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Sunset Bitch

nytheatre.com review by Matt Schicker
August 15, 2005

Jessica Martin, whose one-woman musical act Sunset Bitch currently plays at Ace of Clubs as part of the New York International Fringe Festival, is a first-rate Broadway-style singer. But good singers are not hard to come by in New York City; what makes Martin’s act unique is her incredible skill as a mimic. In Martin, who has made a name for herself in England in West End musicals such as Me and My Girl and Mack and Mabel, we have a female Rich Little: an impersonator who not only sounds like someone else, but who zeroes in on a person’s quirks and exaggerates them in an insightful and often hilarious way.Throughout the evening, Martin impersonates such oft-imitated grande dames as Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Liza Minnelli, and Barbra Streisand. A musical number about movie cliches features Martin morphing into a string of old movie stars including Jimmy Stewart, Mae West, John Wayne, Peter Lorre, Rita Hayworth, and others. A very funny bit imagines Lee Strasberg casting Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe in a Method version of Uncle Vanya. Early in Sunset Bitch, Martin does a dead-on version of Julie Andrews’s singing and speaking voices that's so realistic you’d swear she was lip-synching to a recording of Andrews herself. It’s such an impressive feat of mimicry that Martin reprises it at the very end of the evening.It’s precisely because Martin is so talented that Sunset Bitch, which she co-wrote with Stewart Permutt and Robert Howie (who also directed), disappoints: though it does combine her vocal and imitative prowess and is generally entertaining, it simply isn’t the best vehicle for her talents. In the act, Martin plays Veronique Raymond, a jaded show business veteran who guides us through the ups and downs of her wide-ranging career with joke-filled anecdotes and songs. But the outrageous, glamorous terms in which Veronique describes herself are distinctly at odds with Martin’s sweet, slightly shy stage presence. She comes across more as an ingenue than a diva, which makes the title of the act seem unrelated to the act itself. At times it also seems that Martin isn’t entirely comfortable with the “stand-up” role the act requires of her, and she rushes through the joke-filled monologues, some of them fairly racy, to get to the songs and celebrity impressions. The jokes mostly are good, and a more confident comedienne would have made the most of them, but the witty, dry comic delivery the material requires is not Martin’s primary strength.Fortunately, when it comes to the music and mimicry, Martin is the real thing, and there is much to be enjoyed in her performance in this respect. Her "straight" singing voice, which is shown off to particular advantage in the standards “Blame It On My Youth” and “Look To the Rainbow,” easily switches between gutsy belting and sweet head tones.The finale of the evening is a series of celebrity “screen tests” for a film version of the 1980s musical Blood Brothers which really requires some familiarity with the show. In previous incarnations of Sunset Bitch in England, this last bit of material probably went over like gangbusters, where Blood Brothers is hugely popular and still is running.Musical director/accompanist Nathan Martin plays with style and does not attract attention to himself, which is exactly how it should be.