by Marc Miller

 

 

This was not your usual cabaret show. The Metropolitan Room website beckoned with just “Jason Graae” listed. That’s inducement enough; Graae is a veteran and expert cabaret performer/Broadway singer-actor/chronicler of the Great American Songbook, with a nimble tenor and a wicked sense of humor. But imagine one’s surprise upon arriving at West 22^nd Street, being handed a program, and discovering that Graae will merely be host, interlocutor, supporting vocalist, and sometime-oboist—really, he plays the oboe—in a populous evening of opera standards, near-standards, and downright obscurities. Zarzuela: El Nino Judio, anyone?

 

 

Opera New York, whose mission statement is “producing unique & innovative productions of opera, music theater, & concerts that are accessible to contemporary, widely diversified audiences,” most assuredly fulfilled it. After Graae’s explanatory opening number, with special lyrics set to Cabaret’s “Willkommen,” we went right into the deep end, with soprano Elena Heimur and mezzo Jodi Karem duetting on Lakme’s “Sous le Dome Epais.”

 

A couple of observations about the format:

First, while it’s natural to wonder how Graae’s earthy cabaret shtick might coexist with six opera singers swanning about, they get along just fine. They’re a dignified sextet, but they do loosen up, especially when Graae cracks wise. He notes how Heimur, in aria after aria, plays a hooker. Opposite Veronica Loiacono on an English-language “Pa Pa Pa” (The Magic Flute), he gesticulates and mugs with a fetching “what am I doing here?” manner. And when his oboe accompaniment works a little less than ideally, he shrugs and confesses, “My A key is sticking.”

 

Second, and this may be central to director Judith Fredericks’ objective, opera in the Metropolitan Room is quite different from opera at the other Metropolitan. Fredericks gives the singers the run of the room, so their often thrilling voices may be two feet away. They sing at you. They acknowledge and flirt with the audience, and when music director Michael Pilafian’s piano accompaniment feels a little anonymous, their personalities make up for it. Baritone Roberto Borgatti’s “Toreador Song” is really spectacular, with Borgatti simultaneously honoring and sending up Escamillo’s swagger. Jodi Karem’s “Gypsy Song” (a lot of Carmen on the bill) is punctuated by Karem and her supporting gypsies banging tambourines right on our tables as they pass. And overwhelming as “Musetta’s Waltz” is at the Met, here, with the singers all around the room, it’s in a beguiling Surround Sound, yielding subtleties in the harmonies that get lost at Lincoln Center.

 

It feels somewhat underrehearsed at times, with a free-for-all Rigoletto quartet that should have stayed in the oven longer, and even Percy Martinez’s well-supported tenor can’t quite handle all the high notes in a pummeling barrage of The Pearl Fishers, Pagliacci, and, as an encore, Turandot’s larynx-busting “Nessun Dorma,” opposite a solid Edgar Jaramillo. But the rough spots have a charm of their own; up close, and, another rarity in cabaret, without mics, we get to see how challenging this repertoire really is. Graae’s narrative interjections are helpful and witty, and if he’s not really an opera singer, he functions well as an Everyman, the regular guy who embodies our wish fulfillment as he actually gets to vocalize with such a formidable ensemble. Graae and Opera New York will be back at the Metropolitan Room in August for several nights of varying, to-be-determined menus; an operetta night, maybe a Puccini night, we’ll see what else. By all means, go.

 

Mar. 9 at the Metropolitan Room, 34 W. 22^nd St. Schedule at metropolitanroom.com.