LUDMILLA
ILIEVA AT DILLON'S IN "DO RE MILLA"
After
a 3-year absence from New York stages during which she performed on
the corporate circuit, Ludmilla Ilieva will kick off a 6-week stint
at The Backroom at DILLON'S (245 West 54th Street, NYC - 212-307-9797)
on Monday, August 11th at 8:30 pm. Her new show, "Do Re Milla," features
musical director Paul Trueblood on piano, and is directed by Margery
Beddow. "Do Re Milla" runs through September 16th, playing three consecutive
Mondays, August 11th, 18th & 25th, and three consecutive Tuesdays,
September 2nd, 9th & 16th. All shows are at 8:30 pm. The music charge
is $15 with a $10 minimum. A $42 dinner & show package is available.
In "Do Re
Milla" Ms. Ilieva frankly confides the emotional highs and lows of
her life by selecting material that not only spans several styles
and genres, but also swings from giddy playfulness to the heartache
of emotional loss. Moving, as she puts it, from "one clef-hanger to
another," this Juilliard-trained soprano rolls out an arpeggio of
memories and melodies.
In songs
as different as Sissle & Blake's "I'm a Great Big Baby," Croswell
& Pockriss' "Bower Bird" and "Tear Joint" (one of two songs by musical
director Paul Trueblood with lyrics by Jim Morgan), Ms. Ilieva sings
with the Mermanesque abandon of a crowd-pleasing musical comedienne.
In one of the happier interpretations of "Funny Valentine" you'll
see (with an innovative jazz arrangement by Jeffrey Chappell) Ms.
Ilieva indulges her vast romanticism. This romantic streak gets several
turns under her musical microscope -- in Harbach and Kern's "Yesterdays"
for example, and, breathtakingly, in a medley pairing Mercer and Mancini's
"Whistling in the Dark" with Dietz and Schwartz's "Dancing in the
Dark."
Throughout
"Do Re Milla" Ms. Ilieva expresses a deliciously quirky brand of homespun
wisdom that seems to spring from her eccentric background. She is
descended from White Russian nobility, grew up a country girl in the
Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and is now, of course, an inveterate,
smart talking New Yorker.
Ms. Ilieva
"moves comfortably between musical idioms as disparate as opera, Broadway
and country western, and she sounds authentic and exciting in each
and every one," Barbara and Scott Siegel wrote in TheaterMania.com
in March of this year.
"Do Re Milla"
is her third professional show since her debut act, "An Earful of
Music," bowed in 1992, and is by far her most personal. She performed
"Hidden Voices" (songs sung anonymously on screen and lip-synced by
the stars) at Don't Tell Mama over an eight-month stretch and an engagement
at Danny's Skylight Room in February 2000.
For more
information, see http://www.do-re-mila.com/.
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