Amanda Mabro took to the stage with a poker face mystique.
Her lyrics may have provided a sneak peak into her emotional state of affairs, but neither she nor her Cabaret band seemed willing to go for broke and lay all their cards out on the table.
What the band lacked in raw energy they more than made up with strong individual performances, however, delicately weaving their way through their own brand of smooth Dixieland show tunes for the rather intimate audience at Casa del Popolo.
Dressed in dapper three-piece suits, drummer Patrick Therin, guitarist Andre Zarbo and keyboard player Cozmos Quazar painted the perfect sonic canvas for Mabro’s lyrical musings – whether delivered in booming baritone, machine-gun whisper or sultry falsetto. The band rode through ‘Wink at the Moon’ and ‘The Parlour’ before retreating into several quieter tunes, whose subtleties were drowned out by pointless crowd chatter.
But Mabro and company went out with a bang, gripping the crowd with a roaring rendition of their soon-to-be-released debut album title track ‘Superwoman in the making.’ “There’s no need to be temperamental,” she crooned, her renewed intensity earning the four-piece the loudest applause off the night.
Sometimes, it pays to lay it all on the line.
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