Nellie McKay on Rachel Carson and Mother Nature
By Stephen Holden, The New York Times
Outfitted in caps and gowns, the singer Nellie McKay and her musicians trouped onto the stage of Feinstein’s at Loews Regency on Tuesday evening with mischievous smirks on their faces. Along with the show’s title, “Silent Spring — It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature,” the costumes signaled what was ahead: a zany homemade one-woman musical comedy with an educational agenda and more wardrobe changes to come.
The caps and gowns, which were soon discarded, suggested a collective graduation from naïveté about nature and the world we inhabit into a more complex awareness. Ms. McKay personified a contradiction: an ingenuous naïf with a torch singer’s sophistication. This alter ego became a fairy-tale version of her show’s heroine, the pioneering conservationist Rachel Carson who died in 1964.
Rachel Carson, the poet-warrior of the environmental movement, did a heroic kind of humanist advocacy science that’s easy for artists to love. She was fearless, literate, and personally enigmatic, and her radical work came at just the right time in postwar history, standing as a challenge to the cult of industrial science in the years after the Manhattan Project. In recent decades, Carson has been the subject of a growing body of musical works, many of them ballads by activist singer-songwriters (“Song for Rachel” by Walkin’ Jim Stoltz, “Rachel” by Magpie, and others, 17 of which were collected on the album Songs for the Earth: A Tribute to Rachel Carson, in the late 1980s). Five years ago, the jazz pianist and (recently retired) NPR radio host Marian McPartland played piano in the premiere of her original orchestral piece, A Portrait of Rachel Carson. Inspired mainly by Carson’s best-remembered book, Silent Spring, the composition is a partly improvised, largely programmatic work that movingly evokes and celebrates the sounds of the natural world. (McPartland produced it in collaboration with the arranger and composer Alan Broadbent.)
This coming fall will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring, and the year’s first musical tribute to Carson and her work has just opened, remarkably, on the stage of Feinstein’s cabaret room in the Regency Hotel in New York. Called Silent Spring: It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature, the show is a resolutely quirky performance piece by the singer, pianist, and songwriter Nellie McKay, who portrays Carson with the giddy fervor and endearing, self-conscious effusiveness of a middle schooler putting her all into the graduation show. By comparison, Glee is grim. McKay has committed herself so fully to her image of Carson as a brainy pioneer of the New Frontier that she dyed her hair brown for the show and shelved the kittenish glamour act that established her as a young darling of the New York nightclubs. There’s something deliciously subversive about this show, with its cheeky mix of stagey inventiveness, deep earnestness and ironic, implied amateurism. As Nellie McKay’s own Manhattan Project, it’s sweetly explosive.
I don’t know too much about Nellie McKay other than the fact that she’s amazing. I think I heard some buzzings about her in 2002 but it was mostly from women that touted her as some sort of girl power act and I wasn’t sure if I was invited to the party.
A few years ago, I noticed Nellie McKay was playing at the old Largo and thought it might make a fun date night to have some dinner and watch this singer that I’d kinda heard of.
That night I got drunk on pasta, wine, and Nellie McKay. To sit in a lounge that small and hear music coming straight from a singer’s diaphragm to your ears without taking a detour through autotune and recording industry approval is something to be appreciated.
From that point on I knew that I was a Nellie McKay fan.
Last Friday night we took our friends to the Catalina Jazz Club, to see Nellie. We figured that they’d go in expecting a boring Jazz show and be delightfully surprised when they witnessed the amazingness of Nellie. Instead it was the Nellie veterans (Kate and myself) that were surprised and delighted by Nellie’s “I Want To Live” dinner theater. I figured we were in for a night of dry-humored ukulele feminist jokes, but NO. We were in for a full on night of musical drama, and it was amazingsauce.
I don’t want to ruin the show for you because you should seriously purchase a flight to wherever this show is happening next. I’ll say this though: “I Want To Live” transcends music and theater.
“I Want To Live” is the story of Barbara Graham, the third woman to be executed in the San Quentin gas chamber. I know, it sounds like a serious downer, but it is amazing. There is a prison scene where all the band members transform into lady prison cellmates and a scene where Nellie sings “I Only Have Eyes For You” while consoling a make believe baby featuring the saxophonist’s impression of a baby crying that is so dead-on you think you’re in the check out lane at Target.
If you’re reading this and you’re like “This sounds fun, but is it hip?” Jason Schwartzman was there. So… yeah.
The Catalina Jazz Club itself is weird, but I loved it. Yelp reviews say that the dinner prices are insane and the wait staff is awful. We skipped dinner and showed up just in time for the show. We ended up at an obstructed view table, but Nellie worked every inch of the stage so no one missed too much. I can’t comment on how the food was, but my “Ultimate Margarita” was pretty fantastic. No one on Yelp seemed to mention the fact that this club is in a basement. It felt more like I was going to a Cub Scout meeting than a concert, but it all worked out in the end.
I’ve made a promise to myself: Never, ever miss a Nellie McKay show. I recommend you follow suit.
When you think of subjects for song cycles, few people would come up with Susan Hayward’s Oscar-winning performance as Barbara Graham, a woman sentenced to the death penalty for committing murder. But of course, we’re not the spectacular Nellie McKay, either.
On Friday night at Catalina Bar & Grill, Ms. McKay began her descent into this musical film noir world with the Jimi Hendrix classic “Purple Haze.” That wonderfully anachronistic start indicated we were in for a strange trip into Barbara Graham’s world. By combining well-known songs like “I Only Have Eyes for You” with some originals, Ms. McKay revealed herself to be amongst the finest actresses currently working.
