McNight channels Sophie Tucker ‘for the children’

How do you build an audience for a tribute to a singer who was born more than 125 years ago?
Well, you start by booking cabaret star Sharon McNight, who, as she’ll be the first to say, has grown into the role of vaudeville star Sophie Tucker.
Then you make it a benefit for local foster and adoptive children and invite a few celebrities like Elinor Donahue, Margaret O’Brien and Morgana King to show their support.
Then you tell people only three percent of foster children ever make it to college. And you show them video clips of the local children who will be helped by this fundraiser for the Foster Parents and Adoptive Parents Association.
That’s what filled the Grand Ballroom of Hotel Zoso Sunday night.
McNight, who was nominated for a Tony Award for “Starmites” in 1989, made me feel as if I knew Tucker by her performance in “Red Hot Mama.”
She came out like a brassy Ethel Merman, wearing a gorgeous gown and hitting high notes like a trumpet player. She had a comedy delivery like the late Milton Berle, who was a kid when Tucker was a star in vaudeville. And she had a bawdy sense of humor that manifested even in her ad libs.
When she took off her coat, her dresser’s hand appeared through the back curtain and McNight quipped, “A magic hand comes from out of the curtain! Maybe I’ll stand next to the curtain.”
Tucker died in 1966, but baby-boomers know her through Bette Midler’s Sophie Tucker jokes.
Younger folks might know the term “red hot mamas,” but few realize it derives from a genre of singing so pejorative to African Americans, I can’t even mention it in our family newspaper.
But her style of singing original hits like “Some of These Days,” “There’s Going To Be Some Changes Made” and “Hard-Hearted Hannah (the Vamp of Savannah),” which she didn’t perform, seem to pass through the generations by osmosis, like “Jingle Bells” or “Rain, Rain Go Away.”
Comedy styles change so dramatically (that line alone might have qualified for a laugh track in the ’50s) that it’s hard to imagine a woman who was knockin’ ’em dead with the Ziegfeld Follies of 1909 still being funny today.
But McNight not only gets laughs with Tucker’s jokes and delivery, she earns bravos for singing a 1928 tender ballad that should be ridiculously cornball today. She brings “My Yiddishe Mama” to life by adding context in character as Sofie. We learn the teen-age Sofie divorced her husband and left her young son with her parents to pursue a career in show business at the turn of the 20th century. That broke her mother’s heart and McNight channels Tucker’s anguish. That, along with her ability to hit powerful high notes, is what makes the song a highlight of the show.
This was a one-time only performance by McNight, who lives in Los Angeles. But Carl Bruno and the Betty Hutton Estate he heads will be back next year for another quality benefit show.
Carl not only presents these shows, he and his partner, Michael Mayer, have two adopted foster sons themselves.