Clint Holmes Leaves the Crowd Longing for More

‘Between The Moon And New York City: The Songs Of Peter Allen’Clint Holmes at 54 Below, September 28 There’s a moment in every Clint Holmes show when he talks about his parents and his multiracial background. His mother was a caucasian British opera singer and his father was an African American jazz musician, and the two of them met at the close of World War II; he was born in the U.K. in 1946. Perhaps that explains his multilayered approach to music. Mr. Holmes is at once a jazz singer, scatting with remarkable harmonic acuity, and a soul singer who can croon and shout with the best of the great stars of R&B.This diversity also underscores his affinity with the late Peter Allen (1944-1992), who was himself several contradictory things at once. He’s probably best remembered as the most flamboyant entertainer of the most flamboyant moment in pop music, someone who could out-dance the Rockettes and simultaneously out-Liberace Liberace in terms of sheer visual extravagance. Yet the best of Allen’s songs are incredibly personal and intimate, celebrating the smallest and most precious moments of life. I still have a hard time reconciling the larger-than-life showman who made his entrance at Radio City riding on the back of an elephant with the poet who sang about a lonely, frustrated man sitting on a porch in the middle of nowhere sewing saddles. Mr. Holmes’s new show, “Between The Moon And New York City: The Songs Of Peter Allen” (produced by Sunny Sessa and directed by Will Nunziata), is the reason for his first appearance in New York since the pandemic, and the shame of it is that it’s only running for two nights. Hopefully, more will follow. The Peter Allen songbook has been thoroughly mined — there are a lot of deep cuts here, not just the greatest hits — and reconsidered and retooled by pianist Michael Orland. His arrangements, which he plays along with saxophonist Kenny Gioffrey, bassist Aaron Romero, and drummer Jakubu Griffin, are distinctly a step up from the somewhat dated synth-and-drum machine charts on Allen’s own studio albums.Rather than the expected opening with a bang — there’s no room to park an elephant on the stage at 54 Below — Mr. Holmes opens surprisingly small, with “The Lives of Me,” which flows seamlessly into “Not the Boy Next Door” (serving as Allen’s posthumous theme song, much as “Unforgettable” became for Nat King Cole) and then “Bi-Coastal.” He builds to an early epiphany with one of the mega hits, “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” and then stops to talk about his own relationship with Allen, who died of AIDS-related throat cancer at 48. At this point, Mr. Holmes briefly reprises a few bars of his own biggest hit, the 1972 “Playground in My Mind,” as well as Harry Warren’s “The More I See You,” which was also a significant number for Peter Allen. He detours from the Allen-centric program to sing “1944,” an excellent original song about his parents, in the same vein as Allen’s own more introspective works. “1944” apparently comes from a larger autobiographical work that also includes “At The Rendezvous” from his most recent album, an inspired collaboration with the late Hammond B-3 giant Joey DeFrancesco.Mr. Holmes excels at Allen’s most touching ballads, especially “Quiet Please, There’s a Lady on Stage,” inspired by cabaret queen Julie Wilson (who appeared in Allen’s 1988 musical flop “Legs Diamond”) and dedicated to Judy Garland. He sings it like one of those bittersweet showbiz metaphor songs that’s gloriously happy and sad at the same time, like Bobby Darin’s “The Curtain Falls” or, for that matter, “Send in the Clowns.” He also triumphs with Allen’s upbeat party songs, like “I Go to Rio,” which, let’s face it, is a much better song than Barry Manilow’s comparable “Copacabana” from two years later. The whole room gets up and boogies with “Everything Old is New Again,” yet Mr. Holmes renders it with surprising and appropriate poignancy — while 1974 somehow seemed like a moment to celebrate, 2022, to quote another songwriter, seems like a time to mourn rather than a time to dance. As Mr. Holmes sings it, the song becomes more about what’s been lost than what’s left.“Between The Moon And New York City” — which refers to the most famous line in “Arthur’s Theme” — absolutely deserves a longer run here in Peter Allen’s adopted city. Mr. Holmes ends with “Once Before I Go,” which is a better end-of-life victory lap type of song than either “Here’s to Life” or the dreaded “My Way.” The songwriter famously described himself as a “a one-man band/With all the trappings of a life lived second-hand” who came with “many colors/Assorted shapes and sizes.” Clint Holmes shows how that’s even more true than Peter Allen himself probably ever realized.

Clint Holmes Leaves the Crowd Longing for More

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