After singing a bland version of Mary Chapin Carpenter's "Houston" in her recent one-night stop at Don't Tell Mama's attractive new smaller room, Teresa Fischer said, "I promised we'd get back to the laughter part." The promise was in the show's title, I Want to Make the World Laugh!.
There is, however, a small fly in the cabaret ointment. Fischer is not a naturally funny woman. She's a smiling woman and smiles through just about everything she sings, but she's not funny. Indeed, she compounds the not-funniness by keeping up a running dialogue with her accompanist-arranger Paul Chamlin that's full of gags that need to be gagged. Picking on him and having him shoot back is a very Smothers Brothers/Sonny and Cher cliché and sits on Fischer's set like a fat bum lowering itself on a whoopee cushion. Noise is made, but no guffaws result.
As for her singing, Fischer owns a few strong high notes in her belt voice, but the rest of it isn't special. She has a head voice as well, although the chest and head tones aren't on particularly friendly terms. Consequently, Murray Grand's "What's a Nice Lady," with which she opens, and the Lew Spence-Alan Bergman-Marilyn Bergman "Nice 'n' Easy," with which she follows up, are okay, but no one would want to write home about them. And so it goes through the supposedly funny part of her program, which includes a tribute medley to Betty Hutton, the great Paramount Huttontot, a hyperkinetic whirligig who made this specialty material work; Fischer doesn't quite. No flash-bam-alakazam out of an orange-colored sky from her.
Fischer, who also included man-hungry material like the Paul L. Johnson-Hector Coris "Lowering My Standards," seems to have a love for stuffed animals and devoted two numbers to them -- one being a run-through of "Straighten Up and Fly Right" (Nat King Cole-Irving Mills) with a monkey hand puppet and a homemade buzzard hand puppet. It was cute for a while.
Fischer let it be known that the proceeds for her show would be donated to City Harvest, and she'd placed two bags for food collection at the back of the room. It's a commendable endeavor. At the moment, her show is less than that.
Presented by and at Don't Tell Mama,
343 W. 46th St., NYC.
Mon., May 27.