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| Miss Bianca Leigh Returns to the Tides with a Generous Selection of Songs |
by Bruce-Michael Gelbert
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Photo by
Bruce-Michael Gelbert |
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With one month left to summer, I was reminded, on August 21, in the cabaret room at the Tides, of the many times, a generation ago, when Leontyne Price would sing art song recitals at Carnegie Hall and then sing nine arias as encores. Favorite transsexual chanteuse Bianca Leigh returned to the Grove, on that unseasonably chilly August evening and, happily, seemed to be staying all night and singing them all, offering a generous selection of encores following her official final number. Michael John was on lights and sound.
After an instrumental prelude worthy of introducing a "Masterpiece Theater" production, Miss Bianca began with an upbeat "Almost Like Being in Love," with an interlude of scat singing. A silver sheen on her voice, she lamented an absent lover with "There's no man left for me;" gave us her sensuous take on "The look of love;" and reveled in a swinging "Mambo Italiano," which was new to her repertory.
Her "Miss Celie's Blues," from the film "The Color Purple," proved a steamy and proud expression of sisterhood. Bianca's "Lady Is a Tramp" included such pertinent adaptations and parenthetic interpolations as, "I never bother with drag queens I hate," and "Won't dish the dirt (well, maybe a little)." The Asian setting in which she found herself, left over from Tides co-owner Randy Baker's "One Night in Bangkok" birthday party, prompted Bianca to recall that she had delivered Lady Macbeth's Sleepwalking Scene in Kabuki 'drag' as a final presentation for her acting degree.
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Bianca's "Misty" boasted perfectly pearly tone. She was riveting as she morphed into a madly imperious Norma Desmond in "With One Look," from "Sunset Boulevard." Her "Mack the Knife," from "The Threepenny Opera," was louche and lively and, in the spirit of Fanny Brice and early Barbra Streisand, she carried a torch for "My Man."
Melinda Thomas joined Bianca for "It's Raining (Enough Is Enough)" as a rambunctious exercise in diva disco, audience seduction, and reciprocal upstaging.
In a wide-ranging, brassy excerpt from "Cabaret," Bianca bid frank farewell to "Mein Herr" at the end of the affair, and appeared to take leave of us as well by juxtaposing that adieu with a sensitive "I'll Be Seeing You," with a lovely quiet high note near the end. Her quartet of encores began with a glittering "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." She paid tribute to Ella Fitzgerald with "A Tisket, A Tasket." She capped "The Blues in the Night," the ultimate "he done me wrong, but I'll get back at him" song, with a triumphant top tone and, to conclude her marathon, accused as much as queried, "Why haven't I heard from you?"
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