By Katie Dunne McGrath**** Earlier this month, singer-dancer-actress Kelsey Bearman premiered her charming, quirky cabaret show, Lost and Found, at .ZACK, the performance venue in St. Louis’s burgeoning Kranzberg Art Center. The show will open in New York City this coming Sunday, August 26th at Don’t Tell Mama at 7 PM.
Under the direction of Lina Koutrakos, with music direction by Rick Jensen, Kelsey freely set sail across her heart, imagination and memory, in a broad spectrum of songs and musings. Lost and Found centers on Bearman’s experience as a young singer making her way in Manhattan, especially as a grown-up daughter too far away from her beloved St. Louis home and family.
She opened with Nora Jones’ “Come Away with Me,” shifting this romantic ballad to one in which she invited her audience to suspend any distraction and simply walk along with her. Her easy delivery belied the technical calisthenics required throughout the song—no big deal, just another step along the walk.
Bearman’s voice is a remarkably sleek instrument. For many born with such a gift, the display of vocal technique is the extent of their musical expression—not so for Bearman. Whether she’s covering a Broadway tune, the American Songbook or pop, she takes care to respect the song’s lyric and melodic foundation, overlaying her emotional connection with it. The result is that even the most familiar songs, such as the medley of Irving Berlin’s “I Got the Sun in the Mornin’ (and the Moon at Night)” with James Taylor’s “Whenever I See Your Smiling Face” or the Harry Warren/Al Dubin classic, “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” provoke a fresh experience for the listener. The lesser-known tunes, including “She Used to Be Mine” by Sara Bareillles, from Broadway’s Waitress, and the funny, lyric-heavy “Empathy,” by Alanis Morrisette, sound like she surely wrote them herself or that they were written especially for her.
In 2014 the Thought Catalog published Kovie Biakolo’s 24 Unexpected Reasons 24 Is the Best Age Ever. Reason #15 relates to having a greater understanding of and affection for one’s parents. At age 24 now herself, the sweetest moment in Bearman’s show was her recounting of her father singing James Taylor songs as lullabies to coax her to sleep when she was a toddler.
Reason #24 states that you are old enough to know better but young enough to know you have the rest of your life ahead of you to get it right. Indeed, Kelsey Bearman’s Lost and Found reflected her gravitas of knowing better and the shiny, optimistic promise of getting better and better as she goes along.
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