It’s a rare thing: the unsolicited email that brings joy, not exhaustion. Somehow, way back when I wrote about nightlife for this paper, I got on Chris Barrett’s mailing list and I’m still getting occasional updates on his whereabouts as a pianist and cabaret singer. Just enough of them to feel I’ve gotten to know, and more to the point like, this person I’ve never met or seen perform live.
His missives offer just enough information to keep me reading with interest, and a reward frequency that keeps me wanting more.
“Dear friends,” he usually begins, before getting down to the brass tacks of the piano circuit. “I wish I could tell you that I’ll be somewhere in the Hamptons, or at least in Manhattan,” he said in May of last year, “but, at this time, it’s not meant to be!”
Then he got personal: “With the sale of my summer house in the Poconos last July, I now spend my 12 months a year in south Florida.” If you were down there sunning yourself, in other words, Trattoria Novello on East Atlantic Boulevard in Pompano Beach was the place to be. Thursdays, please.
This was welcome news for Chris Barrett fans, as only two months earlier he’d resurfaced after a long absence to announce that “the gods had indeed smiled down upon me and presented me with my first public space booking in 12 months. . . . Yes, I’m still here, in good health, and quite ready to resume work!”
“I will,” he went on, “as always, perform songs from our Great American Songbook and feature known and unknown songs from my catalog of ‘The Best of Broadway.’ I am blessed to have been offered this opportunity to once again sit at my piano, greet my friends and customers, and present my life’s passion of performing great lyrics and singing the best songs of our time!”
You see the likability. The sincerity. He lamented the “difficult time” of the pandemic, and in closing invoked a song title from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight Express”: “There’s a Light at the End of the Tunnel.”
Happily, he still ventures north, “with a good vacation stint” come August or September, and when he does, he can be caught at the Century Inn in Scenery Hill, Pa., an old stone beauty that’s been around long enough to have lodged our first low-born president, Andrew Jackson.
The last I heard from our man at the piano was his “warm Christmas wishes,” sent with directions to his YouTube performance of a witty “Just in Time for Christmas” (“Tis the season when you turn your thoughts to people you can’t please”). He sings it with a blue-balled silver tree over his shoulder.
Chris, should you indeed make it out this way again, you can expect a request for some Hoagy Carmichael from a new fan. But if your days here are indeed done, as you say, there’s always YouTube.