Gotham States of Mind In All of Their Tempos
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: January 6, 2011

“An intimate arbitrary iPod shuffle” is Barbara Fasano’s capsule description of “Helluva Town: A New York Soundtrack,” the exhilarating new show she and her husband and musical partner, Eric Comstock, have brought to the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel.

Although the title refers to the high-strutting “New York, New York,” from “On the Town,” you won’t hear either that song or the other, all-but-inescapable “New York, New York” (via Liza Minnelli and Frank Sinatra) in a program that pointedly eschews the usual big-town whoops of triumph. Nor will you hear the city’s “state of mind” anthems by Billy Joel and Jay-Z; “Manhattan” is also nowhere to be found.

That’s all to the good. For “Helluva Town” is not a parade down Fifth Avenue. Its expression of civic pride is a musical version of strolling along the city’s byways with the volume on the iPod lowered enough for the sounds of the street to filter through the music. The pace is leisurely enough to allow the taking of snapshots like the park bench tableau of Paul Simon’s “Old Friends.”

As singing guides Mr. Comstock and Ms. Fasano suggest the sophisticated cabaret children of Bobby Short and Lena Horne. This is their third show as a team I’ve seen in a major New York nightclub, and their chemistry, which has a little bit of the Astaire-Rogers blend of sex and class, has jelled.

Mr. Comstock weaves his piano, vocals and witty patter into a stream of consciousness that sets the cultivated tone of a show that blends the wistful (“Some Other Time,” “My Shining Hour”) with the comic (“She’s a Latin From Manhattan”). Ms. Fasano, who suggests a lighter-voiced Horne, is a lyrically sensitive interpreter with a special affinity for Joni Mitchell, whose wistful early song “Marcie,” about a romantic naïf, stands out in a program consisting largely of lesser-known show tunes.

“Helluva Town” is sprinkled with humorous twists and bon mots. A slightly revised “How About You” rhymes “I like New York in Jan” with “I am a Gershwin fan” and exalts “Ben Bernanke’s looks.” Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh’s “I Walk a Little Faster” is imagined from the point of view of Peggy Olson of “Mad Men.” Jim Lowe’s acidic pop-blues novelty, “The Hamptons,” offers what may be the final word on that expensive southern Long Island getaway where “the literati glitter. and the glitterati litter.” Cole Porter couldn’t have said it better.

Barbara Fasano and Eric Comstock perform through Jan. 15 at the Algonquin Hotel, Oak Room, 59 West 44th Street, Manhattan; (212) 419-9331.