For One-Upmanship With a Twist, Check Out the ‘Show Broads,’ Marta Sanders and Leanne Borghesi

Marta Sanders and Leanne Borghesi, ‘Show Broads’Martuni’s, San Francisco, December 14Also Appearing at ‘Songs of the Season’ Benefit ConcertFeinstein’s at the Nikko, San Francisco, December 11 & 12The theme song of “Show Broads,” a two-woman show starring Marta Sanders and Leanne Borghesi, is no doubt “Bosom Buddies” from “Mame,” which sets the tone for all that follows. Here is where we get to meet the two “broads,” longtime “frenemies” in shiny, sequined dresses who proceed to spend the next 70 minutes trying to out-sing and out-funny each other. This past week they gave two shows at the Triad Theater, which as they told us marked their first appearances together in four years. As I remember it, the give-and-take between the two of them was slightly differently in those more innocent times: Ms. Borghesi’s character on stage then was more of a delightfully innocent ding-a-ling type, a kind of a singing Gracie Allen, who paraded around in old-fashioned feather boas and shiny tiaras, not quite realizing how gloriously silly she looked. Ms. Sanders likewise played a caricature of herself as a veteran theatrical type working perhaps a little too hard to both encourage and outshine her younger partner: If this were “Cinderella,” she would be both the wicked stepmother and the benevolent fairy godmother at the same time, bellowing all the while about the many experiences she’s had and all the dues she’s paid.In the current incarnation, Ms. Borghesi isn’t at all dopey and Ms. Sanders is much less Medea-like, but both are still devastatingly funny and totally tuneful. At the Triad, they jumped the gun slightly on the holiday season; almost two weeks before Thanksgiving, there’s a lot of holiday content, starting relatively early in the set. After the opener, featuring “It’s Today” (also from “Mame”) leading into “Bosom Buddies,” and Cole Porter’s “Friendship,” another semi-sarcastic ode in which the rhetoric of two dear old chums pledging support for each other quickly escalates into hyperbolic absurdity, as in: “If they ever put a bullet through your brain / I’ll complain.” Then we get into “Christmas Stars,” a piece of “special material” written for them by Dana P. Rowe and Scott Logston. Like a lot of their material, this song is highly meta, or what we used to call “inside baseball.” The premise is that they take the most sacred, in multiple senses of the word, holiday carols — not commercial jingles about Santa and Rudolf but about holy, silent nights, shepherds tending their flocks, and angels on high — and jive them up with brassy Broadway/vaudevillian shtick. Try to imagine The Nativity as performed by Baby June and her Newsboys in Act One of “Gypsy.”The two have memorable solos, and it’s an excellent example of a show where the much-lauded special material takes center stage: Ms. Sanders’s “Been Around the Block” (written by John McMahon and Jay Jeffries) is a showbiz memoir song along the lines of “I’m Still Here.” Likewise, Ms. Borghesi really shines when she makes the holidays both sweeter and more alcoholic with Ana Gasteyer’s “Sugar and Booze.” (Best line: “We’ll have Hendricks for the Gentiles / Manischewitz for the Jews.”)There are also guest stars: Jennifer Leigh Houston duetted with Ms. Borghesi on Kay Starr’s best-known Christmas song, “Man With The Bag,” co-written by Starr’s manager, Hal Stanley. Then Ms. Borghesi’s niece gave us Jason Robert Brown’s wickedly fun idea of a Weil-Brechtl Christmas song, “Surbaya Santa.” I can only imagine he heard the voice of either Lotte Lenya or Madelyn Kahn in his head when he wrote this, but Casey Borghesi delivers it with gusto and makes it more than memorable.Still, it’s the Sanders-Borghesi duets — in which the two constantly try to upstage and pull focus from each other, with hilarious consequences — that we came to hear. Apart from “Bosom Buddies,” their signature song would appear to be “Use What You’ve Got”; Cy Coleman and Ira Gasman wrote this as an old-fashioned, burlesque-style double-entendre-type song, referring to “what you’ve got” not only in terms of talent and intellect but more specifically in anatomical abundance. (Here’s a clip of the two singing it at Birdland four years ago.)Ms. Sanders and Ms. Borghesi turn it into a supreme anthem of empowerment; in fact, I can’t think of the last time I’ve felt so empowered, not to mention entertained. In their return, the two Show Broads, Marta Sanders and Leanne Borghesi, are again larger than life — and even louder.

For One-Upmanship With a Twist, Check Out the ‘Show Broads,’ Marta Sanders and Leanne Borghesi

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