Maggart Makes Her Own Meaning

Maude Maggart opens her new show at the Oak Room with Marshall Barer’s “Here Come the Dreamers,” Kern and Hammerstein’s “In the Heart of the Dark” (which contains the line “a dream is on its way”), and Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t It Romantic?” (featuring “a dream that can be heard”). She then asks the crowd to identify the common theme among the three songs, and one gullible bloke pipes up with: “Dreams!”But don’t take the bait. That’s merely what Ms. Maggart wants us to think. If we’ve learned anything from her shows, it’s to look beyond the obvious meaning. In Ms. Maggart’s art, the true substance is always hidden beneath the surface.At the Oak Room, she gives us a better idea of what the show is about when she relates a factoid regarding the Broadway and vaudeville star Cliff Edwards (aka Ukelele Ike), who introduced one of the best-loved of all children’s songs, “When You Wish Upon a Star” (in Walt Disney’s “Pinocchio”), shortly after he recorded a series of salacious, double-entendre-filled “party” records that were strictly for adults: Everything has its evil twin, and that’s what maintains the karmic balance of the universe.Ms. Maggart comes by the high concepts of her shows naturally, and they are the main reason why I look forward to her annual runs at the Algonquin Hotel. Her singing itself is hardly secondary, but it’s not the main attraction; her voice is beautiful at times, and she makes the most of what God gave her. But on an exclusively musical level, the voice wears thin after a while; I rarely listen to one of her albums all the way through. At the Oak Room, however, her voice primarily exists to illuminate her ideas, rather than the other way around.Ms. Maggart offers a more substantial clue as to the subtext in two comparatively long sections of patter. The first is more objective, and almost comes off like a lecture on popular song iconography (dreams, rainbows, moons) given by a professor of comparative literature.The second is a personal reminiscence of her relationship with the late and highly eccentric lyricist Marshall Barer, who, she tells us, once enlisted her family to help him construct a room that consisted entirely of mirrors on all four walls, the floor, and the ceiling. The idea of Ms. Maggart doing an entire program of Barer’s lyrics would be a welcome one. On Thursday, the only other song of his that she included was “Alice in Wonderland,” which marries Lewis Carroll to Antonio Carlos Jobim in a way that suggests hallucinations rather than dreams.And while we’re at it, don’t be fooled by Ms. Maggart’s inclusion of the delightfully dated “I’ll Buy That Dream,” from 1945, or that she has titled her show “Speaking of Dreams.” What’s more significant here is the idea that Ms. Maggart has taken a 1989 song by Joan Baez (deeply autobiographical yet strangely surreal), whose music is hardly the coin of the realm at the Oak Room, and made it the center of her presentation. The singer and her musical director, John Boswell, artfully weave “Speaking of Dreams” into Judy Collins’s “My Father” to construct a mega-monologue that’s like a Haight-Ashbury answer to the “Soliloquy” from “Carousel.” Her voice and tremolo, in fact, sound more natural singing Ms. Baez and Ms. Collins than they do Rodgers and Hammerstein.Throughout Ms. Maggart’s show, it’s not the content of the songs that we should be paying attention to — as when she combines Disney’s “Cinderella” song, “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” with Stephen Sondheim’s “On the Steps of the Palace.” Rather, it’s the juxtaposition itself that’s significant. She climaxes her show by combining two of E.Y. Harburg’s “Rainbow” songs — “Over the Rainbow” and “Look to the Rainbow” — both in a surreal, somnambulant waltz tempo, like a lullaby sung to a child who’s already asleep. By now, Ms. Maggart’s own transformation is complete: She has willed herself into an analyzer of songs, singing and moving as if in a dream, dressed like temptation, personified by a cutaway gown that could have come from Coco Chanel’s toga party.Ms. Maggart has gone over the rainbow, down the rabbit hole, and to the other side of the looking glass; she has become, as Ms. Baez’s lyric suggests, “Queen of hearts / And the daughter of the moon.” Of all the millions of times I’ve listened to “Over the Rainbow,” I never realized until now exactly what Harburg was doing in the line “there’s a land that I’ve heard of once in a lullaby.” Obviously, there never was any such lullaby before “Over the Rainbow,” but Ms. Maggart makes me aware that Harburg wasn’t just making it up. Rather, he was creating a song that reflected back at itself, much like someone in a room full of mirrors.wfriedwald@nysun.com

Maggart Makes Her Own Meaning

Maggart Makes Her Own Meaning

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