Last night, Regina Spektor arrived on Broadway for the first night of her week-long residency at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on West 46th Street. She played a 25-song set heavy on favorites from her twenty-year career, complemented with some newly revived oldies from her time in the early 2000s Anti-Folk scene, a few dance accompaniments, along with a truly batshit crazy cover of "A Few of My Favorite Things" with special guest Amanda Palmer.
The house was packed, and the audience was supportive, despite some opening night kinks in the show, including a sound issue that prevented Spektor from completing her duet of "Call Them Brothers" with her husband, Jack Dishel, and the singer forgetting the lyrics to some of her songs, including "Folding Chair", the opener, which is one of her biggest hits. She always recovered with humor, including noting the appropriateness of her second piece, "Eet", which includes the on-the-nose lyrics "It's like forgetting the words to your favorite song / You can't believe it / You were always singing along."
(Jake Dobkin / Gothamist)
Throughout the night, Spektor seemed delighted with the chance to play a storied stage, which has featured shows like The Sound of Music and Hello, Dolly!, and has recently been featuring limited runs by Morrissey, Mel Brooks, and Yanni. She frequently exclaimed "Broadway!" in a sing-song sendup of a theater voice, and waved the requisite jazz hands. The production is distinguished from her normal concerts by a more elaborate stage-set; a colorful LCD backdrop showing abstract animations and drone shots; and the presence of Caleb Teicher, a graceful tap-dancer who provided percussion and visual accompaniment on songs including "Prisoners," "Somedays," and her new song "Spacetime Fairytale."
Spektor dipped into her back catalog to great effect, with the aid of bootleg recordings of old performances at venues like Tonic (RIP) that she recently discovered online. "8th Floor," a beautiful piece in Russian and English about staring out of an apartment building window in the Bronx, was particularly well received, and "Loveology," which she recently did live on Seth Meyers's show, showcased the full range of her unusual voice, which can move from sweet and girlish to deep and powerful in the space of a verse.
Toward the end of the set, after playing many of her classics like "Grand Hotel," "Firewood," "Blue Lips," and "You've Got Time" (with Jack Dishel back on guitar), Spektor, stating that she intended to "homage the fuck out of this stage," brought the house down with the aforementioned "A Few of My Favorite Things," from The Sound of Music, alternating piano and accordion with Amanda Palmer and Lance Horne, who gamely did their best parody of musical theater voicing.
While that was fun, the emotional highlight of the show was Spektor doing a solo performance of the classic "Smile," which she dedicated to her father, Ilya. The singer noted that the performance was on World Refugee Day, which was particularly resonant for her, as it was almost 30 years to the day since Spektor and her family arrived in the Bronx as new immigrants from the Soviet Union. Her father was watching the performance, making a video for the family archive at the back of the house. Asked whether he had any inkling that his daughter was bound for stardom when they first arrived, he said with pride that she'd always been talented, and that "at every show, she exceeds my expectations."
There are still a few tickets left to Spektor's shows this weekend—you can purchase them online through her website, and you can find the full setlist here.
