By Steve Murray, Cabaret Scenes

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.

By Daniel Temmesfeld

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.

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A Review of “I Want To Live!” at Hollywood’s fabulous Catalina Jazz Club!
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.

Nellie McKay sings Frank Loesser

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Critic’s Notebook – Whoa, Nellie!
by Hilton Als

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Bringing Out the Bad Girl for Some Tough Times
By STEPHEN HOLDEN, New York Times

“Fresh out of reform school — Barbara Graham,” announced a booming voice to open Nellie McKay’s new show, “I Want to Live!,” on Tuesday evening at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency. Wearing a copper-colored dress whose tarnished glitter suggested crushed Christmas ornaments and flashing a bright artificial smile, Ms. McKay, bounced onto the stage like an animated package of pretty poison.

The show that followed was a brilliant, zany film-noir musical biography of Barbara Graham, a convicted murderer who was the third woman to die in the gas chamber in California (at San Quentin) in 1955. In the 1958 movie “I Want to Live!” Graham was played by Susan Hayward, whose performance won her an Academy Award for best actress. (more…)