Cool weather outside, cool singing inside.
Karen Akers, tall and slender, with handsome cheekbones and a voice that both purred like a chorus of kittens and snapped like the jaws of a tiger, brought the clever, convoluted lyrics of Cole Porter to the Kranzberg Art Center Wednesday night and held them up to be admired like the Trova art that hangs on the walls of the room. She'll be there through Saturday, with Don Rebic a stylish accompanist.
Porter wrote "list songs," similar in style and complexity to the "patter songs" of William S. Gilbert, though he wrote his own music while Gilbert had Arthur Sullivan. Porter wrote of gold-diggers, and he wrote of infidelity, and he wrote a lot about sex, which is the goal (or the prime subject matter) of such famed list songs as "Anything Goes," "Let's Do It," "Buddy Beware," "Always True to You (in My Fashion)" and "Can-Can." The latter two are from "Kiss Me, Kate," and "Can-Can," respectively. Akers makes them all glow.
But Porter was from a different age, and he wrote with a glorious double-entendre style. He and his listeners knew exactly what he was writing about, but unlike the lyricists of today, Porter was clever, and smart, and a master of the language.
And that's exactly the way Akers works. There's an occasional twinkle in her eye, and a few slightly sexy grins, but never anything as uncool as a lascivious leer. Always just enough so that we know that she knows that we know which direction she's going, and we're all in on the joke together. But our relationship is the ultimate in cool. No touching!
She interpolated a few Noel Coward verses into "Let's Do It," and they point up the similarity between the two writers, their style and their subject matter. Coward's "Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington," can be compared to Akers' version of "Thank You So Much, Mrs. Loughsborough-Goodby." She also delights in "Ridin' High" and "Don't Fence Me In," Porter's nod to the musical style from west of the Hudson River.
I've been a fan of Akers since I saw her make her Broadway debut in 1982 as the much put-upon wife of Raul Julia in "Nine," and I neither saw nor heard anything in her first local appearance (in my not-always-perfect memory) to change my opinion.
Karen Akers sings the music of Cole Porter at the Kranzberg Art Center in Grand Center, nightly through Saturday
–Joe