| JULIE
BUDD |
| | "You and The Night and The Music" a salute to Broadway in the 1930's is a show filled with music and memories ranging from the Great Depression to the building of the Empire State Building, to the events leading up to World War II. Songs of the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Rogers & Hart, and Cole Porter are just a few of the great musical moments that are presented in an evening of Broadway melodies. JULIE BUDD's stories of the Great Depression years in the theatre are warm and inviting to the audience, along with stories of her personal experience working with these great legends as she was a child growing up in show business. Julie also pays tribute to some of the great ladies of the theatre in the 1930's: Mary Martin, Beatrice Lillie, Ethel Merman, and Ruth Etting. "You and The Night and The Music" is definitely
a warm evening of great music and memories. REVIEW SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER By Philip Elwood, Examiner Music Critic Return of Julie Budd: better than ever before "JULIE BUDD, a Brooklyn hit-'em-hard song belter .. with a show-stopping voice ... and astonishing range and dynamics ... opened Tuesday for a week at..." In January of 1978 when I wrote that, Budd was appearing at The City, a warehouse-like combination supper club, cabaret and (upstairs) disco on Montgomery Street off Broadway. The truth is -- remarkably that those comments still fit Budd's performance, which she is presenting at the New Orleans Room of the Fairmont Hotel through Saturday -- 8 and 10 p.m. shows. Even her pianist, Steve Bernstein, who discovered the then teenage Budd's vocal talent at a Catskill hotel's amateur contest in the early 1970s is still with her. The pair's current presentation, titled "You and the Night and the Music"- a salute to the music of Broadway from the 1930s isn't cluttered up with pop-rock songs, backup singers or a couple of electric guitars. This time around, only Mario Suraci's warm and tasteful bass joins Bernstein in Budd's accompaniment. Over the years Budd has often worked the big-time rim, playing Manhattan, Miami Beach, Las Vegas show rooms along with the likes of Jimmy Durante, Danny Thomas, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Jim Nabors and Liberace -some may remember her girlhood appearances on the Ed Sullivan show. The hour-long New Orleans Room performance includes renditions of 23 songs by such as the Gershwins, Rodgers & Hart, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern as well as a four-selection medley from "Porgy & Bess," and a couple of encores. She is particularly skilled at turning out warm and plaintive lyric interpretations --"Who Cares?" (pronounced "cay-yas"), "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," "Where or When," and the obscure Rodgers & Hart number, "Quiet Nights" are typical. And her custom of modulating from key to key -- often two or three times in a single song -displays a sure sense of pitch and makes many an old favorite fresh again. Budd's still-enthusiastic
patter about her love of 1930s songs and those who sang them keeps the program
rolling along at a speedy pace. REVIEW THE BELLE OF BOROUGH PARK Julie Budd makes her entrance at the Oak Room and immediately manages to turn one of Midtown's most sophisticated clubs into Flatbush Avenue. This is the most haimish cabaret act in town; you almost expect her to offer you some noodle kugel so you shouldn 't starve to death. Chattering away about her Borough Park childhood in Fran Drescherian tones, flaunting a defiantly unreconstructed profile, Budd trumpets her ethnicity in a manner that recalls Streisand and Brice. And like those two great ladies, she is a natural as both singer and comic. The Streisand parallels are impossible to ignore, even down to the elongated, chewed-out vowels, resulting in a vocal delivery that can only be called Yiddish British. This is the only place you're going to hear that big hit from "West Side Story," " Tew-noight." But Budd has something Streisand lacks: a generous sense of warmth for her fans. Budd's new act is called "Showstoppers" and is made up mostly of big Broadway moments like "If He Walked into My Life" and 'Ten Cents a Dance," along with a few movie tunes such as "My Shining Hour" and one of the greatest renditions you'll ever hear of "It Might as Well Be Spring." This is a voice that seems to know no limits, filled with great, throbbing vibrato, wide range and prismatic colors. With a mastery sense of phrasing, Budd knows just when to croon, caress or bait. If her pronunciatlon and Hebraic melismas recall Streisand, her enormous sound evokes the very best 1960s recordings of Eydie Gorme. "I shoulda taken
my Actifed," she sniffed during her pollen-plagued opening night. If she
sounds this good with hay fever, than what treats lie in store after allergy season?
So nu, God willing, she should only live and be healthy. I could sit and listen
to her sing until next Shavuous. REVIEW On The Town With Rex Reed After-Dark Magic Good news for the after-dark crowd: Things are as they should be with the sudden re-emergence of Bobby Short and Julie Budd, two veterans of the music scene who never disappoint. At the Algonquin, Julie Budd's new act toasts Broadway show-stoppers, and every hand-picked song from "Everything's Coming Up Roses" to "If He Walked Into My Life" lives up to the label. She's been filling clubs, theaters and concert halls since the age when most of her Brooklyn school chums were losing their skate keys. When she opens up that larynx, the vocal power is positively pyrotechnic.
On "He Had Refinement," you can close your eyes and see and hear the
late, great Shirley Booth stopping the show in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."
Then Ms. Budd turns right around and breaks your heart on "Pink Taffeta Sample,"
a Dorothy Fields-Cy Coleman gem excised from "Sweet Charity." Accompanied
by the formidable Herb Bernstein, her pianist-arranger since the age of 12, Julie
Budd is a whopping talent with range, humor, precision and taste. | |
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