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Music in Review;CABARET

By Stephen Holden

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March 12, 1996, Section C, Page 14Buy Reprints
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Joys and Sorrows of Life, From Funny to Personal Julie Wilson Oak Room

What do men really want? In the words of Cole Porter's 1938 song, "Most Gentlemen Don't Like Love," "A slap and a tickle/Is all the fickle/ male ever has in his head." Performed by Julie Wilson with a wickedly merry glint in her eye, the song sets the tone for her new cabaret show, "All About Men," which plays at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel through April 6.

In a clinging black gown, a gardenia tucked behind her left ear and a red feather boa nearby that she sinuously winds around her torso during one number, Ms. Wilson cuts a figure of such stylized chic that she is beyond fashion. Her costume and makeup lend her the aura of a beautiful, solitary clown whose interpretations distill the joys and sorrows of life into tragicomic rituals of astounding purity.

Ms. Wilson's program swings from incisively funny observations like "Most Gentlemen Don't Like Love" and Stephen Sondheim's "I Never Do Anything Twice" to wrenchingly personal ballads like "You've Changed." Adding spice are playful, kick-up-your-heels numbers like "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?" and "Sugar."

The heart of Friday's show, at which Ms. Wilson was accompanied on piano by Mark Hummel, consisted of two songs from "Pal Joey" written for Vera Simpson, a character Ms. Wilson said she had played five times over the years. In these versions of "What Is a Man?" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," the attitudes of amused observer and suffering lover were fused in soliloquies that conveyed a woundingly funny truthfulness. STEPHEN HOLDEN