Storm Large With James Beaton
‘Inside Voice’
54 Below
Through January 6

Storm Large is introduced as “the quiet Storm Large” these days, and she makes both a point and a joke of being more intimate and less out-of-control. Her opening number is a vintage 1951 Betty Hutton vehicle, “It’s Oh So Quiet,” in which she alternates, for comic effect, between feather-soft whispers and rafter-raising shouts, as she slithers through the house, randomly embracing us individually and as a group, and onto the stage. 

She’s still the same Storm Large, she of the adorable baby face and the men’s magazine body, which she’s never been shy about showing off, though her current dress is a bit more modest than the “two band aids” — as she puts it — that we’re accustomed to seeing her in. Most of all, though, there’s the chops, and not just a big, burnished, smoldering voice but the taste to put together — and brilliantly interpret — a unique program of mostly contemporary songs, some originals, and a few vintage standards and show tunes as well.

Still the original blue-eyed and blue-haired soul singer, she tells us that the title of her current offering, “Inside Voice,” is both an inside joke and also serious; “Inside voice,” she tells us, “is a kind of nudge-and-wink.” We know that no matter what, she’s always going to be outrageous and unstoppably candid. Yet at the same time it’s a more thoughtful artist we now see before us; up to now, her patter between songs has always been highly entertaining, but not least because it was humorously rambling and, for all of her obvious talent and beauty, hysterically self-deprecating. 

“Like love, I am a many-splendored thing, but one of those splendors is definitely not subtlety,” she announces early in the set, but almost immediately puts the lie to that notion. It’s a more coherent and well-balanced Storm Large we see before us now celebrating her journey through illness that led to sobriety, and rather than merely being toned-down, she is actually more entertaining than ever. Instead of a band, she’s accompanied entirely by the pianist James Beaton, which indeed makes for a marvelously intimate set.

And then, at the same time, she continually riffs on that idea, screaming, “I can f—ing be quiet” as she launches into Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” (“Words are very unnecessary / They can only do harm.”) One of the genuinely quiet moments is Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” which most of us know from Elvis Costello. She accompanies herself on vigorously strummed ukulele here, with Mr. Beaton not playing but singing in harmony. After finishing, she demonstrates how it could work as a Christmas song by adding jingling bells.

The centerpiece of the show is a segment of numbers by 21st century female singer-songwriters, among them “What Was I Made For” by Billie Eilish and “Writer in the Dark” by Lorde; here she makes a point of focusing entirely on the music, going from song to song with minimal comment. She makes all of them seem not only relevant to her own story, but like all the great interpreters turns them into autobiographies. That’s no less true of the newest song here, “Vampire” by Olivia Rodrigo, which is barely six months old: “Hate to give the satisfaction, asking how you’re doing now / How’s the castle made of people you pretend to care about?”

She stirs up the mood with her YouTube hit and singalong, “Eight Miles Wide,” a cue for the camera phones to emerge from all over the room as everybody joins in: It’s a cry for understanding and a feminist anthem but at the same time a parody of one.

“These are my calm years,” she tells us. “I used to be much more gnarly and what-not.” It’s true. She ends by introducing her original ode to marriage equality, by saying at first she thought to sing, to the tune of “Here Comes the Bride,” “Here come two guys,” which gets a major laugh. Instead, she was inspired to write a text from the perspective of love itself, postulating what love would ask of us. The result was “Stand Up for Me” (“Stand up for me, and I’ll stand beside you. / I’m the light that guides you from inside you.”) As the show ended and the house lights came on, we were all standing up, both for love and for Storm Large.