With a brilliant career that over the past three decades has seen her ascend to the top of the pop charts and star in several successful TV series and Broadway musicals, Vanessa Williams was a no-brainer as guest for the latest installment at the Town Hall of Seth Rudetsky’s Broadway. Both the host himself and the audience were in adoration mode for 90 minutes as Williams bantered easily with Rudetsky about her career and belted out several songs from her wide-ranging catalog.

 

Rudetsky is unequaled at being chatty, informative and always entertaining in his programs of conversation and musical performance with notable stage stars. Moving easily from the piano to the interlocutor’s chair and back, Rudetsky is knowledgeable, well-prepared and funny, putting his guests and audiences at ease. As a terrifically versatile pianist, he plays whatever is needed at the time. And with Williams, that ranged from Sondheim to Kander & Ebb to Disney.

 

The discussion—always enlightening, amusing, entertaining—ranged from Williams’ childhood (her mother, a music teacher, was in attendance, a few rows from the stage) and college years at Syracuse, where she majored in musical theater, to winning the Miss America pageant and, after being stripped of her crown with only a short while left in her reign thanks to nude photos that were published in Penthouse magazine, her slow but steady rise to a triple threat singer-actress-dancer onstage, onscreen, on records and on TV.

 

 

Punctuating the conservation were the irresistible songs: Rudetsky and Williams would walk over to the piano, and he would accompany her in, say, “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods (in which she played the Witch in 2002), the title song from her smashing Broadway debut, replacing Chita Rivera in 1994 as the lead in Kiss of the Spider Woman, “Colors of the Wind” from the Disney movie Pocahontas, and—unsurprisingly, the final song of the night—her biggest radio hit, “Save the Best for Last.”

 

Williams is currently starring in the silly but hilarious play, POTUS, on Broadway, and at one point she invited her costar, Lilli Cooper, onstage. Cooper took over the conversation before belting a show-stopping “The Oldest Profession” from the Cy Coleman musical The Life—Cooper was amazing, but I couldn’t help thinking that Williams should have done another song or two instead. 

 

Although Cooper deserves her own showcase, next up for Seth Rudetsky’s Broadway at the Town Hall is the great Jane Krakowski on September 12.