Barbara Brussell


TIME OUT NEW YORK
November, 2003

Top live shows

Barbara Brussell
Danny's Skylight Room


by James Gavin

Cabaret singer Barbara Brussell looks like a composite of the great Hollywood blonds, from Harlow and Monroe to Goldie Hawn. And in her heart-tugging roller coaster of a show, she's everything those women are onscreen: childlike, desperate, flirty, madcap, sad. 

Brussell is no kid; for 20 years she has led a choppy bicoastal career in clubs and musical theater. The motor-mouthed title of her new act - The Piano Bench of My Mind: Songs I've Been Sitting on for Far Too Long - should tell you what a handful she is. Laughing through tears, she details her journey from one disastrous romance to another - and her eagerness to throw herself back in the ring for more.

Onstage, this fearless singer-actress draws on a madly eclectic bunch of songwriters to tell her story: Rodgers and Hammerstein; '60's folk dreamboat Richard Farina; Leo Ferre, France's anarchist poet laureate.

Singing Joni Mitchell's “I Don't Know Where I Stand" in her sweet, plaintive voice, Brussell becomes a wistful flower child.  She delivers the tragic aria from South Pacific, “This Nearly Was Mine," in a tone of sheer terror as she sees another Prince Charming slip away.  But by the time she's reached And This Is My Beloved," a hymn to fairy-tale love from Kismet, Brussell is Cinderella again, so endearingly starry-eyed that every word of her fantasy rings true.