Joanne Halev at Birdland

Joanne Halev
Birdland
New York, NY
April 21, 2025

Backed by everybody's favorite musical director Alex Rybeck and bassist Tom Hubbard, chanteuse Joanne Halev made her long-anticipated move upstairs to Birdland's main room for an elegant, thoughtful set of music and mirth. Drawing on life, love and the shifting tides of fortune in a show aptly titled "Sailing On," Halev brought a sold-out crowd to their feet in sincere appreciation for her mastery of the Great American Songbook.

Stunningly sheathed in a cool white cowl-necked ensemble that positively gleamed, Halev kicked off her floating foray with a bittersweet reminiscence of earliest childhood "Down East in Maine," where she grew up "By the Sea." That Bobby Darin hit (and its French original "La Mer"), rendered here at a more soothing tempo that closed with a lovely vibrato, took the Jewish girl from Maine (no lobster for her) to the less aquatic precincts of Midwestern Kenosha, where she discovered boys (or, rather, they discovered her). Darting between Rodgers & Hammerstein and Lerner & Lowe classics, Joanne took on the "I am sixteen, going on seventeen" fellas who froze when she lamented their "words, words, words" when all she really wanted was a hormone-laden invitation to "show me!" At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, she continued her romantic research, just barely missing out on a future hazardous Duke who became a TV heartthrob and Broadway star (you can guess who).

Smartly directed by in-demand club helmer Sara Louise Lazarus, Halev next set her sights on New York Harbor, sailing into the Big Apple where she worked the bar at the Waldorf and billeted in Greenwich Village. Sondheim's sultry Dick Tracy contribution "Live Alone and Like It" set the tone for this segment of the proceedings, punctuated smartly by Francesca Blumenthal's cabaret favorite "The Lies of Handsome Men." It's a theme she harkened back to frequently, limning love and loneliness with lyrics lifted from some distinguished cabaret writers, including Carol Hall and Amanda McBroom (the latter's "Ship in a Bottle" especially trenchant here).

And the classic set list schoonered on: Lerner and Lane's "Too Late Now" got a winsome reading, Halev's elegiac, haunting vibrato finishing the number. Hall's "Jenny Rebecca," a hit for Barbra Streisand, featured a lovely instrumental coda from Rybeck. Halev had fun with Rodgers and Hart's "Nobody's Heart Belongs to Me" and calmed the usually jaunty "I've Got the Sun in the Morning" from Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun, picking up the pace to close the evening's songfest.

And sail on she did—tacking starboard onto Birdland's main stage, where she found a comfortable berth. We look forward to another cruise thru the Great American Songbook with Captain Halev at the helm.

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