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When Dixie Carter, the cabaret world's most elegantly funny cutup, comes to the line "they just like to kick it around" in "Most Gentlemen Don't Like Love," Cole Porter's incisive analysis of the fickle male libido, the singer begins kicking the air with vehement, hilarious comic fury. It is a
typically expressive gesture for Ms. Carter, a performer who inhabits a song totally while singing it, veering from madcap playfulness one minute to intense, teary-eyed romanticism the next.
When it works, as it does in almost every number in Ms. Carter's wonderful new act at the Cafe Carlyle, the seriocomic energy fizzing from the cafe's tiny platform stage is wildly exhilarating. Ms. Carter's backup quartet, led by the pianist Mike Renzi, features a violin that can evoke many scenes, from a fancy European hotel in the 1930's to a woodshed in Tennessee.
What stamps Ms. Carter's act is the utter fearlessness. In the brilliant five-song sequence that forms the heart of the show, she goes further than she has ever gone before in juxtaposing unlikely songs. The sequence begins with a version of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm On Fire," delivered with a compressed predatory fury, then segues into a version of Stephen Sondheim's "Every Day a Little Death" that flaunts the lyrics' neurotic anxieties. Next comes a pained "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," followed by a tough, battle-scarred "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." Rounding out the history of a relationship that has proceeded from obsessive passion through heartbreak to anger recovery is a tender "Try to Remember" that suggests that the racking emotions she has portrayed in the previous four songs were all worth the pain.
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