photo provided by Bruce-Michael Gelbert
CD cover
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Broadway’s Idina Menzel has taken to singing her repertory with symphony orchestras and sharing some of her life story, along with the songs, on the concert stage. She recorded her new Concord Records CD, “Idina Menzel Live: Barefoot at the Symphony,” at Koerner Hall at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto, Ontario, last year, guided by composer Marvin Hamlisch, no less, leading the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, and by her own music director and pianist, Robert Mounsey.
Menzel grabs the listener right off the bat by selling “(Don’t you want to be the) Life of the Party,” from Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party,” and there’s no question that she is and does. She learned her next number when her New York University theater music professor requested a Cole Porter song—not yet realizing that he was gay, she had hoped to seduce him, she tells us—and, in her swinging “Love for Sale,” from “The New Yorkers,” she strikes an apt balance between seductive and exuberant, with a touch of plaintive on the side. Staying in theme, she completes what she and Mounsey style their “prostitution medley” by pairing the Porter classic with Sting’s “Roxanne.”
That Menzel idolizes Barbra Streisand is eminently clear. She introduces the next track with her wry impression of herself, as a second grader, singing Hamlisch’s “The Way We Were,” the title song from Streisand’s movie with Robert Redford, with a heavy Lonk Islandt accent. Menzel had hoped to sing it for Streisand, when the diva was fêted at the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors, but Beyoncé had already claimed it. She paid homage to Streisand instead with “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” given a fiery and fierce account here and paired with a contrastingly rueful title song from the film version of Jule Styne and Bob Merrill’s “Funny Girl.” Menzel gets mid-song applause, in “Parade,” when she changes “Hey, Mr. Arnstein!” to “Hey, there, Toronto!” She rides this crest with Jimmy Webb’s “Asleep on the Wind.”
In memory of composer Jonathan D. Larson, who died of an aortic aneurism, at age 35, on the day of the dress rehearsal for “Rent,” the first show in which Menzel starred, she sings earnestly optimistic seize-the-moment song “No Day But Today,” which was not her song in “Rent,” but was one of her favorites, and invites the audience to sing along. That this is a recording of a live concert, with its mixture of the formal and informal, is nowhere more apparent than when Menzel starts her cover of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” which she sang with Lea Michele on “Glee;” then has Hamlisch stop the orchestra so that she can explain why she’s singing it; and then resumes it, interrupting periodically for further commentary.
When spouse Taye Diggs, whom she first met when they were doing “Rent,” joins her here, they feign not knowing each other, but gradually groping toward recognition in a “Where or When,” from Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “Babes in Arms,” that has perhaps too much pizzazz for this listener’s taste. The reflective moment that “Where or When” might have yielded comes, instead, with “Heaven Help My Heart,” from Tim Rice and ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson’s “Chess.”
Menzel begins her look at Stephen Schwartz’s “Wicked,” in which she co-starred with Kristin Chenoweth, with “For Good,” blissfully a cappella and unmiked, before launching into Elfaba’s hit, “Defying Gravity,” which she saves for last. I’ve managed to review almost an entire Idina Menzel album without using the word “belt,” but I can’t resist applying it here, as she triumphantly knocks the song right out of the ballpark and into next week. She takes the tone down somewhat for her encore, “Tomorrow,” from Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin’s “Annie,” which she dedicates to her mother.
For further information, visit www.concordmusicgroup.com and www.idinamenzel.com.