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BROADWAY BASH 2001

"There they were, the girls who made you love them and then disappeared, turning up like the bad-penny dames in private-eye novels. They only stuck around for a couple of nights in their slinky silks and satins. But that was long enough for them to win and break hardened hearts all over again.

In a kinder world Kristin Chenoweth, Melissa Errico, Donna Murphy and Vanessa L. Williams would each be ruling her own Broadway musical. The times and theater as they are, these delectably talented women are more usually found in sitcoms and action movies. But every so often they show up to tantalize Manhattan theater audiences with glamorous visions of what could be.

The most recent occasion for such fantasies was provided, as it often is, by the Encores! series of American musicals in concert at City Center. Though this invaluable programs official season doesn't begin for a few months, its producers saw fit to provide an appetite-whetting sampler of vintage numbers delivered by latter-day stars...It offered plenty of goose-bump-raising moments. And they usually involved little more than a woman, a song and a top-flight orchestra....

....Ms. Errico, the goddess from the Encores! "One Touch of Venus" was done wrong several seasons ago by the clunky Broadway version of the movie "High Society." That she deserves much better was amply evident in "Broadway Bash!," especially in her slyly understated "What Makes Me Love Him?," from "The Apple Tree" (1966). I knew that song, but I was unfamiliar with "There's a Room in My House," a charming courtship duet from "A Family Affair" (1962) performed by Ms. Errico and the droll, pure-voiced Jason Danieley ("The Full Monty")."

--by Ben Brantley The New York Times