Karen Mason
Broadway Baby!
The Palm Cabaret and Club, Olas Altas, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, January 4, 2026
Reviewed by John Amodeo
Photo by Gene Reed
Karen Mason has always been a babe of the boards, and her recent show Broadway Baby!, which she performed in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, dashed any doubt, if ever there was one, that she was born for the stage. A veteran of seven Broadway musicals, including the mega hits Mamma Mia! and Sunset Boulevard, as well as such national tours as Love Never Dies and regional productions of Company and Gypsy, Mason knows her way around a Broadway score. Under Barry Kleinbort’s direction, Mason and her longtime musical director Christopher Denny assembled a sophisticated mix of Broadway songs, songs written for film, and even a few songs from the pop world, all shaped into an evening of absolute magic.
Setting the tone for the program with the showstopper “All That Jazz” (John Kander/Fred Ebb). Mason pulled out all the stops with high belting, surprising stylizing, and the expressive acting that has always been her hallmark. Throughout the show, she was in remarkable voice, skillfully shading her dynamics to emphasize a lyric or an emotion, and always in service of the song. Two examples are the way she tenderly ended Aladdin’s “A Whole New World” (Alan Menken/Tim Rice) and Mamma Mia’s “I Have a Dream (Benny Andersson/Bjorn Ulvaeus) where her closing notes seemed to float on air and lingered long after she had finished. In the latter song, she sang a whole chorus in Spanish in deference to her local audience, and the staff stopped in their tracks to listen appreciatively.
Kleinbort and Mason formed the program as a loose arc that allowed Mason to share stories of her own career on the stage—sometimes glamorous and sometimes not. She’s a natural storyteller; her patter, while clearly outlined and finely honed, was so conversational that you almost felt as if you were having coffee with her rather than seeing a performance. Even though she has many career accomplishments to be proud of, as a master of self-deprecation, she was at her funniest when she poked fun at herself.
One of the joys of Mason’s shows is that you don’t always know where she is taking a song. With Denny’s help, there were some unusual pairings of songs and some intriguing arrangements that made you hear a familiar song with fresh clarity. Mason and Denny paired two gorgeous Michel Legrand songs from the 1964 film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, “Watch What Happens” and “I Will Wait for You,” both with English lyrics by Norman Gimbel. They were so carefully interwoven you barely knew when you were going from one song into the other. Mason aimed right for the heart with such lines as “No, I won’t believe your heart is cold,” and scored a bull’s eye with her heartbreaking sincerity.
Another unexpected pairing that made so much sense once you’ve heard them together was John Lennon’s “Help!” with Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive.” This pairing started off slowly as Denny softly vamped the bass line from “Being Alive” beneath Mason’s plea for “Help!” He did that so subtly that she segued seamlessly into “Being Alive” without skipping a beat. It is a little-known fact that Lennon intended “Help!” to be sung as a slow ballad, but when it was written to be the opening for the Beatles’ film of the same name, he felt he needed to speed it up for commercial release. Mason and Denny’s arrangement made you feel that desperate yearning Lennon had always intended, which heightened that same cry for help in “Being Alive” that Mason brought home with reckless abandon.
This Broadway baby isn’t just about heartfelt ballads. Mason sizzled on a mashup of “42nd Street” (Harry Warren/Al Dubin) and “Let Yourself Go” (Irving Berlin), where she did just that with vocal pyrotechnics that rocked the rafters. She was delightfully daffy on “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” (Jule Styne/Leo Robin) as she mined the hidden humor in each lyric until she brought it to a dazzling finish.
Mason let us know that her dream to live on the stage began early. She shared a story of playing Carrie Pipperidge in her high-school production of Carousel, which sent her into the most heartrending version of “Mr. Snow” (Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein II) I’ve ever heard. Denny’s driving beat propelled Mason’s wistful dreaming to a stirring climax during which the audience was rapt and frozen in a moment of sheer magic. I’ve never cried through this song before, and I’m not likely to until the next time I hear Mason sing it. In her closing number, “As If I Never Said Goodbye” (Andrew Lloyd Webber/Don Black/Christopher Hampton), Mason mesmerized us with the line “Feel the magic in the making,” which is exactly what we felt through the entire show.
