Maureen McGovern

Almost from the moment this striking, red haired performer edged through the tables at the Algonquin's Oak Room, took up the mike and sang Comden/Green /Bernstein's Lucky To Be Me,there was little doubt the audience was in the hands-completely in the hands--of a masterful entertainer. By the time she'd followed her opener with Nice and Easyand turned up the heat with Fever,Maureen McGovern owned the room and everyone in it.

A long history of awards and accolades trails behind this artist, going back to 1973 when she won a Grammy nomination as the Best New Artist for her recording of the Academy Award winning song,

The Morning After, from the Poseidon Adventure. Jumping a quick twenty five years, her reviews this past year as Anna in the National tour of The King and Iand as Mary Turner in the West Coast production of Gershwin's political satire, Of Thee I Sing,are unanimous: This lady can deliver!

And deliver she did--with an impressively varied selection of songs from Hoagy Carmichael and Ned Washington's The Nearness of You,which Maureen terms the "most romantic song ever written," to Billy Strayhorn's jazz classic Take The A Train.

Her show is a veneration of the great music of America's mid-century. The composers and lyricists she selected provided an array from Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and the Gershwins to Sondheim. Interestingly, the only contemporary piece was her closing number, a feeling rendition of Ordinary Miraclesby Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Marvin Hamlish.

Perhaps credit is due to Maureen's extensive experience in musical theater as well as her string of recordings. She's played everything from Polly Peachum in the Sting production of The Three Penny Operaand Miss Adalaide in Guys and Dollsto Nellie Forbush in a regional production of South Pacific. She was in Ninewith Raul Julia and spent another fourteen months on Broadway in The Pirates of Penzance. But, whatever the source of her talent, she possesses a chameleon like persona that alters from song to song. In some, she's wide eyed and singing to the nearby tables. In another, she's lost in a reverie, singing the entire song with her eyes closed and her head tilted slightly up. With Sondheim's Could I Leave You?(which Maureen mused might have been written today about a well known Washington couple), she's a woman full of energy, wit and venom.

If, as Pearl Bailey once told Tony Bennett, it takes ten years just to learn how to walk on stage properly, Maureen has learned her lessons well. As impressive as her musical ability is with such a wide-range of material, it is equalled by the unassuming ease with which she handles her audience in the intimacy of a cabaret setting. Summing it up in the words of the Bergman/Spence number she sang, Maureen McGovern has that rare ability to make an exquisite performance look Nice and Easy.

By Peter Leavy