She owns a Tony and six Emmys, and she's just 10 days ahead of her 64th birthday, but Tyne Daly is out among 'em, wearing bright red, high-heeled pumps and showing a splendid repertoire during her bright, tuneful and well-received cabaret show, a visit she explained by saying, that as a career reaches a certain point, "Men want to be rock stars or restaurant owners. Women want to be cabaret artists."
Daly, with pianist John McDaniel doing outstanding work alongside, opened last night at the Kranzberg Theater in Grand Center and will run through Saturday.
Noting that her show's theme was the absence of a theme, she also took a liberty with the traditional encore routine. She enjoyed the applause, started off the stage, then returned to the microphone. She explained to the audience that this was the point when she was supposed to walk to the rear of the little room, then come back and sing the encore everyone expected. She said she was going to wait on stage and, then she would sing an encore, which she did, after the laughter stopped.
Daly's choices were interesting and intelligent, ranging in age from George M. Cohan's "Life's a Very Funny Proposition" to the three-year-old charmer, "Crayola, a musical search for a crayon to match a true love's eyes, by Kristin Andreassen. Her range is not great, but she handles lyrics well and gets all the drama out of Kurt Will's "Pirate Jenny," and from two splendid Marilyn and Alan Bergman songs from "The Queen of the Stardust Ballroom," the winsome "Job Application" and the tragic "Fifty Percent," a triumphant paean to the end of a love affair. She turned nicely silly in "Row, Row, Row," by William Jerome and James V. Monaco from the 1912 Ziegfeld Follies. Daly won her Tony for the 1989 revival of the Jule Styne-Leonard Bernstein musical, "Gypsy," but it was represented only by a riff on "Some People;" later, McDaniel did a lovely performance of Styne's "Killing Time."
And tradition and double meaning were served with Rudy Vallee's theme song from 1929, "My Time Is Your Time," by Eric Little and Leo Dance, a number that could easily be retitled, "My Tyne Is Your Tyne."
At the Kranzberg Theatre, Grand Boulevard at Olive Street, through Saturday.
–Joe