When Maureen McGovern sings, she is flawless.

Her delivery is clear and rich—her diction is impeccable—and her voice soars and ebbs perfectly, without overdoing any of the emotion. She is a living legend in her prime—to be experienced in performance and savored. At age 60—or “59 and 12/12ths,” as she more delicately put it—McGovern is reliving the 1960s and early 1970s with a concert of songs that were among her favorites as she was growing up.

McGovern is superb on ballads, bringing keen insights to an opening medley of Joni Mitchell’s “All I Want” and Paul Simon’s “America”—establishing from the beginning that the audience was in for some serious interpretations of songs it thought it knew and had grown tired of. Among her best were James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” both of which she sang as if thinking of the words for the first time. She carried that emotional wallop into Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” and then switched gears with Simon’s “59th Street Bridge Song”—which included verbal doo-wop accompaniment by Jeff Harris, McGovern’s excellent pianist and Musical Director—and how long has it been since you thought about “feeling groovy”? She echoed a longing for things past in Randy Newman’s elegy, “Cowboy,” combined with “The Coming of the Roads”—an ode to cutting down trees as a sign of “progress”—written by Billy Edd Wheeler.

Among McGovern’s lighter moments were a Connie Francis imitation on “Where the Boys Are” (Neil Sedaka/ Howard Greenfield); Tom Lehrer’s outrageous “Vatican Rag”; and the Lennon-McCartney “Rocky Raccoon.” The evening also included McGovern’s original hit song, “The Morning After” (Al Kasha/ Joel Hirschhorn), written for The Poseidon Adventure.

In her encore segment, she acknowledged her debt to the Great American Songbook with three standards: an a capella, off-mic version of “My Funny Valentine” (Rodgers and Hart); “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” (Joel Burke/ Al Dubin), during which she vocally duplicated the sound of a clarinet; and a loving, embraceable “Love Is Here to Stay,” written, she explained, “in Gershwin.”

The only imperfect note in an otherwise perfect evening was McGovern’s inclusion of Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die,” a more blues-styled song that didn’t quite match the beauty inherent in most of her other selections.

(Photo by Deborah Feingold)

Elliot Zwiebach
Cabaret Scenes
February 6, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org