Reviews and Quotes:

A Mix of Cake and Caffeine, and the Songs of Jule Styne

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
February, 2005

In "Everything's Coming Up Roses," a ferociously entertaining tribute to the composer Jule Styne, KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler, two dizzy throwbacks to old-time show business archetypes, join forces to become the Oddest Couple of Cabaret.

Both have flourishing solo careers. She's a perpetually fading comic bombshell, a Marilyn manquée who ambulates with a wide-eyed jiggle while wielding an improbable semi-operatic soprano. He's a frenzied, piano-banging, jabbering encyclopedia of show business lore who suggests a Frankenstein-like resurrection of Al Jolson, wired from head to toe with the voltage turned on high.

When they pool their zaniness, the dessert they cook up suggests an angel food cake spiked with double espresso. She calms him down; he wakes her up. In the show, playing at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, their rapport is so cozy they all but finish each other's sentences. Styne, who died 11 years ago at 88, was himself a gee-whiz enthusiast and an inexhaustible reservoir of brash show tunes, which he could crank out on demand in just minutes. His musical optimism suits performers who are much more comfortable having fun than when searching their souls.

Which is not to say that "Everything's Coming Up Roses" is without reflective moments. On the whole, the show is an energetic chronology of Styne's musical life and times that avoids sticky nostalgia. Songs from "Gypsy," "Funny Girl" and "Bells Are Ringing," as well as lesser-known musicals, are strung into inventive medleys and duets.

But when Ms. Sullivan croons a sweetly wistful version of "People," standing beside the piano, it revolves around the words, "We're children needing other children." The lovers who are "very special people" in the same song are seen as a more mature breed that this latter-day Peter and Wendy contemplate longingly from afar.

The same ingenuousness informs Mr. Nadler's version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," sung from the point of view of a pauper who can't afford to lavish bling on his dream dates. The song, which follows his remarks on Styne's gambling habit, is the cleverest change of pace in a show that for all its giddy pleasure at living in the past never loses its head.

Fine Styne salute is coming up roses

Howard Kissel
February 10th, 2005

Jule Styne, who wrote some of the greatest songs of the 20th century, worked with an unusually diverse group of lyricists, from Leo Robin ("Bye, Bye, Baby") to Stephen Sondheim ("Small World") to Comden and Green ("Never Never Land") to Bob Merrill ("People") to Sammy Cahn (the many songs made famous by Styne's former L.A. house-mate, Frank Sinatra).

In their Algonquin Oak Room tribute to Styne on the centenary of his birth, KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler do a wide range of Styne songs, from the soulful to the theatrical.

At first glance, Sullivan and Nadler are an odd pairing. Her song readings tend to be offhand, almost conversational. He has an energy bordering on maniacal. But they complement each other beautifully, bringing out the inherent wit and beauty in these treasured songs.

They perform several songs that are not familiar but deserve to be. Two numbers from "Sugar," the 1972 musical based on "Some Like It Hot," which he wrote with Bob Merrill - "Penniless Bums" and "The People in My Life" - are both "finds."

Nadler, a fabulous pianist who has done the musical arrangements, has woven songs together elegantly. At times, he sets the keyboard afire. At others, he recedes into the background so their voices blend smoothly, as in "Time After Time" and "Just in Time."

Sullivan provides fascinating background material about the composer, who started as a child prodigy in London.

She performs "I'm Going Back" from "Bells Are Ringing" with all the necessary gusto. Nadler does "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" as if it were a philosophical soliloquy.

The two do a dynamite job celebrating a composer who is hardly undersung but may be underappreciated.

by REX REED
February 16, 2005

KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler have pooled their considerable talents again in Everything’s Coming Up Roses, a new cabaret act at the fabled Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel that continues to warm and charm through Feb. 26. This time they’ve added Jule Styne to the list of legendary composers they have honored from coast to coast. Everything fits. She’s Lillian Russell in space shoes. He’s a cross between Danny Kaye and Chico Marx. Together, they create their own special elixir of musical mayhem. Satisfaction is guaranteed. In the dour cold of a Manhattan winter, that ain’t gefilte.

Unlike all those other girl singers who refuse to learn new songs, bubbly blond Floradora girl KT has devoted most of her adult life since she left Boggy Depot, Okla., to learning them all. She can croon "Never Never Land" from Peter Pan or knock the wind out of your sails with the showstoppers that Mr. Styne penned for Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing with equal skill and spruce. Mr. Nadler, who used to be merely an entertaining musical wacko, has gained so much self-assurance since he first started performing in New York bars that now, when he calms down long enough to sing a ballad, he can startle and touch you with the beauty of his husky lower register in a slow tempo like "Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend." Surprisingly, he tackles Lorelei Lee’s anthem for gold diggers everywhere, singing it as the tragic lament of a man who knows what kind of Tiffany rocks lead the way to a girl’s heart, but painfully aware that he can’t afford them. Sometimes he doesn’t even have to open his mouth. From the Scott Joplin–inspired ragtime piano on "Sunday," one of Mr. Styne’s earliest Tin Pan Alley tunes, to the gorgeous but seldom-heard love theme from the final, ill-fated Jule Styne show, The Red Shoes, Mr. Nadler is a whiz at the keyboard, too. Talk about longevity. With their two voices, her feathers and his piano, they can take this act to the moon and save money.

