
“Amber Gray: Gray Matter” at 54 Below
She may have been in three Broadway shows and nominated for a Tony, but Amber Gray still has that Off-Broadway spirit. In her new solo show Amber Gray: Gray Matter, which played 54 Below last week, Gray sprinkles in deep cuts from her career downtown, eschewing her “big hits” and focusing on songs that have significant meaning for her. She knows how to use that one-of-a-kind voice to convey wells of emotion and, even in this relatively casual, easygoing show, she is able to mine the music for maximum impact.
Gray begins the show with “Devil Gonna Rise Up” by The Bengsons, featuring her music director Cody Owen Stine on accordion and Gray herself holding the beat by shaking a plastic cup full of change. It’s a soulful melody, allowing Gray’s voice to introduce itself to us in the context of this intimate venue, when many people may only have encountered her larger-than-life performance as Perspehone in Hadestown.
Gray also uses this first song to set up the story of her many collaborations with the director Rachel Chavkin. Chavkin’s company The TEAM is an important artistic home base for Gray, and she first encountered Chavkin’s work while she was still in graduate school. Their early collaboration, Mission Drift (about the history of Las Vegas), brings the song “Burnin’ Down” into the show. A stomp-clamp a cappella wail against capitalism and climate change, this song connects Gray to another frequent collaborator, the singer/composer Heather Christian. Christian found success last year with the masterful Oratorio for Living Things, but the two songs Gray performs here stretch back more than decade, showing how far both women have come and how integral Christian’s music has been to Gray for so much of her life.
Of course, Gray does not let the evening go by without songs by Dave Malloy, composer of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, and Anaïs Mitchell, composer of Hadestown, though they’re not the tracks you’d expect. Instead of “Charming”, the character Hélène’s tent-burning jam Gray sang in Great Comet, she opts for Malloy’s “Starchild” from Ghost Quartet. It’s always great to hear any Ghost Quartet song and Gray nails the tricky tone of this tune, ending it with a lighthearted smile. It only made me want to hear her tackle “Hero” from the same score, or better yet, appear in a production somewhere.
From Hadestown, Gray performs two songs that were cut, a piece of “How Long” and “Chant II,” which Mitchell admitted to Gray should not have been excised, but the show was running long. Unless you were in the rehearsal room, you’ve probably never heard the Hadestown score performed with piano only. The score’s power truly struck me while listening to Stine pound the keys and hearing Gray bring out these melodies in such a stripped-down fashion. I have loved that score since hearing it for the first time at New York Theatre Workshop, but I gained an even stronger appreciation for it when the trappings of the production were pared away. It’s a loving tribute from Gray to Mitchell.
There are many other highlights from the set list, which stretches to an impressive twenty-one songs. As far as pop songs go, Gray sings thrilling renditions of Fiona Apple’s “Paper Bag” and Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” early in the show and, towards the end, two tracks from Regina Spektor’s record Soviet Kitsch. Gray’s voice is particularly suited to the melodic jumps in Spektor’s tunes and she nails the lyrical tone, somewhere between humor and tragedy, laughing to avoid crying. Cover the whole album, Amber!
It was beautiful to see a quieter, more reflective side of Gray in this show, too. So often she is blowing the roof off a theatre, but here, particularly with Jacques Brel’s “If You Go Away” and André De Shields’ “Tragic Mulatto” we got to see her quiet, calm, and laser-focused on the emotional truths in the songs. She has shown us over and over again what a magnetic talent she is, but this thoughtful, sort of sad side of her was something I’d only glimpsed briefly in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon. Here, she lets this side take over for a few moments and it’s absolutely breathtaking.
A major fan for the past decade, I left this show at 54 Below feeling like I’d only scratched the surface of Amber Gray’s potential. This wasn’t a typical cabaret show, and that’s not what I was expecting, given who she is as a performer. She is connected to her roots, still seeking material outside the box, still trying to show us who she is and what she can do.