In addition to being a witty and unique singer-songwriter, Ms. McKay infused her performance with the kind of commitment required to make this unique evening come to life. Backed by a very talented band, Ms. McKay ended the evening—after the execution of Ms. Graham—with a couple of songs from previous albums. It will be very difficult for other cabaret artists to measure up to this chilling and thrilling night.
Oh the joy of entering a show unawares and being dazzled and surprised. Nellie McKay’s latest project, a musical descent into the film noir world of Susan Hayward’s Oscar winning performance as condemned murderess Barbara Graham, is a brilliantly conceived and executed cabaret spectacular unlike any show you have or will see. Think Kurt Weil meets Grand Guignol, meets apple-pie Doris Day gone wrong. McKay, a gifted singer, songwriter, actress, musician and satirist, won a Theatre World Award for her portrayal of Polly Peachum in the Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, so she’s no stranger to social activism and a touch of the absurd.
Working her way chronologically through the life of Graham, McKay weaves her song selections brilliantly, reflecting on the optimistic girl gone horribly bad, doomed by her choices to die in the gas chamber. Using pre-recorded voice-overs and her band mates as dramatic foils, “I Want To Live” is at times zany, aburd, ironic and always astute in its observations on social injustices and seedy underside of abused women. Her klezmer-like original song ‘Please’ captures the down on your luck atmosphere that surrounded Grahams early years. A series of brighter side ditties (‘April Showers’, ‘They Say It’s Spring’ and ‘Isn’t It A Lovely Day’) are sung in a soft, fragile 40’s style reflecting the optimism of youth. But then a shift happens during the Billie Holiday hit ‘Some Other Spring’, full of crushed and damaged love. There’s a hilarious rendition of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ sung to Graham’s baby while saxophonist Tivon Pennicott imitates the baby’s wailing cries.
Always in manic character, McKay/Graham is arrested (‘Call The Police’) and incarcerated. She and the band, now in jailhouse garb, go through the motions of prison life and The Beatle’s ‘I’m So Tired’ reflects their toil and mental drain. Another McKay original, ‘There You Are In Me’ sums up Graham’s sad existence eloquently – “No one ever loved me, Not at school and home was so sadistic, I don’t wanna be another fool another sad statistic, Everyone you know secures a wretched glow within your memory, Wipe their filthy toes upon the yearning of your mind”. The disappointment is made even more glaring with each last minute stay of execution only to end in the tragic, inevitable conclusion.
I’m not sure the audience was prepared for or understood McKay’s full intentions with this theatre piece. Half laughed heartily at the absurdism, but all sat rapt in attention at the spectacle. McKay is an amazing performer; quirky and brilliant, smart and adventurous. Her four song encore of original material (‘Beneath the Underdog’, ‘Toto Dies’, ‘I Wanna Get Married’) and a delightful version of South Pacific’s ‘I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy’, show her unique world vision, artistry and imagination.
I’ve seen Nellie McKay quite a bit since moving to Oregon. She plays two-week residencies in New York on occasion (lucky!!), but she rarely hit the Midwest when I lived there. Now that I’m here in the Northwest, I’m glad that she tried to swing by at least annually. This time was for her new project, yet to be released officially in any form… I Want To Live! – a story of Barbara Graham, the third woman to be executed in the State of California (via the gas chamber at San Quentin). It’s loosely based on the 1958 film of the same name.
A Review of “I Want To Live!” at Hollywood’s fabulous Catalina Jazz Club!
By Tony Gieske
Photos by Tony Gieske
It’s a Churchillian task to write about Nellie McKay‘s performance Saturday at Catalina’s. There she stood in all her Debbie Reynolds-ness, offering a figurative “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” among other exudations, in a skit that rivalled the works of Imogene Coca, Fran Leibowitz, Dorothy Parker, Fran Landesman or Alice Ghostley, with a hint of Alexander Pope heard now and then. It was the stuff of history.
The McKay voice is a knife edged with honey. Which is good, because the words she writes are razor sharp beneath a homespun mantle.
When life’s impossible
Hold tight beneath the underdog
That’s where I’m comfortable
She often tackles a lyric in a style that is positively cubist. From “There You Are in Me”:
Uptight, upright, long nights, furious
Darwin asked “You Got The Money?”
Big cry, big guy, fish eye curious
Can this be my home?
After draining this proto-Lotte Lenya vein, she taps into “Some Other Spring,” a melancholy standard we all know from Billie Holiday’s version, and draws a bit of heart’s blood with it.
Some other spring
I’ll try to love
Now I still cling
To faded blossoms
Using her splendid little backup band — “they can play anything and they’re natural criminals, too,” she says — McKay then got into surrealism on “I Only Have Eyes for You,” with the tenor man uttering penetrating cries like an unhappy infant for no apparent reason.
And she took a ricocheting shot at feminism with one of her better-known numbers, “Mother of Pearl”:
Feminists don’t have a sense of humor
Feminists just want to be alone (boo-hoo)
Feminists spread vicious lies and rumor
They have a tumor on their funny bone
The evening as a whole, we were told, constituted McKay’s demented version of “I Want to Live,” the biopic for which Susan Hayward won an Oscar. The flick was about Barbara Graham, the forgotten murderess — steady there, feminists — who became in 1955 the third woman to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
So, to conclude her wacky parody, McKay seated herself in the fatal chair, put on a pale green blindfold, and got a laugh when she said: “I don’t want to see them stare at me.” The musicians struck up a hissing sound and she rolled her head back and forth, depicting death throes. Gotta say she’ll do anything for a laugh.
And among all her anythings, such as imitating Tom Waits or portraying a chicken being hauled to market inside a crate, she played piano rather deftly with her own prodigious little fingers, a feat that Winston Churchill never managed.
