MEREDITH MCCALL: The Joy In Your Heart

Meredith McCall

The Joy In Your Heart

© 2006 Meredith McCall (844667003192)

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Lush, intimate performances by actress/singer Meredith McCall - a mix of styles including jazz standards, musical theatre and latin music

notes

The first several times I saw Meredith McCall onstage, she played a lovelorn clerk in a Czech parfumerie; a wisecracking rag doll; a singing cat; a y'all-come-back-now waitress in a Southern diner; a cynical, lonely Italian-American in a New York slum; and the spunky moll to a junk tycoon. With those kinds of roles, it didn't take long to recognize in this nimble artist the kind of effortless versatility that makes audience members dizzy with delight. McCall was so adept at playing it all – young, old, shy, sassy, eats-nails-for breakfast tough – that you'd hear her name attached to a show and wonder happily: Who will she be this time? The fact that nine out of 10 of these performances were in musicals – and that her command of diverse material extended to musical styles – just made her skill at slipping into so many different skins all the more impressive and enchanting.

Now, the secret sorrow of such musical-theatre chameleons is that their voices are often what tend to be noticed least about them. Oh, we may pick up on someone's velvety tone or stratospheric range – and we can't help but notice a voice when it's powerhouse-belting out an 11 o'clock number – but by and large, when we're in the theatre, we get caught up in the lighting and costumes and story, and the voice of an actor, especially a versatile actor, becomes fused with the other skills she or he draws on to create a character: gestures, expressions, a walk, a look. It's only when the visual trappings of theatre are stripped away that we really hear that actor's vocal instrument and begin to appreciate it for what it is.

With this recording by Meredith McCall, we now have a way to appreciate the voice of this accomplished actress. Here we discover a creaminess of tone, a lightness of touch with lyrics, a sly turn with phrasing that might have slipped by us as we watched her on stage. We can hear just how these qualities take standards as well-known as "Scotch and Soda" and "La Vie en Rose" and make them buoyant, fresh. And with less familiar songs – say, Maury Yeston's endearing lullaby "New Words" – how they bring the music close to us and its tenderness to full flower.

Of course, McCall's gifts as an actor are still much in evidence here. In fact, each song plays out as a drama in miniature, performed by its own distinctive character. There's the siren of "Sway," who invites her partner to seduce her, but, in McCall's alluring tones, seems every bit the seductress herself. There's the ingenue of "On a Slow Boat to China," at first so demure in her desire to shanghai her sweetheart, but then the more she contemplates that leisurely Pacific cruise, the more it stokes the fires in her until she's roaring. In "Everybody Loves My Baby," you can hear the carefree elation of a Jazz Age flapper, and in "Waters of March" the free spirit who finds exhilarating joy in every detail of life, no matter how mundane. These figures are every bit as varied as those McCall portrays onstage, and she renders them with all the style and skill she employs there.

Which may go to show that you can take the actress out of the theatre, but you can't take the theatre out of the actress. Not that that's a problem here, you understand. It just means that McCall the singer is giving us that much more to listen to. And listening is a pleasure. – Robert Faires, Arts Editor – Austin Chronicle

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  • The Joy In Your Heart
    author: Ted Sousares

    Very vibrant voice, at times breathy, good mood changes, excellently in-tune vocalist. Nice choice of selection mix; great musicianship backup; I recommend this album as an Austin special.

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