Cast Albums Blog
REVIEW: Back to My Roots - Kate Rockwell
Kate Rockwell’s debut solo album Back to My Roots is an ode to the “Second Golden Age of Broadway,” which Rockwell defines as the 1970s-1990s. I’ll leave it to others to decide if it was such a Golden Age, but regardless, Rockwell’s album is a smooth and polished orchestrated album (a bit of throwback to Bruce Kimmel’s Fynsworth Alley solo discs), full of both well-known and lesser-recorded Broadway songs. The album shoots out of the gate with a brassy rendition of Cy Coleman’s “Hey There Good Times” from I Love My Wife. From there through the next six songs, it’s one up tempo song after another: a saucy “Bring on the Men” from the better-left-forgotten Jekyll and Hyde, a mashup of “I Know Things Now” from Into the Woods and “Now You Know” from Merrily We Roll Along, and then two numbers from Falsettos: “I’m Breaking Down” and a song typically sung by a man, “The Games I Play.” Rockwell brings panache, exuberance, and excitement to each of these tracks. Rockwell’s Falsettos numbers are followed by a duet with Ariana DeBose on “What You Don’t Know About Women” from City of Angels, before tackling the mother of all-belt songs, “Buenos Aires” from Evita. If all this sounds like an exhausting listen so far, it is. Perhaps the album should have been titled “Back to My Belt,” because while Rockwell has an astounding full gorgeous belt (Seth Rudetsky would be in heaven), the album could stand from a bit more variety or at least some better ordering of the tracks.