Search - Betty Buckley :: Heart to Heart

Singer-actress Betty Buckley has earned her status as a contemporary Broadway icon through the power and presence of her various theatrical incarnations, from her Tony Award-winning Glamour Cat in Cats to, most recently, Gypsy's Mama Rose. Surprisingly underrecorded for someone of her stature, Buckley has crafted a beautifully integrated program for Heart To Heart: she extends her uniquely vivid interpretations from standards (with real gems by Kern and Berlin) to Mary Chapin Carpenter's thoughtful pop-folk idiom, even including two new compositions of her own. What's more, she gives us a chance to hear her passionate art up close (all the more so for those who were fortunate enough to catch her cabaret performance of this material at New York's Café Carlyle), inviting us into an intimate setting through arrangements as spare and direct as the simple pen-and-ink caricature Buckley designed for the album's cover. Pianist-partner Kenny Werner's coolly elegant keyboard frames and dovetails with Buckley's vocals--passionate, vulnerable, and full of yearning--in a graceful pas de deux. What's more, Buckley fans will be delighted with the level of her own songwriting--in particular, "Violets," her setting of Tennessee Williams's lyrics for a production of his Camino Real, in which she portrayed Marguerite. Heart To Heart is bracing and fresh, an antidote to the overproduced belters of too many recital albums. --Thomas May