REVIEW: Perry Payne Is "Getting Away From It All"

Perry Payne is Getting Away From It All

With Musical Director and Arranger Michael RiceRay Kilday on Bass, Danny Mallon/Gary Seligson on Drums, and Amy Hamilton Soto on Violin
Directed by Evan Pappas
At the Metropolitan Room July 1, 2, 10 at 7:30 p.m., and July 11 at 9:45 p.m.
Reservations at metropolitanroom.com / 212.206.0440

Review by Chuck Taylor, former senior correspondent for Billboard Magazine and author of The Smoking Nun blog at chucktaylorblog.blogspot.com.

Throughout her 20-plus-year career as a singer, actress and comedienne, Perry Payne has possessed an uncommon knack for sending audiences into a cascade of giggles one moment, then gently moving them to tears the next. Her current show, “Let’s Get Away From It All” at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Room, is a vintage performance from the talent, packed with a daring set that includes classics from Rodgers & Hammerstein and Henry Mancini, originals from her musical director and arranger Michael Rice, a camp favorite from Blossom Dearie, adaptation of a Trisha Yearwood hit—even a moving ballad from pop star Pink.

She brands the show as a departure from our tentative times: “The real estate market tanks, the stock market falls like a stone, Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson and the OxyClean guy… And now we’ve got circa 1978 JCPenney brown and orange woven lawn chairs in Times Square. Thousands of them. All facing south.”

In her role as humorist, Payne’s comfort level as a theatrical presence is apparent. Singing Steve Randoy’s new “He Slipped Me the Plastic,” she offers a deadpan reading, watching over her minions and knowing that in only a few lines, the audience will be reduced to giggles: “I was walking to the bank one day, when something stopped me on the way/I felt it but I didn’t know what to call it (the devil!)/He followed me for awhile, flashing a wicked smile, with a big fat bulge in his wallet/I struggled but I must confess, my lips said ‘No’ but my heart said, ‘Charge it!’/That’s when he slipped me the plastic. God it felt so good.”

Likewise, in a song written by John Wallowitch for Blossom Dearie—who both died recently —she delivers a tome with droll seriousness about a drag queen past her prime: “Give up on those éclairs and those chocolate chip pies/And banish your Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, they seem to be undersize, thunder thighs/Please give me a break, Bruce. My heart has an ache, Bruce. For haute couture’s sake, Bruce, shave off your beard.”

It takes a master of timing to switch gears from farcical to solemnity, but Payne effectively transitions from a hilarious anecdote about her hometown of Lynchburg, Va., to a personalized version of Yearwood’s “Years.” She shares in her patter, “Lynchburg is not the end of the world, but you can see it from there. In Lynchburg, gun control means holding it with both hands. Lynchburg was the home of Jerry Falwell and the headquarters of the Fleet Corp., the world’s biggest enema maker. There’s a certain existential symmetry there that is almost poetic.”

She then takes on the tender “Years,” rewriting the lyric with an autobiographic bent: “I turned down Rivermont and felt a little sadness/Then left onto Parkland and the house appeared/I looked out past that shade tree that my laughing Daddy planted on the day I was born, across the street the Thompson’s oldest daughter must have come home/I thought of all those summers, when I paced that porch and swore I’d die of boredom here/And I thought of what I’d give to feel another summer linger where a day feels like a year…”

Payne’s encore, Pink’s “Glitter in the Air,” wraps her show with an endearing universal message of missing: “Have you ever hated yourself for staring at the phone? Your whole life waiting on the ring to prove you're not alone/Have you ever been touched so gently you had to cry? Have you ever invited a stranger to come inside?”

While branded as an escape from the world outside, Payne’s “Getting Away From It All” is so much more. Indeed, she provides flight from tough times—you will laugh until you ache—but there are also engaging, pragmatic reminders that enduring when things are serious is ever a worthy endeavor. Life isn’t always convenient… it is sometimes sad, and she provides a world view that is wise, wicked and wonderful.