Klea Blackhurst

A Brand New Evening with Klea Blackhurst

Chelsea Table & Stage, NYC, May 18, 2025

Reviewed by Alix Cohen

By rights, Klea Blackhurst should be a household name for music and theater aficionados. A poster woman for “almost,” she has starred in successive workshopped and/or out-of-town productions that didn’t quite make it to Broadway.

Sustaining performance standards, unabashedly candid and persuasive, unique in voice and presentation, Blackhurst muscled through decades of cabaret shows and concerts, the infectious epitome of loving what one does. As her series at Chelsea Table & Stage pauses until October, she left us wanting more.

Uncommon time signatures were displayed in a swingy “Don’t Rain on My Parade” (Jule Styne/Bob Merrill) and “It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish” (Cy Coleman/Dorothy Fields), which arrived with unexpected freshness and a unique cadence. Instead of simply a high-beam vocal, we heard personal expression.

Blackhurst was raised in Salt Lake City where “nobody drank, smoked, or used swear words and Man of La Mancha was considered a musical comedy.” Around the house, she heard jazz, musicals, and Herb Alpert, who awakened her desire to play trumpet in a Broadway orchestra pit. At 20, she packed up her t-shirt and LP collections, an audition dress and pumps, and hightailed it to New York where musicals flourished.

In this show, Blackhurst’s career highlights formed a cohesive through-line that was specific, sympathetic, and droll. Aided and abetted by pianist Michael Rice, drummer Daniel Glass, and bassist Ray Kilday, her high-stakes approach was riveting. She has personality to spare, and she can write. 

A tribute to her mom, Ethel Merman, and Mary Martin included Irving Berlin’s
“I Got the Sun in the Morning” and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “A Cockeyed Optimist.” The second was paused to point out the lyric, “I could say life is just a bowl of Jello/And appear more intelligent and smart.” Salt Lake City has, she quipped, the highest per capita consumption of Jello in the world. Each selection fit character and musical moment as if bespoke. From Buffalo Gals, in which Blackhurst played Sally Ann Silverspurs, we heard “The Yodeling Muchacha” (Nick Plakias, who was in the club tonight). As if hoedown married polka, the song conjured dirndl skirts, lederhosen, and cowboy boots. Yes, she can yodel; you’d never hear this elsewhere. Lively and articulately funny, the song was highlighted with brief accompaniment by the trumpet of Blackhurst’s dreams.

From a musical version of The Nutty Professor with Jerry Lewis at its helm came “While I Still Have the Time” (Marvin Hamlisch/Rupert Holmes). The show took 10 years to fully percolate; it ran successfully in Nashville and then it got stuck in the limbo of a law suit. Blackhurst played the eccentric’s secretary, Miss Lemon. She began the song hopefully and tremulously with furrowed brow, and then, with her head back, it became resolute. We made the journey with her. Jerry Herman’s “Before the Parade Passes By,” she noted, delivered the same message. Stepping forward and then back, forward and then back, she looked out to the future then down to us for complicity.

When Blackhurst was backstage at a make-up mirror before a salute to Hamlisch, she found Lucie Arnaz staring at her curiously. Arnaz then went to Ron Abel, co-author with Chuck Steffan of the musical Hazel based on the television series with Shirley Booth. “I’ve found your lead,” she declared. Blackhurst played the role in New York workshops and through a Chicago run. Arnaz directed.

“Hazel had a PhD in life and fixing things but never did anything for herself; then she met a man,” we’re told. “He Just Happened to Me” captured the astonishment and delight of a sweet, selfless middle-aged workhorse discovering love. It was poignant, not saccharine. Chicago critic Tom Williams wrote: “Klea Blackhurst alone makes seeing the show worthwhile.”

“One more original from a show that hasn’t happened yet” introduced Merman’s Apprentice in which 12-year-old Muriel Plakenstein runs away from home and apprentices herself to Ethel Merman, a role Blackhurst was born to play. When legendary producer David Merrick heard the kid, he decided to star Muriel in the first all-child cast of Hello, Dolly! Merman took her under her wing; the show can be viewed on YouTube.

The sheet music of “Taking the Veil” (David Evans/Stephen Cole, also in the club tonight) should be gifted to every aspiring actress. Muriel enjoyed all the tag-along perks. She didn’t realize what it was actually like when a show opens and runs. “To them you’re a luminous star/But what you are kid, is a nun…it’s like taking the veil,” Merman/Blackhurst sang. The performer knew what she was talking about.

An excerpt from Blackhurst’s high school diary written when she had visited New York was ambitious, observant, and smart. “I’m All I’ve Got” (Ronny Graham/Milton Schafer) might have been written for her: “I’m all I’ve got/No matter what you cannot rearrange me/Into a shy, a demure and a strange me.” No fanfare, but definitely an anthem.

Blackhurst left us with “Laughing Matters” (Mark Waldrop/Dick Gallagher): “So take those blues and bounce them off the wall/Keep your humor, please/Cause don’t you know it’s times like these that/Laughing matters most of all.” It’s not that I don’t agree, but I would have stopped with the previous song. Klea Blackhurst is the whole enchilada.