Melanie, Cosby Pleasing at SPAC

by Marilyn Nason, The Post-Star, September 7, 1971

Melanie succeeded in filling the vast Saratoga Performing Arts Center amphitheatre Sunday night all alone, thanks to a poignancy and performing fire almost impossible to imagine in such a tiny girl.

Most of her songs were sad, autobiographical and concerned with loneliness. She sat alone on a chair, a small girl with a huge guitar, two floor mikes and a single spotlight. Although she arrived late for the performance, causing considerable backstage concern, Melanie sang and played for well over an hour without pause.

She and co-star, comedian David Steinberg, drew 8,400. The audience seemed unable to get overly enthusiastic about young Steinberg’s very off-color humor during his first half of the program. But following a half-hour intermission, when Malanie had still not arrived, Steinberg reappeared on stage for about 15 minutes more to appease the audience.

Funny Bit

For this, he was joined at the last minute by Stephen Lanier, stage manager, and the two of them without rehearsal were extremely funny in a bit about a psychiatrist.

The SPAC performance was geared to the publicity launch of her latest album and she played several songs from it. But she also delighted the audience with some of her hits, “Tuning My Guitar,” “Beautiful People” and “Nickel Song.”

She was exhausted at the end of her show but returned for umpteen encores at the behest of the metropolitan press people standing in the wings. It became rather pathetic after a while, because the 24-year-old tiny girl was truly drained.

There was not a dry eye in the house Saturday night as Bill Cosby spun his humorous stories.

The laughter of the 5,200 attending was about as loud and sustained as any in SPAC’s history. It marked Cosby’s third appearance at SPAC and, as he noted, his last performance before beginning his college studies. He was his usual relaxed self, wandering on stage with his cigar and informal attire, pushing a grand piano.

Own Composition

Cosby decided at the last minute to forego an intermission and also composed on the spot a tune he played, appropriately called “Waiting For the People to Come In and Sit Down.”

He began playing and was soon joined by the three musicians already onstage to back singer Carmen McRae. They rallied to this unexpected bit quite well and even joined Cosby as he puffed his cigar and played, all the while watching the latecomers finding their seats.

The Cosby humor Saturday night tended mostly toward his three children, his well-laid plans to be strict but not violent in their upbringing and some particularly hilarious stories of arguments with his wife, Camille, over raising the children, going out for the evening and being courteous to a wife in such matter as opening the car door.

Singer Carmen McRae opened the show with Cosby’s introduction that “there are singers and there are singers but Carmen knows what singing is all about.”

She went on to prove just thạt for well over an hour. Perhaps the only fault to be found was the length of her performance but certainly not the quality of her fabulous voice. She sounded a great deal Iike Ella Fitzgerald as she did some seat singing in “Satin Doll.”