Barbara Brussell

Come What Mae — A Mother of a Show

Tom Rolla’s Gardenia, West Hollywood, CA, January 26, 2019

Reviewed by Elliot Zwiebach for Cabaret Scenes

Barbara Brussell is an audience’s delight. Her singing is enchanting and seductive, her song choices are stunningly on the mark, and her patter is so stream-of-consciousness that you’d think she was making it up in the moment as she talked directly to you. Her voice has developed greater depth over the years, and she effectively draws listeners in with her sterling interpretations of familiar songs to which she gives new meanings.

Autobiographical shows are not unusual, but shows about one’s mother may be, though perhaps not when your mother was Mae Magnin Brussell, who died 30 years ago.  According to Brussell, her mom shared what she knew of the world with her children, and was also a conspiracy-theory buff whose writings and broadcasts about the Kennedy assassinations, Watergate, and other events in her lifetime brought her into contact with all kinds of people—a circumstance Brussell used brilliantly on a quietly stunning “Someone in a Tree” (Stephen Sondheim, Pacific Overtures).

Brussell set the time frame for her mother’s political awakening with a pair of medleys. One had snippets from songs from the 1960s, including a sweet, sincere “Scarborough Fair” (Paul Simon) and passionate readings of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a Changin’” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The other was a series of fervently-sung cultural anthems, including a passionate “Being at War” (Carole King), a light-hearted take on Paul Simon’s “59th Street Bridge Song” (“Feeling Groovy”), and a reflective, dramatic “Man in the Mirror” (Glen Ballard/Siedah Garrett).

With music director Christopher Denny at the piano, Brussell employed more of her vocal perfection—and her ability to find the links between otherwise unrelated songs—to describe how her mother exposed her to all life has to offer in a combination of “Children and Art” (Sondhei,; Sunday in the Park with George) and “Think of Me” (Andrew Lloyd Webber/Charles Hart/Richard Stilgoe, The Phantom of the Opera).

One of the evening’s high points—and one of its most poignant—occurred when Brussell used “Bridge over Troubled Water” (Simon) to reflect on the impact of the death of her sister in a car accident.  It was sung softly and tenderly, and when she got to the lyric, “When darkness comes/and pain is all around,” her drawing-out of the word “pain” showed how powerful the emotion lives in her.

Despite differences between them over the years, Brussell’s love for her mother was clear in the lovely, reflective “Mama, Hereby” (Jane Siberry) (“I love you as my mother, but the pain we cause each other is killing me”), and an achingly poignant “You Were There” (Ken Hirsch/Ron Miller; Clothespins and Dreams), in which she expressed her apologies for any hurts she may have inflicted  over the years. She closed the show with “One of Those Days,” a lovely song by her brother, John Goodwin, recalling sights and sounds that remind her of her mother.