Kristin wows 'em at the Fox

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http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/reviews.nsf/concert/story... Home Entertainment Music Story ! Kristin Chenoweth wows 'em at the Fox By Sarah Bryan Miller ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 01/12/2009 Kristin Chenoweth is extravagantly talented, compulsively entertaining and professionally adorable. On Saturday night at the Fox, she sang, danced, joked, and kept the audience in the palm of her hand for a surprisingly varied performance. She did so with a cold that she turned into part of the act, lobbing used tissues at her bass player and swigging from a goblet of cranberry juice between numbers. The bug may have taken some gleam off her high notes, but it didn’t interfere with the energy onstage. If you hooked her into the power grid, this tiny blonde dynamo could light up Grand Center all on her own. She travels with a capable conductor, Andrew Lippa and a small stable of dancers and instrumentalists. For this performance, a co-presentation of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Fox Associates, she was also backed by the SLSO. Chenoweth opened with a musical debate on whether to play it "sweet" or not, and turned the introduction to her greatest hit, "Popular," from "Wicked," into a topical meditation on Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. She roamed through some Jerome Kern and a "Music Man" medley -- including the rarely done complete version of "My White Knight." Two pieces written for her -- "Taylor, the Latte Boy" and "14G" -- showed off her talents to perfection. She sang Victor Herbert’s "Art is Calling to Me" and her encore, Leonard Bernstein’s "Glitter and Be Gay," with a bit too much self-indulgence but made a lot of her material seem better than it really was through sheer sales power. Chenoweth’s running commentary between songs never stopped, and it seldom failed to amuse. (Her "advice to young performers" was particularly well done.) The audience devoured it, applauding during the introductions even to relatively obscure numbers. The costumes are a part of the show. In the first half, Chenoweth came out wearing a short pink-sequin-covered dress that she compared to being in the middle of a disco ball. ("Advice to young performers: That’s where you want to be" onstage.) Inch for inch, she’s the country’s most vibrant entertainer. This was the Symphony’s Fox debut. Although SLSO president Fred Bronstein said he wanted the performance there, it’s too bad it couldn’t be in Powell Symphony Hall: The Fox’s Hollywood Babylon Rococo ambience is fun, but the acoustic and sightlines are poor, and any nuance in the orchestra’s performance was lost.