Re: Julie's concert with Amanda McBroom
"(The concert) tended, however, to put McBroom at a disadvantage,
for Wilson's style is so over the top yet so grippingly real that it made
McBroom's big gestures and go-for-broke emotion seem calculated and staged
by comparison. In the first half of the double bill, Wilson performed the
music of theater composer Stephen Sondheim. Wearing a body-hugging, black
lace gown and wrapped in feather boas, Wilson -- in her late 70s, yet sporting
a figure that even Jennifer Lopez should envy -- looked ready for a production
of Sondheim's ode to long-ago, Ziegfeld-like glamour: Follies.
This torchy elegance provided the perfect context for a pairing
of songs from Merrily We Roll Along. Emotion made her voice
even huskier than usual as she fused glowing nostalgia with surging regret
in Good Thing Going, then raced through the strings of adjectives
in Not a Day Goes By before throwing herself off the song's cliffs
of feeling." Daryl H. Miller, Los Angeles Times, August 21,
2001
"Watching Julie Wilson perform is indeed an education, not to mention
one of the world's great pleasures. Her confidence, showmanship and musical
exuberance are irresistible, thus making her one of the greatest examples
of
cabaret at its very best... Singers have come and gone. But
Wilson, thankfully, remains, and like a breeze off the bayou, she has swept
back into town with "Julie Wilson in Dixieland," her most enjoyable show
yet.
Now, cabaret elegance and Dixieland gusto are rarely thrust onto
the same stage, but Wilson pulls it off, as she does most things, with
effortless grace and ageless spirit... This is a singer who knows
how to use her voice, her body and her sense of humor to sell a song and
get it right every time. She can slow things down for a tribute to singer
Mabel Mercer on two Jimmy Van Heusen tunes, "But Beautiful" (lyric by Johnny
Burke) and "I Thought
About You" (lyric by Johnny Mercer), and make your heart swell.
Then she can turn around and start growling through "I Ain't Gonna Give
Nobody None of My Jelly Roll," a rather dirty ditty that Wilson sings with
a
bawdy twinkle in her eye. But Wilson is at her best when she can
cut loose, as she does on Peter Allen's "Everything Old is New Again,"
the hilarious "Hard-Hearted Hannah" or the classic belter "Bill Bailey."
Seeing Wilson wrapped up in all those feathers is like seeing Fred Astaire in tuxedo -- it means that whatever else might be going on, for the present moment, all is right with the world." Chad Jones, Oakland Tribune, June 20, 2001
About Julie's new cabaret show on the songs of Dorothy Fields and Amanda McBroom: "In comparing their careers, Ms. Wilson, whose show plays through April 21, finds a deep commonality between the dreamer and the wit in their shared acknowledgment of desire. Now in her mid-70's, Ms.Wilson pours a lifetime's wisdom into each number, breaking songs into emphatic bursts of speech-song in a worn but compelling contralto.
Her extraordinarily expressive face registers a thousand emotions as she reacts seismically to each word, seemingly channeling the past. This stylized Method acting, which occasionally turns her face into a tragic clown mask, is Ms. Wilson's signature. And when the lyrics of a song are especially pungent, she invests them with the weight of a theatrical oracle.
The show, which features Mark Hummel on piano and Link Milliman on
bass, is finally a distillation of a long life that remembers love,
mourns loss and embraces laughter and a fierce will to continue, despite
the loss." Stephen Holden,
N.Y. Times, April 2001
"The naughty bravado of Mr. Coleman's collaborations with Carolyn Leigh is so perfectly suited to Ms. Wilson's worldly joie de vivre that they might as well have been written for her." Stephen Holden, N.Y. Times, October 1999.
"With her archeological talent for discoverintg buried treasures, she will dazzle you with songs you've never heard before, then turn around and amaze you with her own fresh spin on familiar material such as 'Witchcraft' that makes you listen with new ears. This perfect marriage of world-weary, golden-hearted chanteuse and literate, jazzy composer results in the kind of glamorous act you won't find anywhere but New York." Rex Reed. New York Observer, October 1999.
"Wilson's lived-in voice plucks every emotional suggestion from a lyric and finds the unblemished emotional core of every song. Her simple reading of the Coleman-Leigh classic 'It Amazes Me' was flawless...Simply put, nobody does it better than Julie Wilson." John Hoglund, Bistro Bits, October 1999.
"Talk/singing with conviction and high style, Wilson makes you pay attention, whether she's offering highly obscure Coleman songs from a never-produced show or some of his most familiar numbers." Chip Defaa, N.Y. Post, October 1999.
"Every time Julie Wilson steps up to a microphone, listeners learn anew what genuine song interpretation is all about...To behold Wilson taking apart lyrics syllable by syllable, to hear the way she can whisper a phrase one moment, get rough with it the next, is to understand the value of the most accomplished cabaret singers...Virtually every piece that Wilson sang Wednesday night at the Plaza Tavern showed shades of drama, wit or sorrow that only a few singers are capable of bringing forth." Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune, April 1999.
"Ms. Wilson, as usual, finds surprisingly emotional subtexts in Gershwin's airy songs by infusing them with her life experience....'Someone To Watch Over Me' and 'Isn't It A Pity?' are among the numbers she turns into pointed dramatic monologues by fixing on just the right phrase from which to approach them as personal reflections." Stephen Holden, New York Times, September 1998.
"Widely recognized as the queen of cabaret...infusing everything she sings with a lifetime's accumulated wisdom and humor...her most telling moments are the ballads. Rodgers and Hart's 'This Funny World,' a song that declares in deceptively lighthearted verses that life is essentially a joke on the person living it, is given a rendition as wrenching as it is even-handed." Stephen Holden, New York Times, Feb. 27, 1998.
"In the quality that distinguishes cabaret singing from all other genres -- the interpretation and communication of lyrics -- Julie Wilson has no peer." Roy Sander, Back Stage, March 1998.
"Any show that gives Wilson a chance to wrap herself in her feather
boa and project her vivid personality through 'My Old Flame,''Ain't Misbehavin','
and 'It All Depends on You' is all right with me." Chip Deffaa, N.Y.
Post, February 1998.
  |
Hosted
by |