Catalina's, Hollywood
Thursday, Oct. 26

Ann Hampton Callaway opened the first of her four nights at Catalina's on Thursday with a devastating number satirizing Billie Holiday singing "God Bless the Child," followed by a hilarious sendup of Sarah Vaughan careening through "Misty."

This took guts, not to mention chops, but most of all it took an exact sense of just how much you can get away with. She learned such things from her long nights of field training in the clubs and cabarets of Manhattan.

The guts she probably got from growing up in Chicago, where she stuck bravely to Sarah and Billie while all her friends were prisoners of the Doors and the Dead.

And as she drove home such cheery tunes of her own as "Swinging Away the Blues" and "Hip to be Happy," she let you know that in the Midwest, optimism is not regarded as embarrassing like it is in the decadent East.

But she never let this disgusting philosophy overshadow the music, over which she showed an indisputable mastery.

She chose, for instance, to sing such tunes as "It's All Right With Me," "Blue Moon" and "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" at languorous tempos that gave her ample room to show the sheen and intensity of her vocal colors, her command of pitch and intonation and her sure sense of the drama in a phrase.

Plus, she made it fun.

These virtues were not lost when the tempo went race-trackward on "Just One of Those Things" and "Lover Come Back to Me." Her pianist for the evening, Benny Green, was a model of reliability and creativity at either speed.

His aplomb was particularly evident when Callaway got serious with an asymmetrical Stephen Sondheim tune called "No One Is Alone" from "Into the Woods." She never lost the shape of the piece, and with a delicate touch, Green brushed in a stroke of blues to backlight the craggy outline from time to time.

Like all the other numbers, this one had an amusing precede.

She once feared to sing Sondheim, she said, because of his legendary intolerance for performers who think they can improve on his carefully weighed writings.

But then, riding an elevator after a Bernadette Peters concert, she ran into the singer, who exclaimed that "this was the first time she had the nerve to sing Sondheim her way."

Callaway took this to heart, she said, and when she finished up "No One Is Alone" this night, it was no trouble to believe her.