POP REVIEW : JULIE WILSON REDEFINES SHOW TUNES

Let’s get right to the point. You say they don’t write songs the way they used to? That the Broadway musical theater’s dead and, besides, there haven’t been any really grown-up lyrics around since, well, since Stephen Sondheim’s last show?

Take heart; hope is in sight, in the person of the gifted veteran Broadway singer/actress, Julie Wilson, who opened at the Hotel Roosevelt’s Cinegrill last week with a set of three shows (performed on different nights) devoted, respectively, to the music of Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart.

Don’t miss her. Forget about feeding the cat, forget about your yoga class and the kids’ Scout meeting. Just get over to the Cinegrill as fast as you can, and revel in the rare joy of hearing intelligent, witty songs interpreted with the razor’s-edge accuracy of a performer who knows, and cares for, what the songs are all about.

In Friday night’s Sondheim performance, Wilson brought rich new perspective to a set of pieces that ranged from early Richard Rodgers collaborations (“Do I Hear a Waltz?”) to the brilliantly complex layers of emotion and feeling that course through “It’s Like I’m Losing My Mind” and “How Could I Leave You” (from “Follies”).

She found just the right touch of whimsy for the off-the-wall character sketches of “The Madam Song” and “Oh Boy, Can That Boy Fox Trot,” and then accomplished the seemingly impossible task of breathing new life into Sondheim’s over-familiar “Send in the Clowns.”

Wilson’s programming instincts are obviously superb, but even the songs of Sondheim, Porter and Rodgers and Hart need the lifeblood of interpretive energy to come alive. There’s never been a better source of that energy than Julie Wilson.

She continues at the Cinegrill, Tuesdays through Saturdays, until the end of August.