Julie Johnson Sings

Julie Johnson Sings: Lawson Taitte review for Dallas Morning News

When Julie Johnson sings, you want to be listening

Julie Johnson is a force of nature.

North Texas' diva of divas is performing a weekend of concerts for Lyric Stage in place of its annual Dallas Divas! show. On Friday, she sang for a solid hour, took a short intermission, then sang for another 60 minutes. Whew!

Mind you, Johnson sings full out. She uses a microphone, but she doesn't just croon into it quietly. This singer is a past master of the Broadway belt, in which women pretend they're a trumpet and blast away into the stratosphere in their chest voices. (Think Ethel Merman, Barbra Streisand and Patti LuPone.)

When she chooses, however, she can shift over into a country manner that makes quite different, though equally powerful, sounds by using other techniques. She's made a lucrative sideline of channeling Patsy Cline in two different shows over the years, so you know she can yodel, rasp and turn glottal stops into high poetry. On Friday, she even did a Janis Joplin tune as an encore, which pushes the voice even farther in the same general direction.

After an hour of all this, you wonder how the lady can talk, let alone do it again and come back for more tomorrow. She did have a couple of friends, Catherine Cox Carpenter and Steve Barcus, singing too - but they performed duets with the headliner and sang backup. Johnson just never let up.

One telling moment came when Johnson joked around with a medley she said she was using as an audition for roles she'd always wanted to play, in case some producers were listening. You'd pay good money to hear her do lots of the roles the songs came from, notably Rose in Gypsy or Desiree in A Little Night Music. But she sang the obviously unsuitable numbers, like "Ol' Man River," with just as much conviction.

For much of Julie Johnson Sings, the material comes from theatrical pieces with country scores (like Das Barbecu, for which the performer won her Theatre World award). Also, a lot of the music on the program was written for her, and even by her.

The lesson is this: Whatever Julie Johnson is singing, you want to hear it. And this show gives you more opportunity to do so than you're ever likely to have again.