Carolyn Montgomery
girlSINGER: A Celebration of Rosemary Clooney
Post Office Café & Cabaret, Provincetown, MA, June 6, 2025
Reviewed by John Amodeo
Photo by Bill Westmoreland
In a week packed with Kander & Ebb-themed shows (and no wonder, when CabaretFest 2025 was titled All That Jazz: A Kander & Ebb Celebration), Carolyn Montgomery’s show girlSINGER: A Celebration of Rosemary Clooney stood out. This was because this multi-MAC and Bistro Award winner is always at the top of her game and because it was this year’s only CabaretFest show without a single Kander & Ebb song in it. For that she can be easily forgiven, thanks to her funny, expressive, and engaging storytelling, whether regaling us with stories about Clooney’s life and how it mirrored her own, or singing in her warm alto whose velvety timbre and gentle vibrato resembled Clooney’s.
Montgomery has made something of a cottage industry of girlSINGER. She has performed it in New York City’s Birdland and 54 Below, as well as at Crazy Coqs in London, and she has won a MAC and Bistro Award for the show along the way to add to her collection. Despite the show’s success, she has allowed it to evolve and mature, even as she herself has. One of the most poignant moments in the show came when she spoke of her first marriage to her now ex-wife and brought her queerness into the show for the first time, just as Provincetown readied for its Pride Celebration that same weekend. She drew parallels between Clooney’s failed marriages and her own with the line, “The truth about marriages gone bad can just suck.” She then segued wistfully into “The Masquerade Is Over” (Allie Wrubel/Herb Magidson); we wondered whether the emotional depths she plumbed were her own or Clooney’s, but they were likely both.
girlSINGER may be the title of Montgomery’s show, but girlACTRESS would better describe it. She displayed a range of emotions from silly to sublime, and from regretful to triumphant, sometimes all in the span of a single song. Case in point, Montgomery took us on a fun ride as she illustrated the clash between Clooney’s girl-next-door public image and her lustful personal life in the medley of “Straighten Up and Fly Right” (Nat King Cole/Irving Mills), “Nice ‘n’ Easy” (Lew Spence/Alan & Marilyn Bergman), and “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” (Nat D. Ayer/Seymour Brown). Here Montgomery delightfully toggled between feigned innocence and simmering sensuality. In a dramatic turn, she had us look anew at Clooney’s signature tune, “Tenderly” (Walter Gross/Jack Lawrence) with tragic irony as she recounted the mistreatment and disregard Clooney received from her husband José Ferrer, whom she deeply loved. Montgomery’s conversational way with a lyric was evident in her richly textured “Hey There” (Richard Adler/Jerry Ross), another Clooney signature song that Montgomery’s natural delivery made her so easy to connect with. These subtle bits of theater woven into the narrative and music were undoubtedly bolstered by having none other than Tony Award nominee Sally Mayes directing the proceedings.
But neither Mayes nor Montgomery can keep a long face for very long, and there was much levity on display. Montgomery poked fun at the implausibility of the plot lines in Clooney’s landmark film White Christmas, which had us smirking all the way through the otherwise somber “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me” (Irving Berlin). She added to the humor by skewering Clooney’s trademark collection of songs sung with dubious accents in a masterful mashup arranged by Tedd Firth. They included “Come on-a My House” (William Saroyan/Ross Bagdasarian), “Mangos” (Dee Libby/Sid Wayne), “Mambo Italiano” (Bob Merrill), “Sway” (Pablo Beltrán Luis/Norman Gimbel), and “Botch-A-Me” (or “Ba-Ba-Baciami Piccina”) (R. Morbelli/L. Astore) that Firth dubbed “ethnically homeless.” In Montgomery’s hands, this sendup became a hilarious tour de force that was worth the price of admission.
Montgomery waxed reflective in another well-crafted medley of “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” (George & Ira Gershwin), “Still Crazy After All These Years” (Paul Simon), and “The Second Time Around” (Jimmy Van Heusen/Sammy Cahn), which creatively weaved one song with another, a specialty of both Montgomery and Firth, and kept music director and pianist Tom LaMark on his toes. LaMark played exquisitely throughout, even though he’d first seen the music just hours before the show.
When it came time to say goodnight, Montgomery brought us back to the moment we are in by closing with Marc Blitzstein’s gorgeous “I Wish It So” from Juno. It was a heartfelt plea for us to triumph over adversity, a message we need to hear now more than ever. It sealed Montgomery’s place in the pantheon of earth mothers who inspire, nurture, and care for us as humans.
