Cabaret

I DON'T KNOW anybody at Dudley House, but I wish I did. Their Cabaret shows what these people are all about: they have style and they know how to use it.

What Dudley House is doing in their latest venture may not appeal to everyone, but what they do, they do right. They have taken Lehman Hall and transformed it into a night club--not a discotheque or a coffee house--a night club, circa 1952. They've packed the place with candlelit tables covered with red-checked table cloths, added some polite entertainment (varying from week to week), and filled the lulls with the kind of music our parents danced to before they learned the Twist.

It's a relaxed place to take a bottle of booze and a date for some quiet conservation. It costs half a buck, and the abundant free soft drinks and the graceful decor (that maybe only Dudley House could provide) are easily worth that price. The performers are worth much more.

Dave Hammond opens the show with a repertoire of show tunes. This could be grim, but Hammond is from Dudley House and knows where it's at when it comes to Broadway. He isn't about to sing of hills alive with the sound of music. Rather, he launches into some of the great obscure and near-obscure songs of our time.

He does some Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse numbers, ignoring the cliches ("What Kind of Fool Am I," for example) for, among others, a pulsating "Nothing Can Stop Me Now." When he gets around to Frank Loesser, he follows the standard "I'll Know" with "Somebody Somewhere," a Loesser masterpiece of understated beauty (from the forgotten Most Happy Fella) that nobody ever sings.

Hammond has a rich, resonant barritone that isn't always at home with his material. About half of his songs have more emotional meat than nearly any stylist can handle, and even this Dudley House gentleman cannot always get to the heart of the matter. At times he tends to be stiff in voice and movement; I wish he would let himself go more than he does. He obviously loves his stuff, and he would do his audience a favor by sharing this love more. Still, I'd walk a mile just to hear some of his tunes on Muzak, and Hammond's voice is much more than background music.

He particularly loves Harold Arlen and tells us so. In this case explanation aren't needed, for his rendition of "Sleeping Bee" makes his affection abundantly clear. When Hammond sings Arlen, he lowers his voice considerably and we understand. He shows us that the last lines of the song ("A Sleeping Bee done told me/I will walk with my feet off the ground/When my one true love I has found.") are special to him. He makes them special for everyone listening as well.

IT'S WHEN Hammond turns to up-beat territory that his stiff demeanor undercuts his enthusiasm. His "Johnny One Note" lacks flair, even though he does well with all the tricky Lorenz Hart lyrics. When he tries a peppy "Not Since Nineveh" (a Kismet item that should be cut anyway), it falls sadly flat.

But most of the time, he sings straight and true. Hammond and his accompanist, Ron Takvorian, have no tricks, but who needs them for a Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson beauty like "Lost in the Stars" or Arlen's "Don't Like Goodbyes?"

Sharing the stage with Hammond is a quiet guitar-strumming singer, Matt Alexander. His songs are mainly his own, with a heavy Paul Simon influence seeping through. Blending his thoughts on Cambridge mornings with warnings about love, Alexander's compositions are pleasant enough, if not terribly memorable.

Pleasant is probably the best way to describe the whole Cabaret. This is Dudley House's style and not everybody's, but I reveled in it.