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Baby Jane Dexter: Making Every Moment Count |
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At: The FireBird Cafe
Reviewer: David Roberts for Theatre Reviews Limited |
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Baby Jane Dexter's current show at The FireBird Café is a nine-performance encore of her December 2000 hit show. "I like to spend the holidays at The FireBird," Ms. Dexter tells her audience, "It feels like home." New York audiences are fortunate Baby Jane Dexter reprised this show in March 2001.
"Making Every Moment Count" can aptly be subtitled: "De Profundis." For it is out of the depths of Baby Jane Dexter's life experience that the energy comes to accomplish her powerful vocal delivery. Ms. Dexter has a distinctive voice that cannot be classified into any particular style or genre. Uniquely her own, this soul-filled voice engages in an intimate "dance duet" with each song she chooses to sing and what she and the song will "sound like" is determined by the outcome of each of those voice-lyric-music ballets.
  
When an artist admits to her audience that she is an insomniac and has been "napping since the 1970s" she has made the first step in establishing a relationship of honesty and depth with those who are listening to her sing. There is nothing superficial in a Baby Jane Dexter performance; nothing sung which results from skimming the surface of life or lyric. Ms. Dexter's gift is her ability to "live the life she sings about in her songs" and sing about the life she lives.
Her truth and honesty come through in her renditions of "How Come You Do Me Like You Do" (Austin, Bergere), Patsy Moore's "I Remember," and Hoagy Carmichael's haunting "I Get Along Without You Very Well." Her experiences of navigating love's vicissitudes are shared poignantly in her interpretation of Boudleaux Bryant's "Love Hurts" (popularized by Emmylou Harris).
A Baby Jane Dexter show isn't all exploring life's darker corners. She knows how to sell more popular songs with a uniqueness that's both endearing and wildly off-putting. Lieber and Stoller's "Love Potion #9" is a must hear and Baby Jane Dexter takes "There Is Nothing Like A Dame" to places even Rogers and Hammerstein couldn't imagine.
When Baby Jane Dexter sings she taps into something almost indescribable and her singing comes from voice and movement and expression and delicious, soulful, grace-filled presence. When she sings Rogers and Hart's "Ev'thing I've Got" the audience knows intimately that Baby Jane Dexter is giving them everything she has, and more.
There are two wonderful verses of (Christian) scripture though not obscure aren't often heard outside of the ritual of death and resurrection (funeral). Even in that context they aren't easily understood. In those verses one called "The Living One" says, "I am the first and the last and I have the keys of hell and death" (Revelation 1:17, 18). Scary? Not really. What the speaker is affirming is that he has experienced all that life has to offer from the first to the last, from the best to the worst, including perhaps the most unknown, death itself. And he has not been overcome by any of them. In fact, he underwent all the pain and all the suffering so others could escape the worst life has to offer. He, in essence, was the keeper of the keys of humankind's experience.
One feels the same way about Baby Jane Dexter. She shares songs which reflect the wide range of her own life experiences in the hope that by singing about love's hurts and life's hurts, her audiences won't have to hurt quite as much in their loving and in their living. "Everybody Hurts" (Berry, Buck, Mills, Stipe) she sings, not to boast of her own pain but to offer a healing balm for the pain of her audience.
Whatever Baby Jane Dexter has experienced she is willing to share. She is one of the most generous performers around. She gives because she knows that one can safely be prodigal in love. She knows she (and we) are able to "Throw It Away" (Abbey Lincoln) because there's enough love to go around.
What has been said of the incredible Abbey Lincoln can just as easily be said about Baby Jane Dexter: "she is a singer's singer - a woman with extraordinary talents -- an artist who cuts through society's fragmented ruptured illusions and human waste, in order to create a symphony of hope and positive ideas. [Baby Jane Dexter] is a woman of and about her "time" and yet, when you listen to her sing, one suddenly gets a poignant view of human existence."
One longs for December and the return of Baby Jane Dexter.
Reviewed on Saturday March 24, 2001
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With musical director Ross Patterson. Presented by The FireBird Café, 363 West 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues. Friday March 9 through Saturday March 24, 2001. Show times are Fridays at 9:00 p.m.; Saturdays at 9:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. There is a $30.00 music charge and a $15.00 minimum. Reservations: (212) 586-0244.
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