High-effort cabaret

The quietest moments are the best moments in Kay Stiefel and Jack Forbes Wilson’s Sing Me a Story, which opened Friday in the Skylight’s Studio Theatre.  Best of all was the ending, of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Surrey with the Fringe on the Top.” They started it in the usual way, as a joshing flirtation, but it ended as the tenderest lullaby, with Forbes singing very softly, so as to not wake Stiefel’s character as she rested her head on his shoulder. So sweet, so sincere.

This utterly unaffected passage exactly caught the feeling of two kids pretending to be in love to find out whether or not they really are in love. Both performers are of a certain age, but the years fell away for a few magical minutes. The intimacy of it played beautifully in the black box of  the Skylight’s Broadway Theatre Center, where Sing Me a Story runs through May 19.

“Surrey,” a planned encore, came soon after Stiefel and Wilson played out a more mature collection of Scenes from a Marriage in a half-dozen songs from various sources. Both singers have a knowing way with bittersweet, grown-up love songs in which resignation is the salient sentiment. Stiefel’s clear-eyed, world-weary, just barely wistful take on “Where Do You Start?” was a highlight of the show.

By the way, the program offers no set list or authorship notes for the songs. I had to do some Google digging to find that Johnny Mandel wrote the music and Marilyn and Alan Bergman wrote the lyrics to “Where Do You Start?” Stiefel and Wilson, who wrote the show, clearly went out of their way to find the less-traveled paths through the American songbook and tended toward its later chapters. Frank Loesser and Stephen Sondheim are well-represented, but Cole Porter is absent and I don’t recall any Gershwin or Berlin.

The choice of material is idiosyncratic — OK, puzzling — to say the least, in the first half. It includes frenetic duo versions of big production numbers, such as “Ya Got Trouble” (Right Here in River City) preceding an extended version of Sondheim’s “I’m not Getting Married Today.” Stiefel knocked herself out trying to make Ben Bagley’s “Renoir, Degas and Toulouse,” a creaky affair that trades on short-person jokes randy-model cliches, work. Not long after came Lou and Peter Berryman’s clever, countryfied novelty song about yodeling, Allan Sherman’s “Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda” and the old Disney kiddie tune “The Ugly Duckling,” complete with quacking-duck hand puppets.

All this was just as incoherent on stage as it sounds here. Stiefel and Wilson earned a few laughs with this stuff, but just as often fell into the uneasy realm of trying too hard. Wilson’s tendency toward mannerism – contorting body, face, pitch and vowels – rose in relation to the volume and pace of the first half. Wilson accompanied the whole show while flitting among the three functional pianos on a set strewn with props and furniture – quite a feat, that, but taxing. He is a very good pianist, and his sensitive, evocative and creative accompaniments enhanced the spell this show cast in its second half. But in the first half, the heroic effort of trying to make C-list material work drained his playing of subtlety and made for a lot of banging.

The second half was far more consistent in content and tone, more confident and convincing in delivery and more comfortable in atmosphere. Like most of us, these performers are more appealing when they’re more relaxed, when they let the moment happen rather than claw after it.

Sing Me a Story runs through May 19. Tickets are available online or by calling the Broadway Theatre Center box office, (414) 291-7800. Credits: Ray Jivoff, director; Ryan Bertelson, lighting designer; Lisa Schlenker, set designer; Gary Ellis, sound designer; Kelly Turner, stage manager; Lauren Pekel, assistant stage manager.