NEW YORK (AP) — Making a stylish Broadway debut, four-time Grammy winner k.d. lang has taken over for Fantasia Barrino as the special guest vocalist in the colorful music and dance revue, “After Midnight.” Emceed by the affable Dule Hill, the show light-heartedly celebrates Duke Ellington’s years at the Cotton Club nightclub in Harlem.
Strolling in amid the talented African-American cast of the slick, vaudevillian-style production, lang may have seemed incongruous at first when she made her debut this week, but she was delightfully comical and winning. Clad in a crisp black suit, and later, a creamy white tuxedo, she wore a smoothly bashful persona well-suited to her unique, androgynous style.
She sang her four jazz standards superbly, occasionally dancing a little, and playfully interacting with the audience, the ensemble and the classy orchestra, The Jazz at Lincoln Center All-Stars.
She provided a delicate resonance on “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and a soulful “Stormy Weather,” had mischievous, physical fun with “Zaz Zuh Zaz,” and finished with a tangy, swinging version of “On the Sunny Side of the Street”.
Lang, who seemed shy about accepting the audience’s enthusiastic applause, will end her run in the show March 9, followed by Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds and Toni Braxton.
Rolling Stone Review
An Improbable Broadway Debut
As casting against type, k.d. lang‘s current stand, through March 9th, as a featured torch singer in the jazz-and-dance revue, After Midnight, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre takes some beating. The show, which opened last fall with American Idol winner Fantasia in that role, is a 90-minute no-dead-air evocation of the music and body swing that filled the bill at New York’s Cotton Club in the Twenties and Thirties. The house band, comprised of members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, blitzes through the score – more than two dozen nuggets from the Harlem Renaissance hit parade, all but a handful associated with the Cotton Club’s breakout star Duke Ellington – with crisp exhiliration.
There is no slack in the rest of the company. In their cut-and-slither duel “Hottentot Tot,” Julius “iGlide” Chisolm and Virgil “Lil’O” Gadson pay comic homage to the rubbery dynamics and proto-hip-hop invention of African-American dance teams such as the Nicholas Brothers. You may know Sippie Wallace‘s cautionary blues “Women Be Wise” from Bonnie Raiit’s 1971 recording, but Adriane Lenox takes it way back and down home, in jittery-spitfire italics, with JALC brawn.
Lang has to follow that showstopper (after an instrumental breather). But her entrance, with the Jazz Age valentine “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” is also full-bodied romantic protest, lined with more elegant shiver. Lang is making her Broadway debut in After Midnight. But she has been ready for the standards in this gig, like “Stormy Weather,” since her 1988 prairie-ballroom-covers breakthrough, Shadowland. And Lang gets laughs too. Her growling simulation of Cab Calloway in “Zah Zuh Zaz” isn’t just funny – it’s believable. (My measure for that: I actually met the great hipster.)
The original razzle and dazzle recreated in After Midnight was, in fact, a Broadway phenomenon. First opened uptown on Lenox Avenue, the Cotton Club was located, in its heyday, at Broadway and 48th Street, a block and a half from the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. It was also a segregated venue; The entertainment was black; the customers rich, white and curious about a culture they deemed immoral and inferior in daylight. In that sense, Lang – gay, white and an emigrant (from Canada) – is a natural for this show, singing from the outside looking in; a voice of exclusion, seeking comfort and acceptance and steeped in blues.
Posted by 
The Lang Channel 