Miss Maude Maggart

We went back to the Algonquin after the final dress of "Priscilla" tonight. We are so familiar with it now I (tt) call it "The Gonk"  Here is the splendiferous star of the evening who titled her show after the 1911 Irving Berlin smash hit "Everbody's Doin' It"

A commentary on the show will be added tomorrow as it is 1am and I am a very old tired man who cannot see the keys of the computer. But she was superg.

Now it's morning and looking at the photo brings back how special last night was.
 Miss Maggart wore a cherry red gown that sometimes seemed to want to drop away from her beautiful body. The back of it plunged to the bottom of her spine. Because the Oak Room is a long space and the performance area is midway  the performers spend a lot of time with their backs to you. And that is why I am so glad of that dress. Because Maude breathes the music. Her muscles undulate with pleasure and pain and drama. Her arms rise and fall with the images she finds in every song. She is taken over, as a medium calls forth spirits. It is pure artistry with not a mote of self consciousness.

And the arc of the show was really clever. She took us on a one hundred year journey in linear time from  simple songs which saluted simpler ways... almost trivial in content.... to deeper psychological insights of profound love and spirit. We went from the hokey bounce of  Berlin's  1911 when everybody was "doing it" (it was actually The Turkey Trot) to 2011 when we find ourselves questioning the heavens.... the profound  "I'm not the star you thought I'd be".

Miss Maggart inhabited standards like "Luck Be a Lady", "Swingin' On a Star", "They All Laughed" and "The Lady is a Tramp" while deftly giving us  history lessons of, say, the link between the popular song and womens' suffrage and the development of crooning as a result of the introduction of the microphone.
 Her love of Sondheim and Michael Leonard gave us sublime renditions of  "Anyone Can Whistle" and "Why Did I Choose You?" and there was an almost folk song by Mark Blitzstein called "I Wish It So" (from the 1959 musical JUNO) that brought the house down.
She is a master of mood. She loves people. She is blessed with dramatic flair. Who else would walk into the audience and end the show with "There Will  Never Be Another You" in semi-darkness?