Review: "Lisa Asher"
- Jeff Waxman: Musical Director, Piano
- Bob Green: Fiddle, Guitar, Mandolin
- Marco Brehm: Bass
- James Fall: Photography
- I'LL BE YOUR BABY TONIGHT
(Bob Dylan) - THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG
(Michael Smith) - PASSIONATE KISSES
(Lucinda Williams) - TEN MINUTES AGO/DO I LOVE YOU?
(Rodgers and Hammerstein) - DEAD EGYPTIAN BLUES
(Michael Smith) - SISTER CLARISSA
(Michael Smith) - WEEPIN' MADONNA
(Michael Smith) - SON OF A PREACHER MAN
(John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins) - BOOTS LIKE EMMYLOU'S
(Janis Ian) - SHE MUST BE BEAUTIFUL
(Janis Ian) - LOVE FOR SALE
(Cole Porter) - JUST A HOUSEWIFE
(Craig Carnelia) - VINCENT
(Don McLean) - PUT A LITTLE LOVE IN YOUR HEART
(Jackie DeShannon, Jimmy Holiday and Randy Myers) - BOTH SIDES NOW
(Joni Mitchell)
-
Wanted: new superlatives! The old ones just don't do justice to Lisa Asher's new Duplex show. With her Kentucky country shadings; exuberance and sunny honesty; and a clarion voice, she shines in a varied, attention-holding program. Several numbers are contemporary pieces by Michael Smith: the amusing The Princess and The Frog, the sweet Sister Clarissa, the patter number Dead Egyptian Blues, and Weeping Madonna. She goes folk-pop with Bob Dylan's I'll Be Your Baby Tonight; the Joni Mitchell classic, Both Sides Now, and two Janis Ian numbers, including the stage-stomping Boots Like Emmy Lou's. Two songs particularly display her talent in creating dramatic and moving characters: Craig Carnelia's Just a Housewife and Cole Porter's Love for Sale. With her finale, Put a Little Love in Your Heart, her energy turns the cabaret room into a happy, hand-clapping revival meeting — ending her show, on opening night, with the audience's standing ovation. Lisa's musical backup is as good as it gets: musical director Jeff Waxman on piano; Marco Brehm on bass, and Bob Green on fiddle, guitar and mandolin.
PETER HAAS, Cabaret Scenes
-
WONDERFUL TOWN
Run, don't walk, down to the Duplex, where MAC Award winner Lisa Asher is making a long-overdue appearance on the cabaret scene every Thursday through August 26. As usual, this big-voiced singer is traversing the musical landscape from standards (Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein) to pop (Janis Ian, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan) to contemporary (Michael Smith, Craig Carnelia). After this run, your next chance to see Asher may be in a legitimate theater: Producer Kurt Peterson is helping her develop her smash hit 1995 cabaret piece I Am a Town, based on her experiences growing up in Kentucky, into an Off-Broadway show. "I'm doing a lot of rewrites right now to expand it," says Asher. "I've been presented with a lovely opportunity and I am going to do everything I can to make it happen. Right now, my goal is to try to have a reading in the fall."
BRIAN SCOTT LIPTON, Loose Lips, TheaterMania.com
-
LISA ASHER
Big-voiced chanteuse raises the roof with songs ranging from standards to country-pop.In her new cabaret act at The Duplex, Lisa Asher gives you what you want from a cabaret show: a welcoming, congenial presence, brassy comedy, deep emotion and powerful singing. She makes a wide range of material her own, everything from a Cole Porter standard to a recent Lucinda Williams country-pop hit. It's a smartly balanced act, too, with the majority of comedy songs early in the evening to draw you in, and the majority of the powerhouse numbers toward the end, to really let you have it. Standout numbers include Lucinda Williams' Passionate Kisses, where the refrain "shouldn't I have this" seems to be about her warm relationship with the audience; Cole Porter's Love for Sale in a version that is simultaneously both the most torchy and rip-roaring take on the song I've ever heard (the crowd went nuts for this one, with reason); and Craig Carnelia's Just a Housewife from the Studs Terkel musical Working. I've liked this last song since I first heard it more than 20 years ago, but I've never heard it delivered with such raw emotional honesty as Asher gives it. It doesn't hurt that Asher prefaces the number with a story about a little-known actress who was best known as Vivian Leigh's stand-in for Gone With the Wind. Asher's patter in general is snappy, smart and sometimes insightful. Before one of the show's last numbers she opines, "I don't endorse any particular candidate for the upcoming presidential election, but whoever wins I hope they take this next song to heart." The song? Put a Little Love in Your Heart. Well, amen!
