Becky Mossing and Michael Shepard
Imperfect Relationships
The Cabaret at Germano’s, Baltimore, MD, September 21, 2019
Reviewed by Michael Miyazaki for Cabaret Scenes
Michael Shepard
George and Dot in Sunday in the Park with George; Annie Oakley and Frank Butler in Annie Get Your Gun; Lucy and Schroeder in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. The stage has given us a wide variety of couples who have both rocky relationships and great musical numbers. In their show Imperfect Relationships, Becky Mossing and Michael Shepard present a series of bravura duets centered on relationship issues.
They opened with the witty “Fine” from Ordinary Days, showing the relationship perils of a couple trying to get to a dinner party. Later, “Beautiful” from the same show, explored two people’s feelings about art, a thematic thread that was picked up later in “Children and Art” and “Move On” from Sunday in the Park with George. The duo performed a number of songs by Jason Robert Brown and a sequence of “Falling Into You” and “The Next Ten Minutes” that musicalized the throes of passion.
The show also had moments of levity with Spamalot’s “The Song That Goes Like This,” “My New Philosophy,” from You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown; and “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” from Annie Get Your Gun. Their final sequence of “Flight,” “Move On,” and “Goodbye Until Tomorrow” was effective for portraying the close of the relationship and for closing the show.
Mossing is a powerhouse performer with a powerful belt and effective coloratura notes. Sheppard brought a warm presence to his chores, multitasking as both pianist and vocalist.
Both can be engaging performers, but they spent large swaths of the show focused on the tablet on the piano that contained the music. While this increased their accuracy in delivering complicated musical material, their resulting lack of engagement with the audience often made the show feel more like a rehearsal than a performance.
