http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/arts/music/sierra-boggess-performs-at-54-below.html 2014-10-18 01:04:46 Sierra Boggess Performs at 54 Below Sierra Boggess brings a little Broadway and a lot of other selections to her cabaret act at 54 Below. === The Broadway singer Sierra Boggess occupies a privileged niche in that magic circle where Disney songs, Andrew Lloyd Webber ballads and stentorian proclamations by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michael Schönberg (“Les Misérables”) melt into a sticky mass of high-flown sentimentality. The theater world is teeming with well-trained singers who have the polished semi-operatic technique to put over such songs. But it’s not always easy to distinguish one from another in the parade of cookie-cutter voices entrusted with such material. Ms. Boggess, who recently starred as Christine Daae in She maintained a cleareyed interpretive perspective and did as well as anyone to convey the songs’ life lessons and override the starchiness that can make Mr. Lloyd Webber’s songs, in particular, sound ponderous. Ms. Boggess also has a mischievous sense of humor, which showed itself in a medley from “Les Miz” into which she incorporated the halting phrases and pseudo-sexy choking sounds of Britney Spears. It made for a witty, devastating parody. Much of her patter reflected her show’s title, “Finding the Balance (the Journey of the Middle Child.)” In an extended anecdote, she described visiting Mr. Lloyd Webber’s palatial manse in England for a banquet celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II and being dazzled by the pomp and ceremony. Her sparkling, bouncy rendition of “If They Could See Me Now” summed up the awe of an American performer from Denver who had stumbled into a fairy tale kingdom.