Danny Roque

ShowMania Palooza

Tom Rolla’s Gardenia, West Hollywood, CA, May 2, 2015

By Elliot Zwiebach for Cabaret Scenes

Danny Roque is a zany performer and a brilliant songwriter, not necessarily in that order. He’s an entertainer with a wild sense of humor whose all-original songs, delivered with sublime gusto, offer clever lyrics that register high on the funny meter.

Typical of his style is “Lunch at Costco Song,” in which he sings about the free samples, offered at the warehouse stores, that can serve as a meal in their own right. Sure, it’s a list song, but it’s a witty, all-encompassing list of the variety of foods available—made even more entertaining by Roque’s energy and faux chorus-boy dance moves that make it a mini-Broadway show in three or four minutes. Based on the raucous applause, one might say the audience ate it up.

Then there was a song about one of the Three Stooges, with Roque in a fright wig that pinpointed which one immediately, singing, “I work with folks I think you’ll know/One’s named Curly, the other Moe.” Called “(It Ain’t Easy) Being Larry,” it describes in painful detail how Larry gets “pushed, pulled, pummeled and hit/Bashed and bruised, punched and bit/Nudged and nailed, decked and rocked/Walloped and clobbered and even cold-cocked.”

Roque brought a friend, Gerry Higby, out of the audience to accompany him on banjo on a terrific bluegrass number, “Neighbor’s Kid,” performed with an impish expression. It tells the tale of a boy who “always did the things your parents said would make you end up dead,” like jumping off a roof or sticking a bobby-pin in a light socket or eating paint.
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One of the evening’s highlights was a happy blues song, “Everything-Is-Going-for-Me Blues,” in which Roque relates all the good fortune that befalls him, like a girlfriend who wants him to see other women and a lost wallet that comes back with extra money in it.
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The evening included some serious songs as well, including “Finally Found My Way Home,” written for the funeral of his grandfather (“In the warmth of your love I’ll reside/When I finally walk by your side”) — a pretty song with a bit of a pop sound; and “(That’s the Way I) Always Want You to Love Me,” an up-tempo samba that Roque used as an opener, but that would have been better used later in the show, once he’d established the wacky nature of most of his songs.

Roque was joined by his son, Christopher—whose calm demeanor covers up a wicked sense of humor that comes out in his delivery—and by wife Nora, a talented singer who keeps the two men in her life grounded.
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She scored big-time on the brilliant “The Stepmother Song,” a Broadway-style character number that questions why the princess in a musical always gets to sing a big song, but not the evil stepmother (“Why does a stepmother never get a song?/One that is simple so everyone will want to sing along”) — typical of the off-the-wall approach that make this songwriter’s material so much fun to listen to.
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Christopher showed off a solid tenor voice and a sweet sound on “Split the Check,” about a guy on a first date who makes the cheap and selfish things he does sound like he’s doing the girl a favor, like splitting the check till he’s sure they will be a good match. He portrayed a similarly callous type in “My Watch,” with a very pretty melody, that uses misdirection to make an audience believe the singer is talking about his girlfriend until it eventually realizes he’s really talking about a watch: (“Your motions are flawless, you sweep through the space/Your hands are perfection, they move with such grace/With you on my arm, we make such a pair/I don’t know the hour when you are not there”).

Providing strong musical accompaniment throughout the evening were Brandon Covelli on piano, Sammy K on drums and musical director Duane “Ben Jammin’” Benjamin on bass.
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