As Maude Maggart rummages through several decades of popular music in Parents and Children, her bewitching new show at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, you have the eerie sensation that a precocious young girl is leading you by the hand into an attic where forgotten family secrets are stored.
Unlocking a dust-covered trunk with a tiny golden key, this curious, modern-day American Alice in Wonderland discovers a stack of vintage sheet music, along with old family photos and a discarded diary. As she pores over the private thoughts of her grandmother, written when she was 17, the past dissolves into the present in a ghostly double exposure.
In her shows autobiographical patter Ms. Maggart, who comes from a bohemian show business family, talks about her real-life 98-year-old grandmother whom she once asked to describe her first love. That request prompted a question: First love or first sex? Thus arrives the shows musical turning point, Maury Yestons song My Grandmothers Love Letters attached to Robin Williamsons First Boy I Loved (popularized four decades ago by Judy Collins on the album Who Knows Where the Time Goes?), whose narrator wistfully speculates about the destiny of an early boyfriend.
Singing these two songs on Wednesday in a sweet, delicate voice whose rapid vibrato lends everything she performs a slightly otherworldly quality, her long-lined phrases, filled with twists and turns, were exquisitely underscored by John Boswells piano and Yair Evnines guitar and cello.
The material ranges far and wide, from Rodgers and Harts perky A Little Birdie Told Me So, in which she whistles a chorus, to Dolly Partons Coat of Many Colors; from Stephen Sondheims Beautiful (from Sunday in the Park With George) to the Roches Runs in the Family. Two perversely funny songs have lyrics by Marshall Barer, an important mentor, along with Michael Feinstein and Andrea Marcovicci.
Maude Maggart performs through May 23 at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, 59 West 44th Street, Manhattan; (212) 419-9331.
