We get Requests Janet Seidel trio

We Get Requests

Reviewed by John Shand
May 19 2003

We Get Requests
Janet Seidel Trio
Sorlies, Glen Street Theatre, May 14

Who'd be a musician? You spend your working hours - while sensible people are sleeping - stuck in smoky bars, surrounded by drunks who spill beer on the instruments, shout their conversations over the music and demand songs they don't actually know the names of.

Against that backdrop is set Janet Seidel's new show, We Get Requests. Seidel spent many years playing in piano bars, and even when she moved to more salubrious establishments, all that changed was the price of the drinks the drunks were swilling. She once even had to cough her way through a cigar promotion.

The first half of the show consisted of songs she remembers being requested: Your Feet's Too Big (Billy Connolly), A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square (an unwell Jeffrey Bernard), It's Only A Paper Moon (Sir Garfield Sobers) and My Attorney Bernie, which apparently appealed to the legal soaks at the Wentworth.

Towards the set's conclusion Seidel's collaborators - bassist (and brother) David Seidel and guitarist Chuck Morgan - revisited a routine incorporated into her last show. Having left the stage for her to do a solo song, they marauded through the audience and plonked themselves on two stools at the piano, using it as a bar for their drinks and chips.

The routine, scathingly close to reality, has tightened into a very funny act, the lads crinkling the chip packet, talking over the songs they have asked for and mixing up the titles. "Do you know that 'icy trees' song?" asks David, and Janet duly launches into What A Wonderful World.

In the second half the trio eased through a pile of audience requests, from Willie Nelson's hit for Patsy Cline, Crazy, to Stephen Sondheim's Send In The Clowns, via Antonio Carlos Jobim's One Note Samba.

It was fun to watch them improvising arrangements as they went, even decorating Crazy with backing vocals.

Seidel seemed more comfortable with the chatty parts of the show than last time, perhaps because there was less of it.

Her singing was typically dreamy, the words floating, cloudlike, and there was an effortlessness about her projection, helped by the excellent sound and having such soft, sympathetic and transparent accompaniment from both her colleagues and her own piano.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• We get Requests
• Janet Seidel trio
• Sydney
• Jazz
• Cabaret

[tw0765]

I love this show, I do.