Let’s face it: The golden age is dead. I’m talking Merman and Lahr and Gertie Lawrence. Tammy Grimes brings back some of the missing magic. In fact, she is some of the missing magic. In Broadway history, she was a footnote, but now the footnotes are as important as the chapter headings, and Tammy is the scrapbook and the clippings, too. There’s been too much water in the moat since 1959, when the well-bred girl from Boston with the sly smile and the über-extravagant vocal affectations of a dispossessed duchess was introduced by her friend Roddy McDowall to his friend Noël Coward, who signed her for the starring role in Look After Lulu and became her mentor in a career that rocked the theater world. But when Ms. Grimes steps out of the shadows onto the shoebox stage of the Metropolitan Room, reprising the lyrics from High Spirits, the 1964 musical version of Coward’s Blithe Spirit, time does indeed stand still. The song is “Home Sweet Heaven,” sung by a glamorous ghost who crashes to Noël Coward’s earth and waxes nostalgic about how much livelier everything was up in the big celebrity hangout in the blue. Name-dropping in rhyme about every pal she left behind from Gertrude Stein to Joan of Arc, Tammy proves she can still haunt both a song and a show. She’s downright hilarious on the comedy numbers, and she breaks your heart on the ballads. The material, which runs the gamut from Kurt Weill to Jimmy Buffett, is the kind of witty, eclectic program she used to perform in the 1950’s in such soignée watering holes as Upstairs at the Downstairs and the Blue Angel. Those were the days when People Who Knew Things were just getting their second wind around midnight, and everybody got home in time to greet the milkman. Nobody watched Turner Classic Movies. They were living Turner Classic Movies.

 

A few snowflakes have fallen on Tammy Grimes herself through the years, but if the vocal strength comes and goes at intervals, who cares? I’m less interested in pyrotechnics than soulful interpretation, which she gives us in spades. If the range of a song is too wide, she just acts the damned thing. It doesn’t matter if the timbre frays or the pitch wanders, because the heart always shines through. She isn’t afraid to show vulnerability, while the maturity of a woman who has lived masks the joy of youth within. These are qualities that actor-director Joel Vig must have admired, for he has sensitively and cleverly constructed the act to bring them all to life, and with the aid of accompanist Dennis Buck, they have brought Tammy Grimes back to life as well. Bravo. They got her out of the house, pushed her onto a stage again where she belongs, and the audience wolfs it down like Dove Bars. When she finally gets around to “I Ain’t Down Yet!,” the Meredith Willson song she belted out in The Unsinkable Molly Brown after surviving the sinking of the Titanic, you know she means it. At 73, Tammy Grimes is just getting started.