For his new show at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, Ordinary Miracles, singer Christopher Caswell chose a form of cabaret that has become more and more popular—the confessional memoir. The form has its own unique set of pitfalls, most obvious of which is that performers tend to invest even the smallest incident with an importance which is off balance from the reality of the situation. Just because something actually happened does not make it stage-worthy.
Christopher Caswell (Photo: Conor Weiss)
Happily, Caswell avoided this much of the time and had some interesting, involving stories to tell. The show would have benefited in many ways if he had concentrated on the “winners” among these stories and excised the others. It would have tightened and sped up a show which dragged at times. No one in the audience is going to be watching out for skips in the chronology of the anecdotes. A good mantra to keep in mind for this type of show is, “there should be truth on stage, but there don’t need to be facts.”
Some of the weaker stories might have been helped if the songs had deepened or enriched them, which brings us to one of the show’s serious problems. There is a certain genre of song that I refer to as “voice from on high” material. There is little or no subtext in these songs; there is no character in which the singer (or the audience) can live; there is no story to tell, only platitudes to pronounce and life lessons to impart. Usually, one of these songs is saved for the finale of a show, to send an audience home with a life lesson. Caswell chose one of the warhorses of the genre, “Ordinary Miracles” (Marvin Hamlisch, Alan and Marilyn Bergman), as his title song. But he was not content to let the Bergman’s poetic lyrics deliver his message; he chose to fill the show with many other “voice from on high” pieces that lacked the quality and polish of that song’s words and music. His message quickly got diluted with repetition and the songs became a blur. Unfortunately, the worst selections opened the show, and the admittedly talented singer took a while to recover from that misstep. This was not helped by the sameness of the arrangements and instrumentation by the normally accomplished trio of James Followell on piano, Sean Conly on bass, and Dan Gross on percussion. It simply added to the blur. For the first half of the show there was tentativeness in Caswell’s delivery and projection that caused some pitch and mix problems as well. I am not sure I have ever written these words before, but a bit more reverb might have helped; the microphone sound was not his friend that night.
Not that I was counting, but it took until the eighth number, a stirring cover of Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are” (Mars, Philip Lawrence, Ari Levine, Khalil Walton, Needlz), sung to his husband in the audience, for Caswell to really relax and sing out. This was followed by his best vocal of the evening with his touchingly romantic “The Nearness of You” (Hoagy Carmichael). From that point on his vocals gained strength and focus, although the material itself slipped back into morass of the first half of the show. He was a natural with these well-written songs and I wish he had included more of them.
This was a show as reliant on patter as it was on songs. One of the drawbacks of songs without subtext is that the singer felt compelled to “over introduce” the songs to give himself some tangible connection to them. Some genuinely warm and funny ideas were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the talk and some misguided “comedic” stretches that landed flat—especially a series of reminiscences about being mistaken as a predator with his young, adopted daughter that pushed the cringe alarm.
I would suggest for his next show that Christopher Caswell concentrates on songs that are personal rather than sermons and chooses to reveal elements of his life through the stories that those songs convey. At the end of Ordinary Miracles, I knew his philosophy, and what he thought I should think of life, but I never got to meet him. I never got to know him personally in the songs. Better choices and more secure delivery would have allowed me to do that.
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Presented at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, 407 W. 42nd St., NYC, May 7, 2026.
Gerry Geddes, critic for BistroAwards.com, is an award-winning director, writer, teacher, performer, lyricist, and a contributor to the podcast Troubadours and Raconteurs. He conceived and directed the acclaimed musical revues Monday in the Dark with George (Bistro and MAC Award winner), Put on Your Saturday Suit—Words & Music by Jimmy Webb, and Gerry Geddes & Company (in its five-year residency at Pangea). He has directed singers André De Shields, Darius de Haas, Helen Baldassare, and Lisa Viggiano. He has been active in the cabaret world for over five decades and has produced numerous CDs; his lyrics have been performed and recorded here and in Europe. Gerry’s workshop, The Art of Vocal Performance, is regularly offered to singers of all levels. His memoir of life in NYC, Didn’t I Ever Tell You This?, was recently published and is available at barnesandnoble.com. He is currently at work on his first novel.
