, as the Irish poet W. B. Yeats insisted, real art requires an "aching heart." We hope to be around when Jenna Esposito allows herself to grow up and the emotions she brings to her songs better match their content -- and her talents.

Barbara Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
October 28, 2007
www.cabaretscenes.org