By Peter Davis 6/03 9:00am

The Eight-Day Week

A Better Holiday Benefit Concert

To do Monday: The Decades Ball

The 1950s come to life at Lapham’s Quarterly’s second annual Decades Ball, chaired by Jane and Morley Safer, who will award historian Kevin Phillips the Janus Prize. The entertainment, a celebration of the boom times and cool cats of the ’50s, includes readings and performances by Tom Hanks, Tony Kushner, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Martha Plimpton, Ari Graynor and Paul Muldoon. Singer/comedienne Nellie McKay will sing classic songs by one of the era’s sweet and innocent icons, Doris Day. Read More

By Rex Reed 3/27/12 7:17pm

cabaret

A Better Holiday Benefit Concert

Nellie McKay’s Latest Act is a Lyrical Landfill

I probably haven’t seen the worst cabaret act of all time, but after Nellie McKay at Feinstein’s, I have certainly seen the dopiest. Part naive, lyric-driven song parade and part ecology lecture on the rape of the environment, this curiosity is called Silent Spring—It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature and it features the cute, sincere and woefully misguided actress-singer in the role of late environmentalist author Rachel Carson, who devoted her career to saving the planet from arrogant self-destruction. Ms. McKay is a gentle activist who loves dogs and flowers and everything green, attaching a few songs about nature to a rambling discourse about the dangers of pesticides, insecticides and other acrimonious environmental assaults. (It’s not a show you want to see on Valentine’s Day.) The musical interludes do little to alleviate the academic tedium generated by the disorganized patter wedged between them. One or two critics I respect have high regard for this girl, but all I can see is a vast need for improvement. Her heart may be in the right place, but frankly, this corny little act, which she has constructed from crêpe paper and good intentions, is something of a mess. Read More

By Jason Gay 5/19/03 12:00am

Whoa, Nellie

“You know, I wanted to be a star,” said Nellie McKay.

It was a Sunday afternoon in May, and Ms. McKay, who is 19, strawberry-blond, button-nosed, dewdrop-lipped, and a startlingly precocious singer-songwriter you should hear from soon, was walking along the bridle path in Central Park. She wore a crisp pink overcoat, shiny black shoes Read More