Video: No ‘pale drooping maiden’ : Kristin Chenoweth introduces MPAC kids to Stephen Foster
By Kevin Coughlin
You can’t say the second time’s the charm for Kristin Chenoweth.
She was so charming opening last season for the Mayo Performing Arts Center that she got invited back on Friday to raise the curtain for the 2016-17 season.
In fact, MPAC invited her back twice. Anyone coming to Chenoweth’s encore show tonight– Saturday, Sept, 24, 2016 — is in for another treat.
Gordon and Cindy Crawford of Morristown were planning to do just that.
“She was incredible,” Cindy Crawford said after Friday’s concert. Her husband ranked Chenoweth’s performance with shows by the late Gregory Hines and Marvin Hamlisch as the best they’ve seen in 15 years as MPAC patrons.
“Her sense of humor is so quick. And her voice is beyond belief,” Gordon Crawford said.
Pound for pound–certainly, inch-for-inch–the 4-foot-11 Chenoweth must rate among the most dynamic entertainers anywhere.
Few can shift as effortlessly from folksy to iconic. And forget the heart-of-gold analogies. It’s more like a heart of plutonium. How else do you explain such towering sound from a package so petite?
Video: Kristin Chenoweth and MPAC teens sing ‘I Was Here.’
The Oklahoma native has an Emmy, a Tony, a jewelry line, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Best known for her roles in Glee, The West Wing and Wicked, she returns to the Great White Way in November for My Love Letter to Broadway.
Chenoweth, 48, also has a shiny new album, The Art of Elegance, which she pitched with comic flair in Morristown. She exuded pizzazz for one of the “new” tracks, Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart, a song recorded by Judy Garland in 1938.
Other crowd-pleasers included Should I Be Sweet, from Ethel Merman’s 1933 show Take A Chance; Chenoweth’s flirty favorite, Taylor, The Latte Boy; and a raucously risqué Dance Ten, Looks Three, from A Chorus Line.
Chenoweth added a smooth duet of Don Henley’s The Heart of the Matter with Mary-Mitchell Campbell, her pianist and musical director.
She got a standing ovation with Bring Him Home, a mesmerizing ballad from Les Misérables that she dedicated to victims of mass shootings in the news.
That song went over big last year, too, as did other numbers she reprised, ranging from a comb-over sendup of Donald Trump for Popular and a duet with an audience member on For Good, to a moving rendition of I Was Here with youth members of MPAC’s Performing Arts Company.
(This was a reunion of sorts; some of the teens sang with her at the White House for a TV special last fall.)
Let’s face it, Chenoweth could have done Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for 90 minutes and probably cadged another opening night gig, same time next year.
We’re betting the choice still would be Pop-u-ler.
Slideshow photos by Kevin Coughlin