Member of a show business family for four generations, Maude Maggart comes by her talent honestly, which makes her an honest-to-goodness pleasure when she's on a stage. She sings with honesty and emotion; she tells stories with a winsome expression that draws an audience right into her big, brown eyes.
Maggart opened her second St. Louis cabaret run last night at the Kranzberg Center, and she'll entertain through Saturday; she was in town a couple of years ago at Savor. Pretty and open-faced, wearing a simple black dress and flowers in her hair, Maggart, in her early 30s, appeared a little nervous in the early going, with some distracting hand movements for emphasis here and there. But by the third number, Stephen Sondheim's "Beautiful," she was rolling.
Between songs, she chatted about herself and her family, talking about growing up as a child whose parents were divorced. That problem was compounded when her mother, at 40, married a 24-year-old man. Meanwhile, her father, a well-regarded Broadway singer, dancer and actor, with whom she spent summers, was deep into a California lifestyle at Venice Beach.
Maggart has several siblings, including singer Fiona Apple, and several half-sibs. She is, by turns, wistful, sad, bemused, filled with longing and mellow, and she's always smooth.
Her program wandered, but in a good way, reaching here and there to sample composers and styles. She is scheduled for an engagement later in the year at Feinstein's at the Regency in New York, and it appears that her St. Louis run will look at several songs that she and John Boswell, her accompanist and music director, may weave into the act.
With a teasing glint in her eye, Maggart sang of a relationship with two men that allowed for word plays on various numerical subjects, some sexual, some poking fun at sex, and she bounced through the Rodgers and Hart "A Little Birdie," complete with whistled trill and a vocal style direct from the 1920s, lacking only a Charleston kick or two.
Dolly Parton's "A Coat of Many Colors," was delivered with the proper notes of trauma and triumph, and some adolescent pain in her own life came forth in a song about her relationship
with her mother. Judy Collins and Maury Yeston also were included in her song list. Maggart concluded with "Our Love Is Here to Stay," Ira Gershwin's tribute to his brother George, who died as they were working on the song.
And then she bounced back with an encore of "Moonshine Lullaby," the Irving Berlin song from "Annie Get Your Gun," first sung by Ethel Merman. Maggart didn't have Merman's belt, but offered a sweetness Merman could never match. A delightful performance, without intermission.
Maude Maggart in concert at the Kranzberg Center, Grand Boulevard at Olive Street, nightly through Saturday.
– Joe