By Bill Ervolino (entertainment journalist/blogger)**** She doesn’t look like Barbra Streisand. She doesn’t sound much like her, either. So, what, precisely, is Linda Moshier up to?
In Simply Starstruck, her April 14th show at The Cutting Room, Moshier will do her best to explain what Streisand has meant to her—in words, music and more music. It’s a sentimental journey. An intensely personal one, too. But it has nothing to do with impersonation.
And the songs aren’t all that familiar, either. Moshier will perform “He Touched Me” and “Evergreen” before the night is over. “But,” she notes, “the other songs in this show aren’t nearly as well known. So, that should be interesting.” She worked on the material over a period of months with her music director Phil Hall. “It started about a year ago,” Moshier recalls. “Phil said, ‘If you got a concert singing this music, would you do it?’”
Moshier, who says her earliest idols were Streisand and Patti Page, naturally said yes. “But, then I was immediately terrified,” she adds. “I said, ‘We can’t just stand up there and sing Barbra Streisand songs. The show has to be about something. A way to present this music.”
Admittedly, Moshier doesn’t have much in common with the eight-time Grammy winner. (Ten, if you include Streisand’s Lifetime Achievement and Grammy Legend awards.) For starters, Moshier hails from Kansas. Streisand, of course, is a Brooklyn girl, who was born a mere hop, skip and jump from the Greenwich Village nightclubs that launched her recording career (when she was barely out of her teens) and established her as a musical force to be reckoned with.
Moshier didn’t move to New York City until January 1991, inspired by you-know-who. “To me, Streisand was musical theatre,” Moshier says. “In Kansas, I sang in amusement parks. I did theatre in college. But, come on—f you’re interested in musical theatre, where would you go? So, I left Kansas for New York. I just got on a train and showed up one day.”
(Hey, Mr. Arnstein!)
Reflecting on her childhood dreams, her arrival in New York and her subsequent experiences on stages here and around the world as a USO entertainer, gave Moshier the thread she needed to frame Simply Starstruck, sharing the highlights of her life and punctuating them with appropriate songs from the seemingly bottomless Streisand repertoire. “I’m All Smiles” turns up during Moshier’s adolescence. And her arrival in the Big City summons up a rollicking “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
A lyric soprano with a whole lot of range and a big, not-bad belt, Moshier occasionally let her guard down during rehearsals and sounded a little too Streisand-ish. “Sometimes, when we were working on a song,” she says, “my director Kevin B. McGlynn would say, ‘That sounds too much like her. You have to change it!’”
It’s the sort of thing, Moshier recalls, that happened frequently when she was in college. “When I was learning how to sing, I learned ‘My Man’ from listening to her. I’d never heard anyone else do the song. But that’s how it is. First you copy other singers. Then your life happens, you start trusting yourself and allowing yourself to try things that might not work.” A snippet of “My Man” does turn up in Simply Starstruck but, for the most part, Moshier steered away from Streisand signatures. “She did the iconic versions,” Moshier notes, before adding with a laugh, “If that’s what you want to hear, go see her!”
Moshier will share the stage with a five piece band that includes two musicians (Aaron Heick and Ray Marchica) who have performed with Streisand. The show also includes a “surprise guest,” whose identity Moshier insists on keeping under wraps.
Mr. Ziegfeld? Miss Marmelstein? Je m’appelle…? The audience for Simply Starstruck will simply have to wait.
Linda Moshier appears in Simply Starstruck at 7 PM on April 14. Tickets are $40 ($30 in advance) with a $25 food and drink minimum. For additional information call 212-691-1900. For tickets click here
The Cutting Room is located at 44. E. 32nd Street, NYC.
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