Busy Broadway vet steps out for cabaret series
The first time he met Carol Woods, Marvin Hamlisch judged that she not only had a Broadway-quality voice, but also good taste in songs.
In her audition for “The Goodbye Girl,” she sang the comedic “Colorful,” a song that had been cut from “Golden Boy” before Sammy Davis Jr. brought the show to Broadway. “Marvin said, ‘That’s a good song. They shouldn’t have cut it,’” as the late Pittsburgh Symphony Pops maestro sat with the creative team, including writer Neil Simon.
When she got the part of Mrs. Crosby, Hamlisch invited her to his apartment and played the song “You’re Too Good to be Bad” for her.
“He told me, ‘ Whatever you want to do with it, you do it,’ ” Ms. Woods said. “What you hear on the CD, that’s it. I had a 104 fever that day, so it was one take.”
The hard-working Ms. Woods will take a break from touring with “Chicago” — in which she has been playing Mama Morton on and off for almost 17 years — for a one-nighter Monday, part of the Trust Cabaret Series at the Cabaret at Theater Square, Downtown.
The singer with a gospel soul has sung it all. While appearing in the London production of “Blues in the Night,” she was befriended by Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, who asked her to sing backup on his album “Barcelona” with soprano Montserrat Caballe.
“I worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Margaret Whiting. I did the movie ‘The Honeymooners’ with Cedric the Entertainer and Gabriel Union, and ‘Stepping Out’ with Liza Minnelli. That was one of the highlights of my life.”
She explained that she had always wanted to be a tap dancer and begged her mother for lessons when she was a little girl. She got the shoes, but when the teacher who was supposed to bring tap to her after-school program got pregnant, the lessons never happened. She was in the cast of the musical “Stepping Out” — about a group of people learning to tap from scratch — when it played Broadway in 1987 and was eager to reprise her role for the 1991 film.
“The main thing was working with Liza, but I really wanted to do that movie,” she said. “I was the only one from the Broadway cast in the movie.”
When the New Yorker is not on the road with “Chicago,” she continues to play venues big and small. She has appeared with the Pittsburgh Symphony Pops and played all over South Florida during a four-month hiatus. The musical selections for the show we will see in Pittsburgh come from a performance at the Manhattan venue 54 Below.
She has no signature song, she said.
“That’s the problem with me — you can’t pin me down because I like it all.”
Audiences most often request “Blues in the Night” and “God Bless the Child” or songs by Gershwin or Carole King. “I could go all over the board.”
Ms. Woods musical mentor was the late songstress Margaret Whiting, whose daughter Deborah is Ms. Woods’ manager. While looking for songs by Whiting for a possible tribute recording, Deborah came across a book of music by her grandfather, the composer Richard Whiting, whose classic songs include “Hooray for Hollywood,” “Ain’t We Got Fun?” and “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Her current project is bringing those compositions to the public.
Accompanying Ms. Woods will be pianist Barry Levitt, whom she met 30 years ago while understudying Cissy Houston in the off-Broadway show “Taking My Turn.”
“We’ve remained friends all these years,” she said.
She hopes to make a few friends here in Pittsburgh, too. Asked what the Trust Cabaret audience can expect, she said, “Tell them I am not pretentious, I’m down to earth. They can come and kick their shoes off and have a good time, because that’s what I’m going to bring to them.”