CABARET REVIEW : TANDEM TALENTS TURN ON HEAT

They don’t get together often, but when they do, singer Pamela Meyers and pianist/composer Stan Freeman turn on the kind of heat that many performers couldn’t get with a blowtorch.

Thursday night at the Hollywood Roosevelt’s Cinegrill, Freeman and Meyers opened one of their rare duo bookings.

Freeman’s rapier-sharp wit and occasional bent for bizarre satire has never been put to better use than in a helter-skelter medley that juxtaposed Rodgers and Hart against Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Freeman’s point--that the Hart lyrics gave Rodgers’ music a creative density that changed dramatically with the arrival of Hammerstein as his songwriting partner--was made with surprisingly telling ease.

Meyers’ prissily perfect send-ups of the sentimental Hammerstein songs were unerringly shot down, sometimes with only a line or two, by Freeman’s boozy-voiced responses from the Hart pieces.

A sample of the many, telling comparisons: “Getting to Know You” countered by “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”; the corn silk of “Oklahoma” versus the big-city buoyancy of “Manhattan,” and, perhaps most impressively, the wide-eyed innocence of “It Might as Well Be Spring” against the disillusionment of “Spring Is Here.”

Meyers’ versatile voice--which ranged easily from Helen Kane cutesy to open-throated, wide-stage belting--peaked on a stirringly dramatic set-piece version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday.”

But a bit of trademark Freeman musical sleight-of-hand, in which he created an impromptu little musical suite out of song titles provided by the audience, paled in the far higher wattage of his work with Meyers.--DON HECKMAN