Lady Rizo is hot and, make no mistake, she’s an absolute superstar of caburlesque.  

She should be, of course, she invented the word, and the style, and she does all it to perfection. Seriously though, she’s damned good at what she does and she wows her opening performance Auckland audience in no uncertain terms. 

It’s always dangerous to take as gospel – now there’s a word – what artists say about themselves from the stage but I have it on good authority that Lady Rizo is not “the product of a night of unrestrained indulgence between Peggy Lee, Mel Brooks, Nina Simone, Dean Martin and Janis Joplin” as suggested on her website but she might well be, as there is more than a hint of each of the aforementioned stars in the unique mix that collectively makes up the sum of this incredible diva. She is, we’re told, the child of hippies and, while this makes sense too, she informs us that when she almost looked of age she “rebelled against the comforting, unscrubbed, rustic life and set out for a world of harsh metropolitan sophisticates.”

I, for one, am extremely pleased she did.

She describes herself as comedienne and chanteuse and each definition fits her like one of her delicious, glitter-filled, elbow-length black satin and sequined gloves. Her patter is risqué if a tad predictable – the ‘compliment the audience’ shtick goes on a bit long but jet-lag could be to blame for that – but she is truly funny in a non-traditional sense. Rather than a seventy minute concert with funny bits between songs, hers is an eclectic but beautifully integrated narrative and as such it’s much more than the sum of its parts.

Lady Rizo won her first Grammy in 2010 performing with cellist Yo-Yo Ma on his album ‘Songs of Joy & Peace’ and, as if that wasn’t enough, she went ahead and appeared on an album featuring Diana Krall, James Taylor, Alison Krauss and a bunch of other big names. She’s also worked with Moby, received an award for the video choreography of Debbie Harry’s single ‘New York, New York’. She was the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2010 and received a commission by the Public Theatre to create a full length piece that premiered in the New York Voices series in 2011. 

To say she’s well connected is the understatement of the year.

The evening has an interesting beginning with the audience only admitted to the venue a couple of minutes before showtime. By this time the Concert Chamber foyer is reminiscent of Eden Park before an All Black test and there is not an ounce of cabaret sophistication or elegance evident anywhere.

This rather unpleasant experience diminishes slightly when the doors open and the venue is exposed for the first time. There are stylish, black-clothed tables – the tiniest I’ve ever seen – with six seats at each. A bar in the corner adds a sense of chic to the occasion and platters of food and alcohol are served throughout. It all seems very grown up.

The stage is lit in deep blue with a centre riser on which a drum kit is perched happily alone while to the left a keyboard and a grand piano sit looking lost in the abundant haze and to the right a Japanese see-through screen perches ready to be used to great effect in the mid-section of the show. All pretty conventional really but at least some of the audience have made an attempt to emulate the Auckland A-list glitterati but overall that aspect of the evening isn’t a huge success.

It gets worse with a perfunctory, humourless and camp introduction by Chris Parker who I think is the MC for the night but I can’t be quite sure. If the evening was a football match, Rizo would already be quite a few points down, and the injection of Parker is a definite own goal with the Lady yet to even make an appearance.

She does though, voice first, and then in person, from the back of the auditorium looking for all the world like a scarlet-gowned galleon under full and magnificent sail as she parts us like Moses parted the Red Sea.

She chooses to begin the show with a track from her new (and debut) album released in November of last year and entitled Violet. ‘Song of Freedom’ is a powerful ballad with a Nina Simone timbre and it certainly sets the tone for the rest of the show. It’s opinionated and ‘in your face’ and the audience – myself included – love it. All thoughts of audience crush and MC distress fade instantaneously and are replaced by that most enchanting of feelings: the satisfied glow of performance bliss.

There is very funny repartee, some sexy stuff around the removing of gloves and a hundred and one things you can do with a bloke in the audience and a rose or two, but it is the songs that tear the evening apart and leave the audience in emotional tatters: pretty tatters, stylish tatters, but tatters nonetheless.

There is great mileage made out of Elaine, the stage manager, assisting Lady Rizo to mount the piano, and audience member Roger, set up by his friends, does a great job of assisting the Lady out of her gorgeous, scarlet super-hero gown and into a dazzling, silver-sequined, feline frock that glitters like a disco ball – all behind the see-through Japanese screen, of course, and everything done in the most dubious, most questionable cabaret taste. 

Introduced as ‘a torch song for our time’, Neil Gaiman’s brilliant ‘I Google You’, with its Sondheim-like resonances and anguished emotional veracity, is a trip to the tip of the iceberg of love:

Whenever I’m alone and feeling blue
And each scrap of information
That I gather
says you’ve found somebody new
And it really shouldn’t matter
ought to blow up my computer
but instead….
I google you

It is hard to imagine Lady Rizo bettering ‘I Google You’ but it has be said that her sensual, and deeply personal, execution of Cole Porter’s ‘Love for Sale’ from the musical The New Yorkers knocks every other version I’ve heard into a cocked hat. It is stunning. “Old love, new love, every love but true love”touches the rawest of raw nerves of everyone in the house and the silence as Rizo sings is electrifying.

Nothing remains serious for long, however, and it seems a hallmark of Rizo the performer that she continuously undercuts what she’s just achieved. It’s an effective tool and leaves us to reflect, after the event, on just how good the bits are and how magnificent the whole is by comparison. 

After introducing us to the glorious sound of her ovaries (you have to be there; perhaps it’s somewhere everyone should go) and telling us, in no short order, that she is “the ultimate badass in a gown”, Rizo sets about proving it by fairly ripping into the traditional, early 20^th century spiritual ‘Sinner Man’. Everyone and his poodle has recorded ‘Sinner Man’ from Les Baxter, Burl Ives, the Weavers through Leadbelly, Gordon Lightfoot, Peter Tosh and the Wailers, to Nina Simone, the Von Trapp Family Children and Sinead O’Connor. It’s a staple – but it’s never been done like this before. It could be called a medley I guess, but it’s not. It’s much more than that, because it has snippets of Merle Travis’ post-war coalmining song ‘Sixteen Tons’ inserted and ends with a raucous – in a good way – rendition of Donna Summers’ ‘I Feel Love’ from her 1977 concept album I Remember Yesterday.

It is a fabulous seventy minutes and I leave feeling that, as an audience, we haven’t quite matched up to the artistry and the energy of Lady Rizo. Nothing she has said or done would support this belief and I hope it’s not just some form of antipodean cultural cringe but it’s how I feel as she slides seamlessly through the crowd to the foyer for album selling and autograph signing after the final number. 

From the fabulosity of her gowns to the majesty of her voice, Lady Rizo has it all. Her audacity is sequin-covered and her glittering charm infectious. It’s a priceless and somewhat rare peek into the New York cabaret scene and its value is well beyond the ticket price.

From three goals down before she appeared, Lady Rizo never put a foot wrong. Like Jimmy Spithal in the 2013 America’s Cup, she came from behind and aced it all. Unlike Jimmy Spithill, however, we absolutely love her for it. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer