[Dixielandjazz] John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey reviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey (The Cafe Carlyle)
by Will Friedwald
Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2011
This week is truly the World Series of upscale, high-ticket cabaret: Within a few
minutes of each other on Tuesday, John Pizzarelli (with Jessica Molaskey), Marilyn
Maye, and Sandy Stewart (with Bill Charlap) all opened new shows. If Ms. Stewart
is subtle and almost overwhelmingly sublime, and Ms. Maye is aggressive, dynamic,
and irresistibly swinging, the Pizzarelli-Molaskey team is all of the above. Their
fifth annual fall show is titled "When Worlds Collide," and indeed, more worlds are
colliding here than even the couple acknowledges, including the traditional Great
American Songbook, jazz, Broadway, popular songs of the 1960s and '70s, and, especially,
comedy. In the team's most finely timed routines -- like their now-classic mash-up
of Sondheim's "Getting Married Today" with Jon Hendricks's "Cloudburst" -- they're
as much Abbott and Costello as Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.
It's said that in the heyday of vaudeville, comedy teams like Abbott and Costello
would traditionally split the take 60-40 between the "straight man" and the comic.
The rationale was that comedians were plentiful but a good straight man, who could
make his partner seem really funny, was hard to find. I was thinking about this at
the Cafe Carlyle on Wednesday during the second night of Mr. Pizzarelli and Ms. Molaskey's
four-week run. The obvious question was: "What, exactly, does Jessica Molaskey do?"
It's obvious that she makes a vital contribution to the act by helping assemble such
"collisions" as the pair's latest, a collage of James Taylor's "Traffic Jam" and
Joe Henderson's "The Kicker," writing new lyrics to Henderson's tenor sax solo on
the original Horace Silver recording.
Yet on stage, the larger share of the glory goes to her husband: He gets the most
swinging moments (like the juxtaposition of the Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love" and
Woody Herman's "Woodchopper's Ball") and the most funny (as when he parodies the
team's own premise, announcing that the next number will be a mash-up of "Send in
the Clowns" with "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris).
Ms. Molaskey is a veteran Broadway actress (famously in the recent revival of "Sunday
in the Park with George"), so it's surprising that Mr. Pizzarelli also gets most
of the emotional moments as well, as in the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" and another
"Company" song, "Sorry-Grateful."
But it's the sandwich of Billy Joel's "Rosalinda's Eyes" and Sondheim's "In Buddy's
Eyes" that provides the essential clue as to why Ms. Molaskey is necessary for the
act to succeed. It's all about perception, and with Ms. Molaskey on the stage, we
are always going to see her husband through her eyes -- just by her being there,
he becomes funnier, more swinging, more tender. She does what Abbott did for Costello,
what George Burns did for Gracie Allen, and a great deal more. When she interjected
Joni Mitchell's "Circle Game" into "The Waters of March," she sparked renewed interest
in a Jobim perennial that hitherto always seemed overlong and overdone.
The longest stretch of time when she's not on stage is the encore, which consisted
of achingly straight renditions of two other even more overdone Jobim chestnuts,
enhanced by a choir of Brazilians in the audience. It was sincere but, compared with
the rest of the show, slightly dull (even though Mr. Pizzarelli spiced up "So Danco
Samba" with Stan Kenton's "Intermission Riff") and hardly a boffo encore. I yearned
for Ms. Molaskey to return to the stage and throw in something out of left field
-- maybe the third act of "Tosca."


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

"All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened
immigration policy on the part of the American Indian."  Pat Paulsen