Veteran chanteuse Maureen McGovern’s “musical memoir,” A Long and Winding Road (at the Calderwood Pavilion through November 15), is a cabaret act gussied up — and messed up — by lavish attempts to turn it into a theater piece. The undertaking began, in fact, as a cabaret act (at New York’s Metropolitan Room) and then became a CD. Now, in its world premiere from the Huntington Theatre Company in collaboration with DC’s Arena Stage, it’s a one-woman show about turning 60 after coming of age in the ’60s and surviving the subsequent decades girded by the folk idealism of, among others, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King. McGovern started out “a young girl with a guitar” but, having set her very capable tonsils against the melodic blasts of “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure and “We May Never Love like This Again” from The Towering Inferno, became “the disaster-theme queen.” From there she moved to Broadway. Now she wants her “Feelin’ Groovy” groove back.
McGovern remains a pitch-perfect, relaxed-even-when-belting pop stylist as well as a likable on-stage presence; she nails Connie Francis’s whine on “Where the Boys Are” and amuses with a medley of doo-wop intros. She brings jazzy heft to Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die” and silken acceptance to the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” But the narrative bridges between numbers, set against projections of the galaxy, the Vietnam Memorial, icons of the civil-rights movement, and McGovern’s own baby pictures, are stiff — at once self-important and generic. Music, McGovern opines (along with scientists quoted in the program), is the madeleine that triggers memory. Henceforth, when feeling nostalgic, she should just sing for her succor.
Related:
Play by Play: May 1, 2009, Review: Cherry Docs kicks over a hate crime, Play by Play: July 30, 2010, More 
- Play by Play: May 1, 2009
Theater around town
- Review: Cherry Docs kicks over a hate crime
Cherry Docs , which is getting its area premiere by New Repertory Theatre, is named for a pair of steel-tipped, rose-hued Doc Martens combat boots.
- Play by Play: July 30, 2010
Opening this week: Bad Dates, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, The Rocky Horror Show, The Taster, and Violet.
- Autumn garden
It's freshman and sophomore year on the Boston rialto, with American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus introducing her first season and Huntington Theatre Company honcho Peter DuBois endeavoring to survive his second.
- Black beauty
August Wilson pioneered a magical realism all his own.
- Ducks and dicks
If the American Repertory Theatre is renewing its vows to David Mamet, several of whose plays it premiered in the 1990s, the double bill of The Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago will do nicely for something old and something blue.
- Cracking the wise
I don’t know that David Mamet’s is a fine Romance , and it certainly doesn’t conjure love at first scene.
- Sox trump comedy
"Being bitter is poison and bitter will kill you. Bitter is a root that will grow a poopy tree of death."
- Zero at the bone
A bleak expressionist fable centered on a murderous bookkeeper symbolically named Zero. Even when you throw in sexual repression, religious zealotry, a trip to Heaven, and enough dissonance to sate Stephen Sondheim, that doesn’t sound like the stuff of song and dance.
- American dreams
It's hard to imagine being dwarfed by the titanically insignificant Willy Loman.
- Get me remix
The Brothers Grimm generally managed to live up to their name.
- Less
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Theater
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, Entertainment, Music, calderwood pavilion, THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, garage, Robert Pemberton, SPEED-THE-PLOW, A LONG AND WINDING ROAD, Bobby Gould, Charlie Fox, Less
