Beloved singer Marieann Meringolo returned to Cherry Grove and the historic Community House on August 22, thanks to the Arts Project of Cherry Grove and, in particular to APCG liaison Andi Porzio, for a terrific cabaret show, considering the songs of Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mathis, and others. Assisting the singer were Musical Director Doyle Newmyer at the Yamaha, Boots Maleson on bass, drummer Sipho Kunene, and Director Will Nunziata.
Meringolo entered to strains of the Bergmans and Marvin Hamlisch’s “The Way We Were” and segued into the Bergmans and Johnny Mandel’s “Where Do You Start?,” pairing the memory song and the break-up song for her dulcet, touching opening, and seducing the audience immediately. Her “Nice ’n’ Easy,” by the Bergmans and Lew Spence, was restrained at first, then at full tilt, and led into “That Face,” of Alan Bergman with Spence, for which she came out into the audience and sang, flirtatiously, to those down front. Her voice velvety, she seamlessly joined “The Way We Were,” the Bergmans and Michel Legrand’s “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?,” and an ecstatic rendition of their “Summer Me, Winter Me,” with the instrumentalists helping to underline the emotions.
Our singer remembered Peggy Lee as she proudly declared “(’Cause) I’m a Woman,” in Lieber and Stoller’s song, and embraced her audience with “I Love Being Here with You.” “It Might Be You,” she sang optimistically, hopefully, in the Bergmans and Dave Grusin’s song, and queried “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?,” by the Bergmans and Legrand, gently, then as an impassioned outpouring of love, ending with a soft sustained high note. She went from ‘it might be you’ to praying that ‘it must be you,’ as she anxiously awaited contact from a new beloved.
Meringolo told us about being taken backstage at Carnegie Hall, by Johnny Mathis’ manager, to meet her idol, as she was preparing for a show of his songs at Don’t Tell Mama, and silkily sang Robert Allen and Al Stillman’s “Chances Are,” Sherman Edwards and Ben Raleigh’s “Wonderful, Wonderful,” and "The Twelfth of Never." She probed the search for oneself in “Little Boy Lost,” as “Little Girl Lost” here, the Bergman song famously sung by Mathis.
On a much lighter note, she shared an Italian number from her past, made up of names of foods—“Fettucine, scallopine”—and other pertinent phrases, as a sensitive lullaby, a lively tarantella, a love song, and a heartrending canzone.
Meringolo appropriately changed the pronouns, in her determined account of the Bergmans and Billy Goldenberg’s “Fifty Percent,” from “Ballroom,” to make the not-entirely-available loved one a woman, and continued with the Bergmans and Legrand’s uplifting “A Piece of Sky,” from “Yentl.” She summed up life’s lessons learned in her encore, “On My Way to You.”