“The audience at the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room, one of New York's premier cabarets, fall to silence when Maude Maggart starts to sing from the Great American Songbook. She becomes the words and respects the melody to the note. Richard Rodgers, Jerome kern, Jimmy Van Heusen, and many of the iconic composers who created these melodies would be proud. She is, note for note, a faithful messenger of the great stuff.

At 32, she still looks like a girl. But the woman emerges on stage when she sings and, to a degree, when she speaks. For Maude Maggart, the songs are life itself, the reason for being alive, for falling in love, for risking everything with a man who hastouched her heart."