By popular demand, ScoBar Entertainment and The Iridium are proud to present award-winning vocalist MARILYN MAYE and her trio in a special Valentine’s show, Marilyn Maye—Always from the Heart, for a four-day engagement, Thursday, February 14 through Sunday, February 17. In celebration of Valentine’s Day, there will be two performances on Thursday, February 14, at 7 pm and 9:30 pm. All other performances play at 8 pm nightly.
Marilyn Maye has been described as a singer, an entertainer as well as an actress and comedian, but the word that most of her fans would use is “phenomenon.” She is an unstoppable ball of energy, equal parts of Ella Fitzgerald and Ethel Merman, one that would be remarkable at any age, but even more so for a woman who just turned 90 and has been entertaining professionally for at least 80 of those years.
At 90, Maye’s raw firepower is astonishing, complementing her ability for amazing subtlety, her gift for underplaying a lyric and her capacity for narrative. She is one of the few artists of any generation who is a great jazz singer with a remarkable sense of swing as well as performing as a full-on theatrical singer with an equally great sense of drama and storytelling. She can deliver a punch-line like no one else and with a single wink of her eyes or the expression on her face, make an entire audience laugh so hard that they can barely breathe.
Throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s, Mayer sang in nightclubs in her native Kansas City, learning her craft—how to swing, belt the blues, personalize a lyric, capture the full attention of an audience and then hold it. She worked steadily, but later regretted that she didn’t have much incentive to spread her wings beyond her native Missouri. It wasn’t until 1960 that she came to the attention of TV superstar Steve Allen, who put her on his NBC show. From Mr. Allen she attracted the attention of other tastemakers and impresarios, including Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson, as well as executives from RCA Records, for whom she made seven albums and many singles in the late 1960s.
In the 1970s Maye was the queen of the late night talk and variety shows, making more appearances on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” than any other entertainer in the show’s history. She worked extensively in regional theatre (she was everybody’s favorite “Dolly” throughout the Midwest), working in every city in the country, except for New York. It wasn’t until 2006 that she made her “comeback” in NYC, starting at Metropolitan Room and following with Feinstein’s, Birdland, Iridium, 54 Below and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
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The Iridium is located at 1650 Broadway, New York, NY,212-582-2121
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