Celina Jones
Both Sides Now
The Green Room 42, NYC, June 25, 2023
Reviewed by Bart Greenberg
Celina Jones
The lovely Celina Jones made her cabaret debut at The Green Room 42 with her program Both Sides Now. She possesses a powerful voice, and she projected a total commitment to the quite eclectic material she chose for the evening. She also brought two talented friends to add variety to the show. Under the guidance of producer Jackson Walker and with the support of music director Rebekah Bruce, she presented a strong, if somewhat flawed, presentation. She obviously has a major interest in theater music, with songs from Waitress, Company, and Children of Eden were on her set list, though most were presented in a pop style. Interestingly, the two Sondheim numbers were presented closest to their original form and were the most dramatically satisfying numbers of the evening.
Her guests included singer/songwriter Adam Laporte and vocalist/guitarist Andrew Maguire, her high school prom date. During the show, Jones soloed on two compositions by Laporte, “Knees” and “That Doesn’t Scare Me”; the latter was a strong power ballad that she acted out very well. It was slightly undercut by an earlier selection, “I’m Not Afraid” (SFANY), which traversed exactly the same territory. Laporte surprisingly joined her to duet on “Bad Idea” from Waitress, to which they both brought a great deal of endearing theatrical energy, but surely he has written a duet they could have offered instead of performing someone else’s work. Two duets with the charming sweet-voiced Maguire were “Heavy Crown” (she mentioned several times that it was written by her favorite drag queen but never identified her as Trixie Mattel) and “I Don’t Want to Know” (Stevie Nicks), which had a definite folk-music vibe.
Jones has some quirks that, hopefully, experience will free her from. She tends to hug the microphone to her lips, which coupled with someone’s choice to add far too much reverb to the sound system, muffled her enunciation. Some of the lyrics in “Gravity” (Sara Bareilles) and “Us” (Regina Spektor) were indecipherable. Considering that she zinged every word of the tongue-twisting “Another Hundred People” with hardly a syllable lost, this is a very fixable issue. She also needs to learn how to free herself from clutching the mic stand while locking herself to it dead center, which she did most of the time.
On the plus side, she demonstrated a sweet and warm sense of humor in her patter, and she definitely knows how to build a song vocally. She is a very promising talent; hopefully experience and some guidance will move her forward.
