My in-laws and I finally met this weekend—their kids treated them to a Manhattan holiday in honor of their 60th wedding anniversary. Lest you brace yourself for a horror story, let me tell you Ken and Gladys are sweethearts, the kind of folks I wanted to trade my own parents in for back when I was an ungrateful adolescent. Good thing they were game for whatever; we served up variety, everything from Meredith Monk’s concert at Symphony Space, to a Sunday matinee of Kander and Ebb’s Curtains at the Al Hirschfeld.
The weekend peaked with Maureen McGovern’s A Long and Winding Road at the Metropolitan Room on 22nd Street. She breezed through a set of 60s-era songs that managed to say as much about our current world as that long-ago decade, bridging the myriad generations gathered at our table—my spouse and I pondered anew the lyrical power of Lennon-McCartney, Joni Mitchell (“captive on a carousel of time” remains one of the most truthful phrases ever written), Randy Newman and Jimmy Webb, among others, while his folks reveled in musical director Jeff Harris’ mind-blowing arrangement of 60’s Silly Syllables, a name-that-tune assemblage of notable pop song vocal vamps.
McGovern, who’s come a long way from her old moniker, “Queen of Disaster Film Movie Themes,” can belt and do coloratura runs with the best of them but she can also break your heart. Her rendition of Mitchell’s Circle Game is a feat of undersinging so skilled the audience pitched on the edge of their seats so’s not to miss this oft-heard chestnut’s words of wisdom.
Nothing I’d say could prepare a listener for the waves of genuine humor and pathos McGovern evokes with a nod of her red beehive. She’s at the Metropolitan Room for another weekend; do yourselves a favor and head over—and if your in-laws are in town, treat ’em.