Francesca Amari and Tiffany Bailey
Delicious Dissonance
Feinstein’s at Vitello’s Studio City, CA, September 17, 2022
Reviewed by Elliot Zwiebach
In this fast-paced show packed with positive, uplifting music and top-notch performances at Feinstein’s at Vitello’s, Francesca Amari and Tiffany Bailey let everyone know they have moved past the challenges they faced during the pandemic. Amari said she prefers to be optimistic rather than accepting negative input in “Everybody Says Don’t” (Stephen Sondheim from Anybody Can Whistle), while Bailey said she realized everyone has his or her own way of doing things in The Doors’ “People Are Strange.”
In “Don’t You Worry ‘bout a Thing” (Stevie Wonder), performed with lovely backing by guitar maestro Dori Amarilio, Bailey said she used the quarantine to spend time on creative projects. Amari, despite months of wearing loose clothing and no makeup, said her goal was to convince herself that “I Feel Pretty” (Sondheim/Leonard Bernstein from West Side Story), performed here with a deliberately misleading “Something’s Coming” intro by music director Wayne Abravanel.
Among the show’s high points were a pair of deeply-felt ballads: Bailey chose an original song, “The Call,” in which she reflected, using clear, simple images, on dealing with the loss of her mother. Amari reflected on the joys of living each day as it comes in the hauntingly beautiful “The Last Day” (Brenda Russell/John Ewbank).
Both performers dealt with their adolescence in a moving mashup; Bailey offered a slow version of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” (Robert Hazard), followed by Amari, who sang Janis Ian’s thoughtful “At Seventeen,” during which Bailey interjected the refrain, ‘Girls just wanna have fun,” as an ironic counterpoint to the tenderly reflective lyrics of Amari’s song.
The evening featured several duets demonstrating the friendship between the two women, despite their living roughly 100 miles apart (Bailey in Los Angeles, Amari in Palm Springs). This included three Broadway tunes: a delightful “Peas in a Pod” (Scott Frankel/Michael Korie from Grey Gardens); a winning “Mutual Admiration Society” (Harold Karr/Matt Dubey from Happy Hunting, with some special lyrics by Amari); and a slow-tempo take on “Together (Wherever We Go)” (Sondheim/Jule Styne from Gypsy). Bailey and Amari also delivered joyous harmonies on “Top of the World” (Richard Carpenter/John Bettis), with additional vocal harmony from Abravanel, and “Rhythm of Life” (Cy Coleman/Dorothy Fields from Sweet Charity).
Together, the two seasoned performers demonstrated clearly and definitively, throughout the show and in one of their duets, that “It’s Not Where You Start” (Coleman/Fields from Seesaw). By the end of the evening, it was clear that they had certainly finished on top.
