The advance press for Jodi Stevens's show, A Broad's Way, at the Metropolitan Room, was very accurate. She is a treat for the eyes and ears. She is also a very good actress, with a highly charged personality and comedic talents. And her impersonation of a competitive and overbearing mother, whom she cannot get out of her psyche -- supposedly her own mother -- can elicit a simultaneous laugh and shiver. Her song list was also very well chosen, consisting of familiar standards and less familiar new compositions. But were her audience made up of committed cabaret aficionados, they would know almost immediately the difference between Stevens's performance and those of the many cabaret singers who can be heard regularly in New York's smaller venues. In fact, our advice to Jodi Stevens would be to hang out with them and study the ways in which they establish contact with their audience, to treat cabaret shows themselves as if they were master classes in the genre. For what seems to happen in A Broad's Way is that a cabaret performer is another theatrical role she has decided to play, although in a small room. A Broad's Way smacks too much of Broadway. Stevens' performance can be admired but it is not the real thing.

If the essence of cabaret is for the singer to create an intimate relationship with the audience, this does not happen in A Broad's Way. For one thing, Jodi Stevens rarely establishes eye contact with those who have come to see and to hear her, and fixes her sight on a spot on the wall or ceiling, or the camera that was present to record her show on the night we were there. This playing to an invisible wall often happens with theater performers who have decided to do cabaret. The result in Stevens' show is that the highly scripted nature of her patter becomes ever more obvious, and that in a show that purports to be autobiographical, contrivance takes over and it is difficult emotionally to relate to her. Even in songs about her love for husband and son, her feelings seem to be only part of the story she is telling, just as on stage she might sing love songs to a the actors playing opposite her. Occasionally, as in the ballad "You Were Too Good to Me," her vision turns inward and she becomes believable. Which suggests that if Jodi Stevens can make the transition from musical theater to intimate cabaret, she will join the ranks of fine cabaret performers.

Sally Mayes directed. Michael Barbieri was technical director.

Barbara Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
September 24, 2007
www.cabaretscenes.org