When six-year “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Ana Gasteyer took the stage at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre Saturday night, it wasn’t entirely clear where she was going.
Her handsomely coattailed pianist introduced her as “the handsomest songstress in Cambridge,” which elicited a smattering of muted chuckles. She then emerged in a sparkling dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Mae West, and delivered a wry rendition of her single “One Mint Julep.”
Because her resume precedes her, it is easy to attend an Ana Gasteyer show expecting her to spout pure comedy. That’s not, however, what came bouncing from the stage in the show’s initial moments. Instead, the audience was treated to a reminder of Gasteyer’s extensive vocal training at Northwestern University and brief stint as Elphaba in “Wicked.”
“One Mint Julep” is a swing number about downing one drink, spiraling out of control and ending up with six kids and a husband before long. It’s a silly, tongue-in-cheek couple of minutes, but it’s not interested in belly laughs, and its focus is squarely on Gasteyer’s classically trained pipes.
However, the comedy did come. Just after finishing “One Mint Julep” (brandishing a julep of her own, keeping with the saucy chanteuse image she channeled throughout the evening), Gasteyer delivered an interconnected string of personal anecdotes with the clip and possession of a seasoned stand-up act.
After glancing around the cavernous Sanders Theatre at various Latin inscriptions, she quipped that being in the space “[dug] up a lot of Quaker demons” for her before launching into a bit about her mother telling Gasteyer that she was “growing to be a handsome woman.” It was a riot.
Her speaking style betrays the self-deprecation of her material, and she has a knack for delivering straightforward bits with dizzying, vibrant sentences that knock the audience off balance.
Then, she began singing again — the tone shifted right back into “One Mint Julep” territory.
As the night wore on, it became clear that Gasteyer was essentially running two shows that bore little resemblance to each other. One show was a straightforward tour for her late 2014 jazz album “I’m Hip,” which features a string of beautifully sung standards and a slew of cabaret-aimed originals with a whimsical bent.
The other was a casual, candid stand-up routine about being a performer, mother and wife in the 21st century. Both were plenty compelling on their own, but for about 20 minutes, the disconnect proved irksome.
Two factors helped push the show over this hump.
One was Gasteyer’s performance of Peter Gabriel’s version of “The Book of Love.” Self-aware but ultimately sweet, the song synthesizes the eye-rolling of Gasteyer’s comedy with the old-fashioned charm of her music. “The book of love is long and boring,” the first verse begins, before submitting to the force of open-heartedness in the chorus: “But I love it when you read to / And you can read me anything.”
Here, Gasteyer’s experience at Northwestern and training in musical theater bolstered her effectiveness. The clarity of her words and subtle shifts in her phrasing sent a collective smile beaming across the pews of the Sanders.
The other contributing factor was Gasteyer’s own sheer force of will. Whether or not her vision was clearly defined, her charm and undeniable flair for performance ended up rendering opposition moot.
Throughout the evening, she exhibited an irresistible pragmatism and sense of groundedness that afforded her opportunities to veer into the theatrical without risking alienation. While she often slipped into songs that held no thread of connection to the bits that preceded them, it was ultimately hard to care because both were so enjoyable.
Perhaps the most encompassing moment of the performance came when Gasteyer discussed what it took to sell a self-produced record like “I’m Hip.”
“You have to get your famous friends to tweet about it and dabble in cultural misappropriation so you’ll be the subject of a thinkpiece,” she said, referring to her performance of the song “A Proper Cup of Coffee,” the opening chords of which the accompanist equated to “musical racism.”
If Gasteyer were a different performer, she would either have avoided commenting on the eyebrow-raising nature of “A Proper Cup of Coffee” or refrained from performing it. However, she opted to both perform the song (to what may have been the rowdiest applause of the night) and jab at her decision to do so, and her charisma and authority didn’t suffer a bit for it.
She’s a performer who is full of contradictions, not all of them easy to swallow, but at the end of the day, we trust where she’s going because she chooses to go there so endearingly.
Ana Gasteyer has 20/20 vision and to say otherwise is offensive to the crafts of both music and comedy.