Tom Waits Does Broadway (Kind of..)

Looking for the Heart (and Rasp) of Tom Waits

By Rob Kendt
The New York Times

Got a frog in my throat," Stewart D'Arrietta said with a cough last week near the end of his splendidly imperfect Tom Waits cabaret act, "Belly of a Drunken Piano." Recognizing that as a serious understatement, he added, "I got a whole reptile park in there."
In this case that's not self-deprecation. Dressed in a cream suit and a chocolate fedora, the wiry Mr. D'Arrietta cuts a figure closer to William S. Burroughs than to the vulpine Mr. Waits. But when he's growling and howling his way through the three-decade Waits song catalog, Mr. D'Arrietta musters a gripping, uncanny imitation of Mr. Waits's trademark rasping roar.
Elsewhere Mr. D'Arrietta, an Australian, does a passable impression of Mr. Waits's warmer, mellower tones, and he faithfully recreates a few Beat-style spoken-word riffs, flecked with slight traces of an Aussie accent.
Mr. D'Arrietta's own between-song patter is more variable, and includes some hoary jokes and stories from his life as well as from Mr. Waits's. He's a genial master of ceremonies, and he touches rock-solid emotion when he dedicates a few songs to friends. But he stumbles with stabs at drollery or commentary, making genital-themed jokes about the president and the pope and recalling a piano teacher with a "flatulence problem."
At its best, though, "Belly of a Drunken Piano" takes us squarely into Mr. Waits's wee-hours world, with its many shapes and shades: from weepy-drunk soliloquies to screaming blues stomps, from cackling chanteys to rain-slick word jazz. Backed by a snappy trio of double bass, drums and electric guitar, Mr. D'Arrietta is a middling pianist, banging away on a gutted, tuneless upright whose sustain pedal seems stuck.

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