Their styles may be different, but they have only one goal—pure, no-frills entertainment. They love music, they think alike, their patter is so grafted along the same lines that they sometimes say the same words at the same time, and they adore the legends who wrote the American Song Book. God help us if they ever move to Vegas. Whatever would they do with a chorus line of naked dancers in spurs? In an intimate space like the Oak Room, they do what they do best, and the audience reaps the benefits. He still taps sitting down, but he’s grown suave and dapper on "The People in My Life," while she gets "People," the Streisand signature song that the producers of Funny Girl wanted to delete from the pre-Broadway tour. No ordinary girl singer would have the nerve to sing that one, but KT bravely makes it her own. She is one of the few ladies on the contemporary New York scene who would look right at home in a bustle. When Jule Styne died at 88, his wife Margaret said, "He just ran out of keys." Fortunately, KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler have found them again, along with a few lost chords of their own, and are keeping the great man’s reputation alive and swinging at the Algonquin with a simple strategy Jule Styne would heartily applaud: "Learn all the songs, and then sing out, Louise!"

Broadway's Jule Styne gets musical tribute

By Frederick M. Winship

New York, NY, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler have teamed up to salute composer Jule Styne's immense contribution to the Broadway musical in a delightful cabaret turn at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel through Feb. 26.

Sullivan and Nadler, both of whom have successful solo careers, make an entertainment match made in heaven, a rare combination of talents that blend perfectly together. She sings to his accompaniment at the piano. He sings and accompanies himself. Best of all they sing together.

Sullivan has the big sexy eyes, cupid's bow mouth and creamy complexion of an 1890s vaudeville star, and she dresses up to that role in an off-shoulder black velvet gown worn with black ostrich feathers in her upswept blond hair. She has a pliant lyric soprano that can range from torchy brightness to light opera froth that marks her as a throwback to an earlier theatrical era.

Nadler is an exuberant personality, flashily dressed and bigger than life. He is not subservient, as most accompanists are, but is an equal artist to Sullivan in every way. His body language and facial expressions are exaggerated and fun to watch, as are his nimble fingers subduing the ivories, and he can be vocally ferocious or sensitive to suit the material he sings.

They have titled their show "Everything's Coming Up Roses" after the remarkable "Gypsy" anthem, and they perform 23 selections from that show and other classic Styne musicals including "Bells Are Ringing," "Funny Girl," "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," "Peter Pan" and "Sugar" in the form of solos, duets and medleys. Their delivery is direct, almost never contemplative.

The carefully worked out show marks the 100th birthday anniversary of Styne, who died in 1994. He was one of the few U.S. composers to win Oscar, Tony, Grammy and Emmy awards.

A British-born child piano prodigy, he began his career as a composer in Hollywood and then turned to Broadway, enjoying a smash hit on his second try, "High Button Shoes," in 1947. He wrote 13 long-run shows with such lyricists as Bob Merrill, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Leo Robin, Sammy Cahn, Frank Loesser and Stephen Sondheim. He also wrote some turkeys.

"Styne was a gambler in private life, and in his career he took monumental risks with both hits and flops to his credit," Sullivan observes.

She and Nadler resuscitate a Styne rarity, "Boogie Woogie Shoogie, Baby of Mine," that was cut from "Bells Are Ringing" but later recorded by Styne, and the first song Styne ever wrote, "Sunday," a solo hit for Nadler. But most of their material is familiar to lovers of the Broadway musical's golden age of abundantly melodic scores and towering stage personalities.

Both entertainers practice the magic of switching character styles to fit each song, rather than singing all the songs in the same mode as many cabaret artists do in order to create a distinctive style.

They blend "Penniless Bums" from "Sugar" into "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" in a way that suggests a pauper's lament on not being able to buy his girlfriend the jewels she deserves. Another nicely matched pair of songs is "Bye Bye Baby," sung by Nadler, with Sullivan replying pleadingly with a rendition of "I Don't Want To Walk Without You, Baby."

Among Sullivan's solo offerings are a ravishing rendition of "People" without any of Barbra Streisand's vocal mannerisms and a torchy "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry," a song she floats as lightly as thistledown. Nadler gets just the right rush of excitement felt when meeting the right girl for the first time into "I Met A Girl," originally sung by Sydney Chaplin in "Bells Are Ringing."

Sullivan rediscovers "Time After Time," a lovely love song from Styne's score for the now forgotten 1947 Frank Sinatra film, "It Happened in Brooklyn," and Nadler performs on the piano a haunting melody from the ballet film "The Red Shoes" that Styne later incorporated in one of his flops, "Look To the Lilies."