Show Description
In his show I WON’T DANCE New York cabaret great, Steve Ross celebrates the songs of that dapper genius, Fred Astaire. The audience will be treated to such musical treasures as Puttin' on the Ritz, Stepping Out With My Baby, Dancing in the Dark, Night and Day, I Guess I'll Have To Change My Plan and of course Cheek to Cheek. The show will also include songs that the great dancer himself wrote (Not My Girl, City of the Angels) and will tell the story of how a determined young mother from Omaha brought Fred and his older sister Adele to Manhattan around the turn of the 20th century and would live to see them become one of the pre-eminent "Kiddie" acts on the vaudeville circuit. That duo dissolved in the early Thirties and Fred went on to be, in the words of no less a superstar than Baryshnikov, "The greatest dancer of the Twentieth Century!" The audience hears about his solo appearances on Broadway and then his unforgettable and inimitable film career wherein he partnered some of the most glamorous ladies around - Eleanor Powell, Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth and the great Ginger Rogers.
"FRED ASTAIRE MUST BE DANCING ON HEAVEN'S CEILING...STEVE ROSS IS AN AMERICAN CABARET TREASURE."
- BARBARA AND SCOTT SIEGEL, THEATERMANIA.COM
Reviews and Links
More than 30 years ago, the Algonquin Hotel reopened its fabled Oak Room to cabaret and the hotel naturally turned to Steve Ross as it's first performer. Ross had been stunning audiences since his residency at Ted Hook’s Backstage in the late 1970’s playing classics and obscure gems from the American songbook, becoming the "cabaret world’s reigning Park Avenue dandy and embodiment of the Cole Porter-Noël Coward attitude of garrulous suavity," according to the New York Times. “If I had to sum up western civilization in four words," Ross once declared from the stage, "they would be ‘Cole Porter’ and ‘Fred Astaire.'"
Ross is a singer and pianist, but his first hit theme evening of song was I Won't Dance, a salute to Fred Astaire. "He is the personification of the bygone dream world that his music summons," the Times Stephen Holden wrote after a Ross performance at the Algonquin in 2010 in another Astaire-themed evening, Puttin' on the Ritz. "Dapper and quick witted with a knowledge of his idols that suggests a lifetime of scholarship in an imaginary 90th-floor Park Avenue aerie, he channels their spirits in brittle, fleet performances whose quickened pace evokes ballroom dancing as a challenging aerobic sport."
"Mr. Ross’s sharply accented pianism, which often accelerates during uptempo numbers, belongs to a traditional New York saloon style associated with Cy Walter, piano bars and hotel orchestras. Precisely syncopated, it stands on the outer fringe of jazz. His dry, precisely enunciated singing doesn’t delve into the psychological murk of lyrics. (Porter’s are especially ripe for the picking.) But his subtle emphasis on a witty turn of phrase — the vocal equivalent of a raised eyebrow — makes each small gesture count. It’s finally about enjoyment, pure and simple."
Time Out NY Dec. 16th Adam Feldman
...No such reservations attach to the thoughtful, wryly urbane Ross, whose Astaire tribute forms half of Steve Ross Stars, the two-act concert he is performing at 59e59. the Theater setting is not ideal, but this master of bittersweet suavity has a natural affinity with the materal. his gentle singing with its pervasive suggestion of gray skies, stores reserves of feeling beneath a camouflage of nonchalance. and Ross even captures a sense of Astaire's momement, through his flud and expressive piano playing. H dances on the keys: elegant, graceful and here to be heard.
“I love to count down,” Steve Ross admits shortly after his Iridium set begins. It’s something he’s doing regularly now that he’s got five sidemen with him for his latest refurbishing of songs associated with–and three written by–Fred Astaire. Both Astaire and Ross have always had light-hearted jazz in their skill bags, and so it makes perfect sense for the latter to pay tribute to, and take some liberties with, the former’s Norman Granz-produced, 1950's album reprise of his favorite tunes.
To flaunt the new “Fred!” angle, Ross uses a cluster of super Mike Greensill arrangements that range far and wide over the style and tempi maps. Ross dresses Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” in a bossa beat, drapes “The Way You Look Tonight” as a fox trot, festoons Porter’s “I Concentrate on You” with samba rhythms, costumes “One for My Baby” (Johnny Mercer-Harold Arlen) as deep blues. Why do I love Steve Ross? One reason is that when he sings about knocking wood in Irving Berlin’s “Stepping Out With My Baby,” he gives the grand a couple of taps. So subtle, so playful, so Astaire.