[Dixielandjazz] Lanie Kazan

[Stephen G Barbone]

Lanie Kazan puts on a good show. Mostly OKOM (American Songbook), and  
she gets involved with her audiences.
She was at Hofstra College on Long Island the same time that I was and  
even sat in a time or two with the band I was with back then. Another  
famous classmate back then was Francis Ford Coppola of Godfather fame.
Interesting that they used their real names in show business and ended  
up famous. What happened to me? <grin>
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband
NY TIMES - April 10, 2008 - By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Torch Songs From a Funny Girl
Inexhaustible, larger than life, ravenous for adulation, Lainie Kazan  
is an old-school entertainer for whom there are no half measures. She  
is both a composite of the sock-’em-in-the-gut show business tradition  
that runs from Sophie Tucker through Judy Garland, and a shameless  
caricature of that tradition.

For Ms. Kazan, who opened a five-night engagement at Feinstein’s at  
Loews Regency on Tuesday, singing doesn’t simply mean standing in one  
place and making pretty sounds. It involves stirring up a storm and  
illustrating lyrics by emphatically (almost accusingly) pointing at  
audience members and looking them in the eye. It means descending from  
the stage and seizing the hand of a ringside patron as she did on  
Tuesday during “The Trolley Song.” It means tossing her leonine hair,  
extending her arms, and throwing back her head in paroxysms of self- 
dramatizing histrionics.

Amid all the thunder and lightning, there is abundant humor. Ms.  
Kazan, who is accompanied by a strong pop-jazz trio, knows there is  
something slightly ridiculous in the spectacle of a 67-year-old second- 
string diva vehemently acting out songs like a contestant auditioning  
for “American Idol.” She also knows that her appeal has little to do  
with questions of taste. It is about the assertion of an overwhelming  
personality.

Her show is an enthusiastic, sometimes cheerfully self-deprecating  
summary of a show business career that never reached the heights  
promised by her early work as Barbra Streisand’s Broadway understudy  
in “Funny Girl.” (She went on for Ms. Streisand twice.) But that  
career has provided Ms. Kazan with steady work in the theater,  
nightclubs, television, and movies in which she excels at comedy. Her  
voice is still robust and rangy: rumbling at the bottom, Streisand- 
like at the top but far less polished.

As the tradition she embodies recedes into the twilight, her  
unwavering commitment to high drama with a comic edge increasingly  
looms as a brave last stand. On Tuesday, Ms. Kazan who said she was  
suffering from the flu, gave her all to every song in a lengthy set.  
Attacking a piece of cringe-inducing schlock like the 1982 hit “I’ve  
Never Been to Me,” she actually made sense of it as a feminist anthem.  
In “Embraceable You,” the audience became her cubs, figuratively  
summoned for a collective hug by a big-hearted mama bear reluctant to  
release us from her clutches.

Lainie Kazan performs through April 12 at Feinstein’s at Loews  
Regency, 540 Park Avenue at 61st Street, (212) 339-4095.