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Carol Woods: Stick Around!

At: Arci's Place

Reviewer: David Roberts for Theatre Reviews Limited

Carol Woods will be sticking around the wonderful Arci's Place only through Saturday February 24. Her current show "Sticking Around" is a must see blend of standards, blues, and new songs which Ms. Woods delivers with impeccable style. There isn't a lyric in this program (written and directed by Jack Wrangler) that doesn't benefit from Carol Woods' interpretation. There isn't a note that she carefully lifts from a song that she hasn't thought about and delivered to her audience with the utmost care.

"I had to grow, become, evolve," Carol tells her audience and with that generous self-disclosure she and her guests are free to share an evening of incomparable singing and playing (James Sampliner). Because Carol Woods is completely comfortable with herself she gives the audience the space needed to be comfortable and allow the power of her voice to transform all self-doubt, all post-election weariness, all despair.

Whether it is Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's "Come Rain Or Come Shine" or Hill and Razaf's "If I Can't Sell It I'm Gonna Sit On It" Carol Woods knows how to sing it, how to deliver it, how to sell it. Her voice is so richly textured and so perfectly controlled that any song finds a home in her range and in her expressive delivery. Ms. Woods is a gifted actor as well as a disciplined vocalist for whom timbre and pitch are as important as volume and meter.

One thing becomes clear as one listens carefully to Carol Woods. She cares deeply about life and about the space she shares with the people around her. She's blues singer, gospel singer, evangelist, teacher, bosom buddy. Her pairing of "Even God Must Get The Blues" (John Sherrill and Dene Anton) with Stephen Sondheim's "Children Will Listen" gives the most seasoned skeptic reason to find some hope for the planet. Though "the devil's been so busy lately," and the "Lies of Handsome Men" (Francesca Blumenthal) threaten to undo civility, there are those wonderful blues "in the night" that beckon us to better places within and without.

The evening with Carol Woods is not without fun. The audience loved her "Dialogue Medley" and "Take A Bite" (Michele Browerman and Karen Gottlieb). Still it is those wonderful standards that continue to be the foundation of any solid cabaret program. Jerry Ross and Richard Adler's "Hey There" worked for Rosemary Clooney and it still works for Carol Woods.

If the ultimate sin is "giving up, not giving in," then songs like "Bless This House" (Helen Taylor and May H. Morgan), "The People That You Never Get To Love" (Rupert Holmes) and the powerful "As Long As I Can Sing" by David Friedman give us bits and pieces of a tangible, workable credo and a glimpse of what just might be the key to happiness.

Go to see Carol Woods as soon as you can. In fact, go sooner. You won't regret it and you won't have to regret not going.

Reviewed on Saturday February 3, 2001

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Musical director, James Sampliner. Written and directed by Jack Wrangler. At Arci's Place, 450 Park Avenue South between 30th and 31st Streets from January 30 through February 24, 2001. Performance times are Tuesdays through Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. and Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Reservations: (212) 532-4370. Carol Woods appeared in New York in the new production of "Follies" on Broadway which is opened on April 5, 2001. Carol Woods' CD "Bosom Buddies" (live with Karen Saunders) is available at each performance.

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