Saw Madeleine Peyroux at the newly restored Cabaret La Tulipe last night. I had seen her in San Francisco many years ago and I remembered that she was shy and didn’t talk to the public much. Her 8 year hiatus didn’t change her shyness and it seems to have given her unusual voice an even lazier quality than before. A cute california guy named Jackie Greene opened up the show for Peyroux and even though he was only 23 (as he explained to the crowd without offering his name), he seemed more comfortable on stage than Peyroux was. Beth (with whom we saw the concert last night) does a great job at reviewing the evening and the show.
If you ever buy tickets for a show at the Cabaret La Tulipe, try to get there very early in order to avoid having to sit upstairs. The space is crammed, the air is rare, the seats creak so loudly that you can’t concentrate on the performance and there’s no room to put your drinks down. I guess it didn’t matter much in the old days of Gilles Latulippe’s loud vaudeville but it made the quiet performance of Peyroux hard to enjoy last night.