JONATHAN WARMAN, HX
-
It was a treat to catch Bistro and MAC award winner Lisa Asher at the Duplex, where she is currently appearing with musical director Jeff Waxman, bass man Marco Brehm, and Bob Green on guitar, mandolin and fiddle.
The eclectic show tapped a few tunes from previous shows fused with novelty songs like Weeping Madonna and Sister Clarissa, both by Michael Smith. These irreverent takes on religion were side splittingly funny. Another moment that had the audience in stitches was Smith's Dead Egyptian Blues. ("Mr. Tut, your sarcophagus is glowing, but your esophagus is showing!") In a well-structured show that didn't waste time on useless patter, when Asher charms her audience, it counts. She is on target with the quip, and her avoidance of the over sentimentality that has become de rigueur in many shows of late is refreshing.
Particular highlights included Son of a Preacher Man (Hurley-Wilkins) and a rich Love for Sale (Porter) that had her remark, "Who knew Cole Porter would write the hooker's lament?" Asher is a definitive singer and cabaret is lucky to have such a luminous talent. She's at the Duplex on Thursdays through August 19. Go!
JOHN HOGLAND, Bistro Bits, Back Stage
-
LISA LISA
Eclectic cabaret informed by astute interpretation and stellar techniqueThere are only two cabaret artists who are currently performing and have their own playlists on my iPod, and Lisa Asher is one of them. Asher's current show at The Duplex is a sensational evening, characterized by her remarkably versatile voice and ability to make every song a fully rendered dramatic experience.
Her song selections range widely — Bob Dylan, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Janis Ian, Cole Porter and Joni Mitchell — and she brings to each of them the spark of her own interpretations, wonderful presence and superlative technique.
Asher is delightful doing a medley from Cinderella, oddly touching doing Son of a Preacher Man, and heart-wrenching doing Craig Carnelia's Just a Housewife. She is unstinting in her examination of the songs, and tremendously generous in her presentation. She even changed my mind about a song I've always loathed, Porter's Love for Sale. Asher delivered it with a kind of brassy cynicism that comes across faked, covering a broken spirit, which gave a poignancy to the song I've never heard before.
That's the kind of magic Asher is capable of.
CHRISTOPHER BYRNE, Gay City News
-
STORY TELLING WITH A SOUTHERN INFLECTION
You can take the girl out of Kentucky, but you can't take Kentucky out of the girl. And in the case of Lisa Asher, a friendly, warmhearted singer appearing at the Duplex Cabaret Theater in Greenwich Village on Thursday evenings in an open-ended engagement, the farther south of the Mason-Dixon line her music travels stylistically, the more at home she sounds.
Ms. Asher, who was brought up in Butler, Ky., approaches songs with a head-on emotional bluntness that is more redolent of Nashville or Memphis than New York. The best number in her new show, the old Dusty Springfield hit Son of a Preacher Man, is told as a brash, chatty confession. It is one of several songs in which Ms. Asher's storytelling instinct and pop-country manner mesh into what might be described as twang-free down-home singing.
The show features four clever yarns by Michael Smith, one of which, Dead Egyptian Blues, a jokey meditation on immortality and King Tut's tomb, rhymes sarcophagus with esophagus. When she sings Janis Ian's Boots Like Emmylou's a worshipful tribute to a pantheon of country singers, from Loretta Lynn to Emmylou Harris, she makes Ms. Ian's adoration feel like her own.
STEPHEN HOLDEN, The New York Times
