Ava Vukic and Frank Silletti
The Book of Ava
The E Spot, Studio City, CA, March 30, 2015
Reviewed by Elliot Zwiebach for Cabaret Scenes
Ava Vukic is an 11-year-old with a powerful belt and an extraordinary top range — and with her outsized personality, abundance of self-confidence and that voice, it isn’t hard to believe she may someday achieve stardom, which would make her fathers very happy.
Ava is the adopted daughter of Frank Silletti and his husband, Sonny Vukic, and does a musical act with Silletti, a onetime performer who hadn’t sung publicly for 29 years, he told the audience.
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That is, till Ava came along and exhibited so much talent that he decided to resume singing just to showcase her.
While there’s little doubt Ava is an extraordinary 11-year-old, she is nevertheless only 11 years old, with the result that every movement she makes seems overly choreographed, and there’s an unevenness to her singing — though the talent is certainly there and simply needs time to develop a bit more. Whatever she may lack in consistency, however, she makes up for in pure chutzpah and an ebullient stage presence, showing off her amazing range spectacularly well in a song that is not quite age-appropriate, “Le Jazz Hot” (Henry Mancini/Leslie Bricusse, from Victor/Victoria) — taking that last note from the depths up several decibels to an amazing high point that compared very favorably with Julie Andrews’s original.
She was also quite good, with powerful projection, on “Good Morning, Baltimore” (Marc Shaiman/Scott Wittman, from Hairspray), though she tended to rush her words a bit. And on both songs as well as others, she spent so much energy dancing and moving from one side of the stage to the other that she ended up very much out of breath.
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The staging could use less focus on movement and more simply on the vocals.
In fact, with Silletti singing pleasantly and providing patter dealing with Ava’s life, her talent and the family dynamic of two fathers with a daughter, the show was a bit too precious and made for a somewhat tedious 90 minutes that could be improved by some pruning and possibly direction from someone other than the proud papa.
Silletti certainly has a right to be proud, and his love was evident when he stepped out of the spotlight and watched, beaming, as Ava did an excellent job on “Shy” (Mary Rodgers/Marshall Barer, from Once Upon a Mattress). She also excelled on a snippet of “Hopelessly Devoted to You” (John Farrar, from the movie version of Grease), though she was wobbly on “They Say It’s Wonderful” (Irving Berlin) — changing the lyric to read, “To hold a Dad in your arms is wonderful.”
In fact, the pair changed lyrics in several songs to remove any hint of impropriety — for example, “always true to you, Daddy, in my fashion,” or “Be my Daddy” in their encore, “Be My Baby.”
Some of the nicest moments were some of the quietest, including duets on “No Matter What” (Alan Menken/Tim Rice, from Beauty and the Beast) — which was particularly appropriate since it’s a father-daughter song to begin with, a nicely emotional “Suddenly” (Claude-Michel Schonberg/Alan Boublil, from the movie version of Les Misérables), and a sweet, appropriate “I’ll Take You Dreaming” (Sylvia Fine/Sammy Cahn, from The Court Jester).
Musical direction was provided by Dave Austin on piano.