Sultry, ageless Kitt sings to adoring audience
Concert REVIEW The inimitable entertainer brought her club act to Orchestra Hall.
Michael Anthony, Star Tribune
January 28, 2006

It's seldom that a guest soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra slithers onstage in a red velvet gown, winks at the conductor, shows off her legs, flirts with gentlemen in the front row and, for her efforts, gets several standing ovations from an adoring audience.

But then, most soloists aren't the inimitable, seemingly ageless Eartha Kitt, who so enraptured the Orchestra Hall crowd Friday night that people rushed to the stage edge to shake her hand as she walked slowly from one end to the other, while the orchestra, led by Miscah Santora, blared out a brassy tune. She then returned and sang an encore: her classic hit, "Santa Baby," which, even in the age of raunchy rap, sounds as sexy as ever.

As lively and fun as the show was -- this was the first night of Kitt's two-night stand with the orchestra -- there's no denying that an intimate nightclub rather than a large concert hall is the best environment to experience her varied talents.

People who caught her act at the now-defunct Yvette in the west suburbs in 1999 still talk about it. And yet she's such a canny performer, that she almost turns a big hall into a boite where the stage is just a few feet away.

What you're really seeing with Kitt is an old-style nightclub act, the kind hardly anyone does anymore, with lots of clever arrangements, innuendo and superb pacing, and where the star alternates as diva, confidant and comedienne. And it doesn't hurt that the star, in this case, looks sensational at 79, moves effortlessly and still has a lot of voice, all with that odd, exotic timbre and clipped phrasing that is uniquely her own.

Resilience and survival were the evening's themes: notions announced in the opening number, Sondheim's "I'm Still Here," phrases of which were reprised near the end, just before her power-house renditions of Eric Carmen's "All By Myself" and what has become her anthem of late, "Here's To Life." Songs long associated with her, "Sell Me,"I Wanna Be Evil" and "C'est si Bon," shared time with a furious "Mad About the Boy" and the evening's show-stopper, a dramatic medley of "If You Go Away" and "Hymn To Love," the Edith Piaf song.