By Marilyn Lester***By and large, composers in a songwriting team get the bigger share of glory: Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers and so on. But in American popular music, that’s only half the story, so it’s big hats off to vocalist Madelaine Warren for shining a 
spotlight on one of the American Songbook’s greatest wordsmiths: Dorothy Fields. In Warren Sings Fields at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, in narrative and in the varied set of numbers, the lady in question was given her due—all the more significant since March is Women’s History Month.
Basically, Dorothy Fields was a badass… a pioneer not only in the style of her lyrics: accessible, conversation and witty and wise, but in breaking the glass ceiling of Tin Pan Alley and beyond. With grit and determination, she traveled where no woman had gone before. Warren opened with a medley of tunes written with Field’s first major collaborator, Jimmy McHugh: “I Feel a Song Comin’ On” (a great symbolic starter), “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “Hey, Young Fella.” These three numbers fit seamlessly together, as did the medleys to follow, thanks to the creative arrangements of music director-pianist, Christopher Denny. Bassist Tom Hubbard, as always, was a sturdy and creative time-keeper, and his arco (bowing) on the Harold Arlen number, “With the Sun Warm Upon Me,” gave exquisite depth to the tune.
With a lot 
of ground to cover in the life of one extraordinary human, Warren not only nicely hit the high points, but proved those points in smart song choices, mostly eschewing the well-known songbook standards, for lesser-known material written with composing greats: tunes such as “I Can’t Waltz Alone” (Max Steiner), “Just Let Me Look at You” (Jerome Kern) and “Make the Man Love Me” (Arthur Schwartz). Warren also tapped into her own inner comedian with Fields’ witty words to “After Forty, It’s Patch, Patch, Patch” (Cy Coleman) from the doomed, never produced Broadway musical Eleanor, and “He Had Refinement” (Schwartz). And if we could have reached the essence of Fields in the ethers, it’s a good bet she would have been as pleased as we were that Warren gave each song its due by singing the verse; these vocal introductions, so often cut from performance, are important in telling the song’s story—and isn’t that the whole point of lyrics?
The rollout of songs in Warren Sings Fields was mostly chronological, but not religiously so. The earliest was 1928’s “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” with McHugh, for the revue, Blackbirds of 1928 at the Cotton Club. Fields, the fledgling at age 23 (and a woman!) had begun working with the well-established McHugh in 1927; 
Blackbirds solidified their collaborative success. The last songs, chronologically speaking, were from 1973’s Broadway show, Seesaw, with Coleman: “I’m Way Ahead” and “It’s Not Where You Start.” A year later, on March 28, 1974, Fields died at home, suddenly, from a heart attack, leaving a treasure chest of work that lives on today.
Neatly directed by Barry Kleinbort, as the penultimate number, Warren awed a rapt audience with her own gift. Before solidly transitioning to cabaret in 2013, she was a lyric soprano on opera stages. Because Dorothy Fields was a big fan of opera, she dedicated “O mio babbino caro” (Giacomo Puccini) to her. It can sometimes take concentration for an opera diva to perform popular music, but this beautiful, seemingly effortless rendition of core training left the audience breathless. But opera’s loss has been cabaret’s gain, and with the encore, “The Way You Look Tonight” (Kern), the art form of cabaret has been that much more enriched by Madelaine Warren’s presence in it.
