Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley could just stand there, looking like a
perfect Barbie-and-Ken couple.  Fortunately, headlining the San Francisco
Symphony's New Year's Eve concert in Davies Hall, they also sang as
mighty an operatic duet as Broadway can allow before the dreaded specter
of Crossover ruins the music.

There is a long list of academic/musicological reasons for this, but
it's still curious how card-carrying opera singers run into trouble on
Broadway, just as outstanding voices in musicals usually can't make the
transition to opera, even when amplified to the max.

Mazzie and Danieley are different.  They can sing just about anything
they set their minds to, and it will be exciting and satisfying.  These
still-young/already-acclaimed artists exhibited flawless diction, every
note right on the money, projection that makes the "mandatory" amplification
even more unnecessary than it usually is, and a wonderful sense of
conveying words, meaning, and music in a complete, winning package.
Although Mazzie has been one of my favorites since her Clara in Sondheim's
"Passion," it's Danieley who now impresses even more - a lyric tenor
with both steel and velvet in the voice.  Mazzie's uniquely knowing
delivery of the Rodgers-and-Hart "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"
was memorable - she put her stamp on the song.

Starting with a duet from "Candide," which they performed with SFS last
summer, Mazzie and Danieley took turns in songs from "West Side Story,"
"Cabaret," and "Oklahoma," Mazzie scoring the (all-too-brief) evening's
biggest hit with an "anniversary performance."

It was exactly 10 years ago, also on New Year's Eve, that the young
singer sang in the touring company of the Kander-and-Ebb "And the World
Goes Around" in the Curran Theater.  From that show, "Ring Them Bells,"
the hilarious story of two Riverside Drive neighbors connecting in
Dubrovnik, brought the house down for good and sufficient reasons.  I
don't know how many times Mazzie performed the song in the past decade,
but it still came across fresh and with a punch.

When the two sang with the orchestra last time, Michael Tilson Thomas
was on the podium, conducting the real SF Symphony.  This time, MTT's
talented assistant, Edwin Outwater, was in charge, but he had only about
one-fourth of the original band, the rest were substitutes...  and they
sounded like it.  The concert-opening half hour of Johann Strauss was
mostly correct and altogether uninteresting; the Broadway section featured
a Mantovani-carpet of strings and a lack of what made the two singers
so attractive: heart and dedication, save for a few regulars in the brass
section and concertmaster Nadya Tichman.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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