Marissa Mulder
‘Girl Talk’

Marissa Mulder has a beautiful voice and, inasmuch as one can tell from her singing, a beautiful soul. Her voice is sweet and tender and almost child-like; it gives everything she sings a quality of innocence, which leads her to take every song — whether by Jimmy Van Heusen or Tom Waits or, these days, Taylor Swift — at face value, and make it immediately autobiographical. She’s completely guileless in a way that reminds me of the late Tony Bennett, almost literally incapable of singing an insincere note.

Ms. Mulder, who has been singing in the jazz and cabaret rooms of Manhattan for roughly 15 years, has steadily ascended the ranks of the major interpreters of our time. While a great singer can make me love a song I had never previously cared for, like Ray Charles did with “Wichita Lineman,” the likes of Ms. Mulder, Barb Jungr, and Natalie Douglas can take entire genres of music I had paid no attention to and make me realize there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in my philosophy.

She first captured my imagination with a program built around Van Heusen, a fellow Syracusean. Then, her Tom Waits songbook show prompted me to listen and relisten to that great singer-songwriter’s catalog over and over for the next few years. More recently, her performance of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” literally sent me back to the howling old owl in the woods — come to think of it, I’m still looking for that horny back toad.

Her current offering is titled “Girl Talk” and is themed around contemporary female singer-songwriters — and it’s rare to see a cabaret show in which all the composers are both living and active. (Save one, that is, but Amy Winehouse would be only 40 if she were still with us.)

“Girl Talk” is not only songs by women, but songs and stories of a specifically self-affirmative, uplifting nature. As Ms. Mulder announces early in the set, “This music gives me space to  laugh, to cry, to rage, to feel. These women have their struggles, like we all do, they each have their demons, and, in their own way, they try to face them down. Some of them have battled their demons and won, others have lost the fight. But they leave behind stories, songs, and legacies of authenticity.” 

Ms. Mulder has not only a gift for singing, but one for hearing; listening to Ms. Swift’s original of “Mirrorball,” it’s hard to pay attention to the lyrics beneath all the excessive reverb and audio overprocessing that are endemic to 21st century pop music. Ms. Mulder is to be commended for realizing that there’s actually a signal under all the noise, a story there, one that’s worth telling. Ms. Swift’s “The Last Great American Dynasty” has always seemed too on-the-nose for me, a song about a rich woman (Ms. Swift herself) buying a mansion owned by another rich woman. Ms. Mulder infuses it with a sense of irony that makes it actually interesting, with multiple levels of identification and representation.

Those levels of identity are also a key element of “She Used to Be Mine,” the only song in the show from a musical comedy, Sara Bareilles’s “Waitress.” Here, Ms. Mulder becomes the lead character, who is singing about herself in the third person: “She is messy but she’s kind, she is lonely most of the time. / She is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie.”

For the most part, musical director Jon Weber and John Miller, who looks like the world’s hippest bass-playing garden gnome, do not radically rewrite the harmonies, yet Ms. Mulder makes them into something more. In Alanis Morisette’s “You Learn,” the author and her ensemble chant, “You live, you learn / You love, you learn / You cry, you learn,” and it sounds merely like an incantation; when Ms. Mulder sings those words, she gives them each a different weight, and turns them into a life lesson.

Sometimes the songs are about big topics: Winehouse’s “Love is a Losing Game,” like “Luck Be a Lady” and “The Gambler,” uses games of chance as a metaphor for life and love and fate. Backed ably by Mr. Weber’s well-chosen chords, Ms. Mulder delivered “Losing Game” as a torch song worthy of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. 

Sometimes the stories are just the opposite — they’re very specifically microfocused, like Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “This Shirt,” which is, as advertised, just about a shirt. Then, said shirt becomes a microcosm, a telling detail and a piece of spiritual DNA that enables the singer to illuminate a life entire.

It might seem churlish to opine that my personal favorite was “Good Thing He Can’t Read My Mind” by Christine Lavin, who writes more traditional — and more humorous — story songs that sound more like classic musical theater. “Girl Talk” is so sincere, so uplifting, and so heartbreaking that such sweetly comic moments are very welcome. But then, that’s Marissa Mulder’s specialty, taking all those emotions, all that trauma, all those narratives, all those complexities and nuances, and baking them into a great big beautiful pie.