Hannah Jane
Lady Legends of Broadway
The Green Room 42, NYC, January 7, 2025
Reviewed by Bart Greenberg

Hannah Jane is a charming and very pretty performer who has a surprisingly flexible and strong voice. She also displayed strong acting skills in her show Lady Legends of Broadway at The Green Room 42. The program was based on the charming book A Is for Audra by John Robert Allman that salutes an array of female musical stars. Hannah Jane has expanded the book’s contents to offer songs associated with each celebrity. It was a clever idea that eventually went awry though Hannah Jane is a major talent and the evening was well staged by Coco Cohn. The indispensable Jon Weber as music director/pianist provided a non-stop background of melodic, inventive, and often humorous support.
Jane got a chance to bring to life some of the characters she seems destined to play in future productions: Carrie Pipperedge, Eliza Doolittle, Ado Annie Carnes, and in another decade Anna Leonowens. She sang an immensely touching “My Ship” (Ira Gershwin/Kurt Weill) and an exuberant “Some People” (Jule Styne/Stephen Sondheim). She also proved herself an adequate puppeteer for “The Lonely Goatherd” (Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein II) and a spirited tap dancer for “Forget About the Boy” (Jeanine Tesori/Dick Scanlan). Although she didn’t reach Christine Pedi’s level of impersonations, she certainly showed that she could capture the vocal mannerisms of many of the stars she was paying tribute to. But as the evening wore on, it that she was insisting trying to demonstrate everything she could do; in effect it was a fevered audition being performed by someone who already had the job.
Most of the major mistakes occurred during the second half of the show, starting with a truncated “June Is Busting Out All Over” (Rodgers & Hammerstein) that Hannah Jane tried to tie in with the legendary disaster of Leslie Uggams’ performance in Washington, D.C. It was a far too short summary that only confused the uninitiated part of the audience. Sister Act’s “Here Within These Walls” (Alan Menkin/Glenn Slater) made very little sense out of context. Another issue was that while she was delivering her vocal salutes and reading the text of Allman’s book, she revealed next to nothing about herself. In this most intimate of art forms, there were very few suggestions of who this excellent singer and eager performer was. Only in the final moments were we given a hint in her quiet and touching delivery of the very first song she wanted to learn: “Over the Rainbow” (Harold Arlen/E.Y. Harburg). Hopefully, she will offer far more of herself in her next show.