Donna McKechnie's NY Times review/discount tickets

[Landmark on Main Street]

Posted: 4/21/05 at 10:46pm

Donna McKechnie's Gypsy in My Soul show opened in NYC and got a great review from Stephen Holden in the NY Times. If you would like to see it on Long Island on May 7th at the Jeanne Rimsky Theater at Landmark on Main Street, we're offering $5 discounts just by mentioning the code: "Broadway World." Visit us on-line at www.landmarkonmainstreet.org, call the box office at 516-767-6444 or email [e-mail]. Hope to see you there!

CABARET REVIEW | DONNA MCKECHNIE
A Tough Life, but Still Worth Singing About
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: April 20, 2005


Broadway dancers who sing belong to an especially hardy theatrical breed. Think only of legends like Chita Rivera and the sadly missed Gwen Verdon to envision the archetype of a brass-knuckled trouper with a heart of gold. Donna McKechnie, who has spent many of the last four decades on the road (she is now in her early 60's), belongs in that rarefied company. With her bright, friendly voice, frisky body language and arsenal of backstage anecdotes, she is a performer without pretensions.


Her breezy new show, "Gypsy in My Soul," which opened a two-week engagement on Monday at Au Bar, is a happy-to-be-here celebration of an itinerant professional life that has seen Ms. McKechnie shuttle from Broadway to London to the sticks and back. To live like that and flourish, as she obviously has, requires a sunny disposition, an iron constitution and an itch for adventure.

As Ms. McKechnie spills herself across the stage, her canteen of good will runneth over. The stories she relays (the funniest concern Ann Miller, who emerges as a kind of soul mate in sawdust) are remarkably free of bitterness, catty insider gossip or egoistic tub-thumping. The gypsy in her soul is still a stage-struck girl from Detroit living out her show business dreams. And if the show's introspective numbers, like "By Myself," suggest the steep personal price she's paid for her free-spirited life, she leaves little doubt that it was well worth paying.

"Gypsy in My Soul" opens with a pop of fireworks: the show's title song, followed by "Lot of Livin' to Do" (from "Bye Bye Birdie") and the zany "Turkey Lurkey Time" (from "Promises, Promises"). Then it settles into a comfortable rhythm, alternating showstoppers and ballads sung with a loose, big-hearted confidence. The showstoppers include "Some People" from "Gypsy" and the inevitable "Music and the Mirror," Ms. McKechnie's signature song from "A Chorus Line."

In the show's deepest musical moment, Ms. McKechnie looks back on the 1998 Paper Mill Playhouse production of "Follies," in which she played Sally Durant. In an artfully constructed medley of songs and dialogue from the show, culminating with "Too Many Mornings," she brings the dithering, self-deluded Sally to full three-dimensional life.

Updated On: 4/21/05 at 10:46 PM