LISA ASHER: Sensitive New Age Singer
by Peter Leavy
Word must have gotten around. The audience present at the second performance of Lisa Asher's new show, True Stories: A Cabaret Verite, could have read like a Who's Who of cabaret performers and critics. And the enduring applause at the end indicated that once again, Lisa had her peers enthusiastic approval. For, after two MAC nominations for Outstanding Female Vocalist and a 1996 Back Stage Bistro Award, she has just won the 1998 MAC award for Outstanding Restaurant/Piano Bar Entertainer. Her extravagantly melodic CD, Let the Mystery Be, treats the listener to her beautiful and expressive voice as well as the wide range of her songs. But live audiences can also watch her mobile face, with eyes that literally dance at times but whose slight narrowing or near winking can emphasize a word or phrase of the lyrics that form the stories to which this newest show and much of her previous shows are devoted.
For Lisa, the Great American Songbook is not closed! As a piano bar vocalist, she's regularly worked her way through the pop songs of the 40s through the 70s but her shows concentrate on the composers of the 80s and 90s. Their lyrics may visit the same themes as their forebears but, as Lisa notes, they have a new approach that wasn't possible decades ago. Without surrendering the intimacy of the cabaret genre she expands the established parameters to include, if frequently unsentimental, equally melodic and equally sensitive songs written by a new generation of writers. The songs she chooses may well provide a glimpse of cabaret-to-come in the 21st century.
By her own description, Lisa's shows were created for her audiences but became a voyage of self-discovery as well. When one grows up in a town of 500, lives are largely open to books and even the young Lisa had a keen awareness of the joys and sorrows of everyday existance in Butler, Kentucky. Her very first cabaret show in New York, I Am a Town, was a recollection of those neighbors and some of their experiences.
Opening with a melody built around My Old Kentucky Home, Lisa included songs about a romance with the gas man, a pair of young lovers seen throwing something off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and a small-town kid seeking to get a snow day off from school. Rounding out the small town ambiance were excerpts, which were both humorous and touching, read from Myrtle Shoup's news and gossip column in her hometown weekly which is still sent to her regularly by an aunt. As Lisa characterize that first cabaret show, it was about where my roots were and some of the characters I encountered. In planning it and putting it together, Lisa began to recognize aspects of her own personality more clearly. This new understanding led to the composition of her second, more mystical, more philosophical and more humorous show, Let the Mystery Be. The title song, by Iris DeMent, is an update of Deitz and Schwartz's contemplation in Dancing in the Dark:
We're waltzing in the wonder of why we're here.
Time hurries by, we here and we're gone.
The same concern, in the hands of DeMent, becomes:
Everybody is wonderin' what and where they all came from
Everybody is worried about where they going to go when the whole things done.
But she advises,
Let the mystery be.
Composer Craig Carnelia provided several songs in Mystery... With her voice teacher Curt Peterson and Lisa's music director, arranger, accompanist (and now fiance) Jeff Waxman, Carnelia has been a major inspiration and force in her career. Since her arrival in New York, he has become a teacher and mentor. Their initial meeting remains vivid. It was in an issue of Back Stage, the performers trade paper, a black ad with white type offering a class with Craig Carnelia. "Shelley Roberts was organizing it, and I signed right up." Lisa's favorite themes, like Craig's, are most often about commonplace people in the everyday, but intense, moments in the lives. She credits him with bringing out the dramatic abilities she brings to her numbers. For his part, Carnelia was quickly impressed with Lisa's voice and her way with a song, and a professional bond was forged. One of the key songs of Mystery... is Carnelia's Flight. To Lisa, the lyrics echo much of her own experience: the sensation of being trapped, of yearning to break loose, then finally, achieving the freedom she so ardently desired.
What is Carnelia's view of Lisa? "She's the best. What more is there to say?"
Lisa's first public performances were at church where she soloed at 13. It's conceivable she inherited her early desire to be a performer from grandparents who ran The Maryland Club, a southeastern Kentucky night club complete with big bands, slot machines and, in the dry county in which it was located, bootleg booze. It was an Appalachian area of coal mines, stills and sour mash. The club shuttered when "One night, my grandma served drinks to three gentlemen who came back the next day and raided the place." Is it any wonder one of the predominant themes in her shows remains the realities of ordinary people? A souvenir of those days was the club's piano, that found its way to Lisa's home and on which she began her first music lessons. The small town's piano teacher wouldn't take children until third grade, when they were eight. On Lisa's eighth birthday, her mother baked a big batch of cookies and I walked over, knocked on the piano teacher's door, gave her the cookies and said, "I'm eight now, I'm ready to learn to play the piano." Even at the beginning, as she played, she'd sing and soon discovered singing was her biggest joy.
