From agnostic gospel to folk and blues, Susan Werner lived up to her title “Empress of the Unexpected” at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center Wednesday night. The singer and musician performed to a full house.
Accompanied by Trina Hamlin on harmonica and percussion, and Gail Ann Dorsey, bass, the trio filled the air of the cabaret section of the performing arts center at an almost ground-level stage. Werner politely pointed out the sea of silver-haired audience members across the 70 tables generously spaced apart, occupying four people to each.
Werner expressed her excitement to play in the Carpenter Center and the reminiscing nostalgia of listening to her Carpenters albums through her huge headphones. She also referred to the lighting and set-up of the stage like being on a Star Trek show, and described the gig as “Carmel, luscious, nougatty goodness.”
“I’m sorry I have no songs that are famous,” Werner said to entertain the audience while tuning her guitar. “But I am a specialist in the field of writing my own music.”
Werner’s crisp acoustic guitar playing paired with her folk singing voice joined traditional music with clever and palpable perspectives. Each song ignited laughter, steady clapping and head-bobbing. She would later promise that the genres of music would transition from one to another and eventually into cabaret, a genre of music she described as “Popular music amongst middle-aged women and gay little boys.”
She explained her genre of music in the beginning of the show as agnostic gospel and jokes. However, she truthfully feels that people need gospel music in their life, therefore she brings them a taste of it. With lyrics such as “Deliver us from those who think they’re you,” in her revised version of the hymn “Our Father,” Werner played with the idea of singing gospel music, asking the audience to turn to verse 553 in a non-existent book. She also asked the audience if they think it would be a good idea to sing her agnostic-gospel songs in the Crystal Cathedral.
Each song required a different musical sense to relate the subject of her songs. She would move back and forth from the guitar to the piano. Certain songs also required Hamlin and Dorsey to step back for a few minutes so she could solely commit to the moment. For example, her song “My Different Son” resembled a blues-singing lounge singer, while her song “Kicking the Beehive” sounded like an acoustic pop-rock song that mandated her drummer and bassist. After singing “Kicking the Beehive,” Werner joked that she had expected the crowd to be louder suggesting they sounded like she was performing at a brunch hour.
Her songs began to saunter while her subject changed to love. Her songs were definitely atypical love songs about knowing what you want and how others don’t understand.
“From forbidden demographic love to dangerous love,” she described her following song as an audience member broke the pressure by adding, “Sign me up.”
Her song was dark and romantic, and indulged the deepest and most extreme form of commitment, an unexpected turn of lyrics. Without addressing the name of the song, the audience soon deciphered the song with the ending lyrics, “Jesus Christ I love you, Clyde” entitled, “The Last Words of Bonnie Parker.”
The following songs proceeded with a solemn tone with a sense of advice for the hard truth. The seriousness of the room was broken once she reassured she would not end the show with such disheartening life morals.
And she was right. The music began to pick up in an attractive upbeat number that described her in a red dress and in the mood to pleasure a well-deserving man. All of a sudden, foot-stomping music was felt through floor, and tables and audience members from the back of the room began whistling as if in a saloon; a great way to end the first half.
The second half consisted of a variety of cover songs, including Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” she commented as “True and worse.”
During the intermission, she mentioned that she spoke to some of the audience members. They asked whether her songs were actually about her own son or daughter, to which she responded by admitting she had no children.
“I’m actually really boring; I don’t have kids,” Werner said before retracting that statement. “Actually, I’m fascinating. If you really knew me, I’m fascinating,” which transitioned into her song, “Movie of My Life,” a humorous and relatable emotional song. She even improvised in a section of the song by adding, “A crappy as of yet un-Opera-worthy life. I’d better hurry because this is her last season.”
Toward the end of the performance, Werner allowed Hamlin and Dorsey to each sing one self-written song about a plant and a gift for a friend, consecutively. Both singer and musician sang beautifully, but with an overall different style than Werner’s.
An audience member asked Dorsey who her song was written for. She said the song was a wedding gift to her friend who married her partner who had also passed away last year. As they began to warm up for the next song, Werner broke the tension by fake crying, saying that her songs suck. Werner jokingly suggested hers were mindless and insincere.
The evening ended in a gradually descending pace before finishing the performance with a promised cabaret.
“Better sing at least one [cabaret] song or the [Carpenter Center] won’t be getting their cabaret grants,” Werner said.
She sang the song in French, and in the middle of the song, she sang without the microphone, as her voice elevated in a raw echo. Once she finished, the audience bursted into cheers and applauded with a few people crying.
The performance evoked two standing ovations — one before the encore. But by the end of the performance, one would recognize the relevance each song had to each person’s life. Despite the silver-haired demographic of the audience, age was not the subject — life was.
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