His name is now synonymous with elephantine spectacles befitting - by Broadway standards, anyway - his classically-influenced compositions, so it's easy to forget that Andrew Lloyd Webber once wrote sweet-nothing ballads, too. And if his legacy had been restricted to the score of this one-woman musical, soliloquies like "Unexpected Song," "Nothing Like You've Ever Known" and the title song would assure his place on the cabaret circuit right next to Neil Diamond, Johnny Christopher and Amanda McBroom.
This song-cycle recounts the amorous adventures of a young London emigrée seeking her fortune in New York City's fashion industry. Premiering in 1979, it was expanded in 1985 into a full-cast feature-length musical titled Song And Dance - partly for the theme permeating Don Black and Richard Maltby's courting-rites lyrics, and partly for its structure of an all-singing first act followed by an all-dancing second. In 2003, the solo-vocal version reappeared, rewritten to recognize such innovations as "speed dating." Wisely, the incarnation chosen for this Bailiwick Repertory production is the original one.
But while our heroine's progress reflects the ambitions of a more innocent time, the romantic expat exhibits remarkable alacrity at landing on her feet: no fortune-hunter she, her plan is to forge a career as a milliner (luscious headgear supplied by Agnes Miles). She breaks up with her home-town boyfriend upon arriving in America, and while waiting for her Green Card (Anglo-Saxon immigrants need those, too, you know), she enjoys the company of a Hollywood producer, a Greenwich Village cowboy and a Westport married man whose exclusive devotion she rejects, coming as it does on the brink of her own success.
The studio at the Bailiwick Arts Center would seem the perfect setting for intimate confessions, especially as confided by Harmony France (recently seen in Bohemian Theater's long-running Songs For A New World), her Portobello Road-gypsy wardrobe rendering her as lovable as her no-frills renditions of Webber's ingenuous pop melodies concealing operatic vocal ranges. And if, on opening night, this included reaching a bit for the high notes - well, who wouldn't be unnerved at the acoustical imbalance generated by accompanists wailing at full power beneath a flimsy platform at center stage? First-night audiences longed for somebody to either throw a tent over the instrumentalists, or to equip our solitary pilgrim with a bullhorn to level the playing field.
