By Elizabeth Ahlfors

When you have an insightful actress/singer with a point of view, an astute director to help frame her message, and musical accompaniment that adds color and style, you'll get more than your penny's worth. Penny Fuller, nominated for Tony Awards for both straight play (The Dinner Party) and musical (Applause), finds the story and sings it, confident and nuanced. While we expect as much from cabaret performers, we don't always get it. What boosts Fuller into a loftier category are taste and talent. The talent has been demonstrated over four decades of busy theater, film, television, cabaret work. And taste? Fuller, with director Barry Kleinbort's help, has imaginatively chosen just the right songs for "The War Between My States," the theme of her current show.

Her father was a Southerner, her mother, Fuller whispers conspiratorially, "a Yankee." She also confides that they were "divorced." You have to have been born before 1970 to understand the stigma of divorce. Fuller split her childhood between New York and North Carolina, and while her interests finally led her to favor New York, she reflects the sensibilities of the South. Well-placed patter and dramatic, unusual interpretations provide a framework for the colorful divisiveness—though hardly a war—between the genteel Tar Heel state of her birth and the brash Big Apple, a comparison, she says, like "grits and pastrami."

Fuller presents a flavorful medley of New York's urbane spice from the viewpoint of a young semi-Southern belle. Imagine beginning a future in the city, anticipating glamour and excitement and finding it is "Too busy, too crazy, too hot, too cold/Too late, I'm sold again on New York City" ("N.Y.C" by Charles Strouse and  Martin Charnin for Annie). Or more pungent, "Watch where you're going, motherfucker!" from Strouse's “You Can be a New Yorker Too!” (Mayor). Fuller finds a more romantic view in "My City," also from Mayor. It's not easy to find a more evocative sense of New York in the last quarter of the 20th century than with these three songs, well-seasoned with David Gaines's jazz support on piano and Jered Egan's bass. 

Fuller always brings a new turn to her interpretations of familiar songs. "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" (Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart) is more conversational than confessional. "I'm wild...again," she admits, each "again" a tad more distinctive. She eschews the usually hard-driving "Blues in the Night" (Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer) and delivers it softly, as a lesson to be learned, taking heed that while she may have fallen for the guy, she should have known better because, "My mama done tol' me."

Her show opens wistfully with Charles Strouse and Lee Adams's allusive "Night Song" (Golden Boy), wondering, "Where do you go, when you don't even know/ What it is you desire?" The answer is Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's "Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home," light and offbeat. Harkening back to the theme of her show, Fuller reads the song's title with a significant pause, "Any place I hang my hat is...home."

Two less familiar but very apt songs salute her parents: one, Frank Perkins and Mitchell Parish's lilting "Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia"; the second, "Forgotten Dreams" (Leroy Anderson, Mitchell Parish), remembers her mother's unfulfilled dreams of becoming a classical pianist with Gaines's nostalgic music-box piano underpinning. Her parents, instead, sent her to secretarial school. "It was more secure." Again, a sign of the times.

"Helen's Soliloquy" was written by Barry Kleinbort for his proposed musical, Skyline. The characteristic 1950's New York rhythms and energy are inherent in this Garson Kanin story, made into the play and film The Rat Race. It's the tale of a young, once-aspiring model/dancer, now bitter and disillusioned, who meets a hopeful young sax player. It's a story and era for a stylish, jazz infused musical. Fuller's delivery is dramatic and nuanced, reflecting NYC from A to Z.

Penny Fuller calls her show an "exploratory journey." What you will find is a performer who knows what she is singing about and delivers it with intelligence and zest, someone you'll look forward to seeing again, and again.