By Scott Barbarino***Entertainer Randa McNamara makes you feel like you’re in your seventies. Your best nineteen seventies! She and her long-time accompanist and friend Paul Greenwood came together to perform her new show Past, Present, Peculiarities at Don’t Tell Mama and it was perfection down to every last detail including passing the hat.
The duo’s sense of timing and humor and the ethereal harmonies they brought to the show were something special. I particularly appreciated those qualities on Julie Gold’s “Heaven,” which brought the packed house exactly where it needed to go—to memories, to social consciousness. In that latter category, her original song “Statue of Liberty” (McNamara/Weiner) became a full on love-fest, which was amplified by the audience in attendance. McNamara’s performance, and the show, was the best of a Bleecker Street coffee house from those halcyon days—beyond anything you’d find anywhere today! Just what the doctor ordered!
None of us know what the back roads of Heaven are like, but if the highways and byways all converged for Past, Present, Peculiarities, then hopefully there was John Lenehan with an OG (Original Gangster) fold-out map leading the way to Don’t Tell Mama.
To know more about this artist check out her answers to our Six Questions here.
