Laura Osnes is the consummate performer for large Broadway musicals, and at the Café Carlyle this week, she scales back her American sweetheart persona to the intimate stage, accompanied by Ted Sperling’s piano and extensive lore, and scene partner Ryan Silverman, amping up her considerable charm. The program entitled “Cockeyed Optimists: The World of Rodgers and Hammerstein” pays homage to these masters of musical story telling with selections from Cinderella, South Pacific, Carousel, The Sound of Music, and Allegra, all songs wonderfully familiar, but at times strategically mashed up, so there is always an element of surprise, a great pleasure of this show.

To highlight one part, as Ted Sperling explains how Rodgers and Hammerstein liked to subvert expectations of light and fluffy fare, exploring themes of racism, alienation, and other dark human experience and emotion, Osnes and Silverman perform the bench scene from Carousel, singing “If I Loved You?” followed by Silverman’s “Soliloquy.” You are reminded of the show’s extraordinary beauty and sadness as Silverman as Billy contemplates the life his boy Bill would have. Osnes rightfully remarks, she is in Rodgers and Hammerstein Heaven. The show’s “nightcap” is Sound of Music’s “Edelweiss,” the last song Hammerstein ever wrote, Sperling tells us. Often audiences would think it was a folk song. It takes real genius to create a song that sounds so authentically like it’s been entertaining people for ages. That goes for this state of the art evening at the Carlyle.

Regina Weinreich

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