You Made Me Love You: Celebrating 100 Years of the Great American Songbook (Jennifer Sheehan)

Before a shimmering silver curtain, sometimes changing to deep blue or purple or rose colors via lighting, Jennifer Sheehan shines in praising and vocalizing selections from The Great American Songbook. She’s backed in these by the formal, first-rate James Followell, very much at home at the Steinway.

Beginning with “All the Things You Are,” Sheehan explains she sometimes feels people will think she’s betraying her generation but, as her opener proves, there’ve “been no better love songs than such older ones.” She gives a bit of history of Great American Songbook contents and their singers. She shimmies like Sophie Tucker doing “Some of These Days” and goes on to “You Made Me Love You” in a different mode. As she remarks, that was a song made by Americans of Irish and Italian descent for a Jew (Al Jolson) to sing in blackface!

Songs that influenced Sheehan growing up in St. Louis included, especially, Cole Porter’s. She “got a kick out of” his lyrics even when she didn’t understand them all. Then she learned about cabaret, which became a major love, typified by “How Long Has This Been Going On?” Sheehan went on to take master classes in Cabaret, to which she returned after classical training at Juilliard. The two types went well together when she approached songs by Sondheim, whom she subsequently met. From his repertoire, she shares “Take Me to the World.”

The second half of Sheehan’s program features songs from Henry Mancini, Barry Manilow and Susan Werner. Her comment on the latter’s “When They Make a Movie of My Life” is that Werner’s music deserves a movie of its own. Toward the end, a few selections from movies and plays are featured, like Berlin’s “What’ll I Do”? and Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening.”

Sheehan’s clear voice has accommodated all the songs. Her gowns (primary blue at first; green later), well draped and modest, accentuate her blend of concert and cabaret.