School Is In Session, And What A Session It Was.

Heigh-Ho, My Merry Rainbow Lovelies! Bobby Patrick, your RAINBOW Reviewer here. Putting the silent T in cabareT to bring you ALL the Tea!

Well, my darling Bobbyfiles, Thursday night’s SWING LESSONS with Melissa Errico and Billy Stritch at the FAB 54 Below was, in the jazz vernacular, a solid, syncopated sensation. This pair of nightclub royalty who have admired one another for years put together a brand new show made up of Melissa’s familiar home of Broadway musicals set to Billy’s jazz/swing arrangements. The lady herself said, “I have, for a long time, lived on Broadway, but I live FOR jazz.” And live she did, on this night, in her beautiful, figure-hugging midnight blue sequinned evening gown, offsetting Billy’s lighter royal blue sparkly jacket, all supported by Tom Hubbard, the busiest bassist in the business. Delighting the crowd from beginning to end, the trio played through a setlist of music from Sondheim to Rogers & Hart to Cole Porter and back again, with the headline duo sharing vocal duties throughout. It can’t be overstated, my lambs, that between Stritch & Errico (and Hubbard, for that matter) there are multiple decades of experience on nightclub stages all over the world that they brought to 54. So, the at-home ease on stage that each possesses singularly, they shared with each other and their audience, defining the term “Nightclub Act.” Bespectacled baritone Billy, with his cool-as-ice delivery and his on-fire fingers dancing o’er the keys, was the perfect companion to Melissa’s delightfully frenetic energy. There is the warmth of rapport, my lambs, and there are the sparks of chemistry, and sometimes you get one or you get the other, as they are not mutually exclusive states of being. With this pair, the audience got large servings of both. It is a rare combo that only rare talents can find. Rapport requires friendship and mutual admiration. Chemistry requires… something else, something so indefinable that if you go looking for it, it will hide from you, but if it happens between performers – well that’s the magic, and these two used it to bewitch the room.