Broadway/regional theater/Las Vegas performer Andrea Bell Wolff brings her new cabaret show, Prisoner of Love, back to NYC’s Metropolitan Room on Saturday, September 23. The theme is love in all its guises, and she plays her theme both straight and for laughs. The repertoire is culled from Broadway, pop and Great American Songbook and includes music from Kander & Ebb, Joni Mitchell, Cole Porter, The Righteous Brothers and Carrie Underwood, to name a diverse few. Having conceived and created the show with the singer, nusic director and pianist Barry Levitt leads a quartet that includes bassist Boots Maleson, violinist Rob Thomas and percussionist Howie Gordon. Peter Napolitano, Director of Musical Theater at Urban Stages and producer of its Winter Rhythms, directs Wolff in this act which debuted at the Metropolitan Room in August.
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Andrea Bell Wolff’s show business history includes being cast, while a teenager attending the Professional Children’s School, as Ermengarde in the first national tour of Hello, Dolly! starring Carol Channing. All in all, she did five productions of the musical, playing both Ermengarde and then Minnie Fay on Broadway and national tours, as well as major roles in George M!, Li’l Abner, Grease, Little Shop of Horrors and Funny Girl. Her work in the revue Bottoms Up! took her from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to Australia, and she has performed at such prestigious venues as The St. James Theatre, Goodspeed, The Paper Mill Playhouse and Sacramento Music Circus. Her work with a show band, Your Father’s Mustache, landed her on The Ed Sullivan Show, and she was a regular on the Donny and Marie variety series, working with Sid and Marty Krofft. Wolff took a long break from performing to raise two children, and returned to the New York stage in 2011 with a show called Loose Screws, a risqué, fictional biographical journey of an also-ran entertainer, Ms. Chelsea Sutton Place. She performed a multimedia revue show featuring music emblematic of the 1960s “girl group” sound in 2015, titled Bad Girls Do Cry at Iridium and Don’t Tell Mama.
Metropolitan Room is located at 34 West 22 Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan. Call (212) 206-0440 or reserve online at: http://metropolitanroom.com
(Prisoner of Love poster: designed by Adam B. Shapiro; photo by Gen Nishino)
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