High School found her active in dramatics and at fourteen she was cast as Adelaide in Guys and Dolls. But it took the musical theater program at the University of Kentucky to send her on her way as a performer. However, it wasn't clear sailing from Graduation Day on. The job she landed after graduation was with the Cedar Point theme park on Lake Erie, near Sandusky, Ohio. It wasn't Disneyland and walking around with giant ears but she did play the Lusty Lil character for several summers. A hopeful move to Nashville bombed. "It was a great place to live, but professionally, it was horrible. The lowest point of my career."
Moving to Chicago was better, careerwise, as well as personally fateful. In Chicago, she was encouraged by a friend to arrive, uninvited, at a closed audition for the Missouri Repertory's production of Woody Guthrie's American Songs. "It's right for you," her friend insisted. "It's a country-gospel-bluegrass thing." As significant as winning the role, which she did, was meeting the show's arranger and music director Jeff Waxman. They were to come to know each other better three months later, whe the show went into rehearsal in Kansas City at a time when Lisa was in the process of acknowledging a failed marriage. American Songs went on national tour for four months, then returned to Chicago for an extended run.
Following American Songs, Lisa packed her bags, took a detour to Kentucky to visit with her family, then headed north to New York. Whether she's referring to Jeff Waxman, the cabaret shows she's created and performed, the piano bars at which she's worked, the MAC award and other recognition she's received, or more likely all of the above isn't spelled out in her conversation. But her eyes light and she is effervescent when she states, categorically, that moving to New York "was the best decision I ever made in my life." In the Big Apple, Lisa has performed a variety of musical jobs including directing other entertainers acts. Her very first directing job was for Bryan Johnson, a friend with great material but unsure how to make it into a show. Clearly, he and Lisa put it together pretty well, indeed. Although it was Lisa's debut directing venture, I Want My Token Back won a 1995 Back Stage Bistro award. This past year she was called on by more than a dozen performers to work with them on their acts.
It would be wrong to believe that Lisa fails to see the charm of the celebrated songwriters of half a century ago. Sprinkled among the newer composers in her latest show are numbers by Berlin, Kern and Chapin. Even though contemporary writers speak more in her vernacular, her entree to cabaret was via the piano bar route for which she won her 1998 MAC award and where the popular songs of decades ago are the bread and butter of the genre. Lisa believes piano bar entertainment, in many respects, makes a cabaret shwo seem easy by comparison. Imagine a room full of people, many of whom are completely unaware of who is singing and who are busy talking to their dates. Catching the audience's attention... now that's a feat and one Lisa has honed to a sharp edge. She'll offer familiar songs and say, "Come on, you all know the words to this one." When she has them singing along she's made her mark and then, as she puts it, she's earned the right to sing a ballad or two.
And the ballads,or musical stories, are where Lisa's heart lies. In True Stories, her newest cabaret show, she once again focuses on tales of everyday people. Some of the stories are startling, some funny, some bizarre but all are true. Once again her program enjoys the accomplished arrangements and musical direction of Jeff Waxman plus a small handful of musicians. Increasingly, her skill as a dramatist enhances her singing. In her hands, numbers as diverse as Carnelia's Just a Housewife and Lavin/Gorka's Sensitive New Age Guys become theatrical pieces.
Although Lisa's shows, and her choice of songs, may represent the twenty-first century's additions to the Great American Songbook, the musical tradition on which she builds is centuries old. Her preference for songs that tell stories and, most significantly, stories about ordinary people, harks back to the ballads that traveled across the ocean from the British Isles to find particularly hospitable soil in Appalachia and the surrounding region. Such ballads were a counterpoint to the usual art of the aristocracy and were characterized by the treatment of all, even Jesus and kings, as if they were the folks next door. So, in Michael Smith's Sister Clarissa, Christ is Sister Clarissa's fiancee, and her choice to be a nun and grade school teacher instead of an actress is not so different from another woman's decision to be Just a Housewife, the Craig Carnelia song also in the show. For Lisa, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, in writing The Last Time I Saw Paris, are simply the concerned citizens of any democracy when they are devastated by its occupation by the Nazis. Hammerstein's letter about writing the piece, read a s a prelude to the song, makes his anguish clear. To cite a final example, DeMent is anti-Vietnamese War song, There's a Wall in Washington, has less to do with the politics and protests than with the people — mothers, fathers, siblings — who come to the memorial to find their loved ones names on the wall, and to grieve.
"You either stay in Butler forever, or you leave and don't go back," as Lisa puts it. She has left and found herself, and her career, in New York. In one respect, other than to visit family, Lisa needn't go back. She has brought her heritage with her.
