Karen Mason

It’s About Time

Birdland, NYC, March 6, 2017

Reviewed by Elizabeth Ahlfors for Cabaret Scenes

Karen Mason has more than a great set of pipes. She is a splendid actress, diving fearlessly into emotional wonderlands, eliciting humor, despair, joy and sorrow. She speaks to the heart and touches the soul.
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It was SRO at Birdland as she celebrated her latest CD, It’s About Time. While many wait for her dynamic powerhouse numbers, like those from her Broadway shows—Sunset Boulevard, Mamma Mia!, Wonderland—for me, Mason’s power is in ballads. Here, she approached the poignancy in “Lorna’s Here” and paired it with “I Want to Be with You,” (both from Golden Boy by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams), a search and recovery for the depth of passion, not letting the song go until she had conveyed all to her listeners. Her audience communication is true to the end, not scanning the room, but studying the audience and delivering her messages right to them.

Opening the show, the George and Ira Gershwin (verse reconstructed by Vernon Duke) ballad “Love Is Here to Stay,” remembered the late Brian Lasser, Mason’s best friend and first music director.

She brought the song’s last word, “stay,” to a minor key which led her into a sunny, swingy, “Just in Time” (Jule Styne/Betty Comden/Adolph Green). This referred to her future husband, Paul Rolnick, who helped her mourn Lasser’s death, the two songs telling a personal story through Mason’s expressive interpretation.
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With Chita Rivera in the audience, she delivered “All that Jazz” (John Kander/Fred Ebb) with her own pizzazz. “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” (James Hanley) is another spirited Karen Mason favorite, and she was on target with Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh’s sly humor of “When in Rome (I Do As the Romans Do).”

Backed by Musical Director Tedd Firth (with arrangements by Christopher Denny), Bob Renino on bass and Rex Benincasa on drums, the highlight was undeniably two Judy Garland favorites, “The Man That Got Away” (Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin) and “Over the Rainbow” by Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, classics that held the room breathless.  She earned a standing ovation after her pairing of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s “Somewhere” and “The Impossible Dream” (Mitch Leigh/Joe Darion).

Songwriter Rolnick, also releasing a CD, took the stage for a segment of his original songs, “Strumming My First Guitar” (with John Nanni), “Cold Enough to Cross” (with Henry Cory), and a duet with Mason on “Shoot for the Moon” (with Dennis Scott), demonstrating the articulate intimacy of his music.

Mason closed show with the title song of her new CD, “It’s About Time,” written by Rolnick and Shelly Markham after passage of the Marriage Equality Act. A favorite at gay weddings, its humanity strikes just the right note for any wedding. “It’s about love. It’s about life.  And it’s about time.”