Music Review - Michael Winther - Michael Winther Explores a Whole Lot of Love Songs, Gay, Straight, Young, Old - Review
Old love, new love, straight love, gay love: as many varieties of passion as there are songs in the program are scrutinized with a sophisticated 21st-century eye in “New Love Songs,” the singer Michael Winther’s tender, witty show at the Metropolitan Room. Accompanied on piano by Kimberly Grigsby (the musical director of “Spring Awakening”), Mr. Winther stakes out some of the most fertile artistic territory in American music: the high ground where show tunes, art songs and the singer-songwriter tradition merge.
It takes a first-rate singing actor to extract all the juice from this polyglot style, whose spiritual godfather is Stephen Sondheim, although none of the show’s composers could be described as Sondheim imitators. Mr. Winther has both the voice and the intelligence for the job.
His singing is strong but refined, with perfect intonation and a warm sound that becomes incandescent when he raises the volume. He has none of the blustery, flowery mannerisms of the typical theatrical baritone. Discreet understatement is his method, a raised eyebrow, a playful grin and an insinuating hesitation substituting for fist-shaking declamation and sobbing histrionics.
As in his solo off-Broadway show, “Songs From an Unmade Bed,” “New Love Songs” brings complicated gay relationships into the everyday. All the songs in that show had lyrics by Mark Campbell, writing with different composers, and three of those pieces (the collaborators were Joseph Thalken, Peter Foley and Gihieh Lee) are represented in “New Love Songs.” “Blue Movie, Part 2,” with music by Carmel Dean and lyrics by William Finn, adds an explosively funny moment of raw sex.
“Was That You?,” one of the most exquisite songs at Wednesday’s performance, is a slippery reflection on passion with music by Adam Guettel. The lyrics by Lindy Robbins wonder, “Was I embracing you/Or did I embrace desire?” And more obliquely, “Can a memory/Make a kiss out of an illusion?”
“Still Love,” Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda’s contemplation of a happy long-term relationship in old age, evokes the comfort of domesticity and shared personal history with an unblinking recognition of the couple’s physical deterioration:
If you don’t hear so well, we can lean close when we’re talking, am I right?
If you don’t walk so well, we can just sit here and kiss in the twilight.
And if we don’t remember so much anymore,
We can dwell on the highlights.
You could call “New Love Songs” post-hormonal music. That doesn’t mean the songs aren’t sexy; it means their eroticism coincides with thoughtful reflection on the disruption that passion inevitably brings with it.
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