Sunday, June 9, 2013

Lea Salonga at Café Carlyle

Last night, the Tony Award winning star of Broadway’s Miss Saigon gave her final performance at Café Carlye (in the Carlyle Hotel) in a show called "Back to Before" that looks at her life as a New Yorker and pays tribute to inspirations including Ella Fitzgerald and Barbra Streisand. The Carlyle Cafe is located at 35 East 76th Street at Madison Avenue. The authentically elegant venue is regarded the epitome of New York class, attracting such top-level singers.

Here is an excerpt from the New York Times review:

In the first half, she concentrated on standards that included “The Song Is You,” “Manhattan” and “How Long Has This Been Going On? — all delivered with an almost machinelike perfection. Her performance was matched by the facility of her musicians, the pianist Jeff Harris, the bassist John Miller and the guitarist Jack Cavari, who were playing arrangements by Larry Yurman.

“Greatest Love of All,” Whitney Houston’s early hit, received an unusually strong and focused interpretation whose message of unapologetic self-reliance resonated with Ms. Salonga’s show business biography. “I Won’t Mind,” a woman’s protective love song to a child who’s not hers, written by Jeff Blumenkrantz, Annie Kessler and Libby Saines, and a medley of Stephen Sondheim’s “So Many People” and “Loving You” demonstrated her comfort in a more intimate, psychologically subtle mode.

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