SPILT MILK - by Noel Katz

"My Chiropractors Hands" - Featured in A STAGE KINDLY presents  "Encore"

Four singers meet each other on a stuck subway car and decide to form a vocal jazz quartet. The highest rung they reach on the show-biz ladder is recording a jingle for a restaurant that serves various breeds of dog. Spilt Milk premiered at New York's legendary rock club, CBGB, before going on to cabaret runs that continually got extended. THE NEW YORKER August 2, 1993Camp Songs "Spilt Milk," a three-girl-and-gone-guy revue offered on Mondays this month at Don't Tell Mama, got its name from a dinner-table accident that occurred while the group was brainstorming for title ideas. "We're picturing a claustrophobic, sloshed crowd," says Noel Katz, the composer, reckoning that such an audience would best appreciate his twisted tunes. Mr. Katz, who supplied the music for playwright Tony Kushner's N.Y.U. master's project, is a devotee of the Tom Lehrer school of songwriting: "I Don't Want to See the Pope (I Want to See You)" is rendered by genuflecting supplicants; "My Baby" praises the glowing woman from Three Mile Island who "melts me to the core"; and "Tom's," a song about the Upper Broadway greasy spoon featured in the "Seinfeld" sitcom, is a near-libelous assessment of the eatery's menu. These and other equally improbable sentiments are given sophisticated credence by the close, Manhattan Transfer-like harmony of the quartet and the smart staging and arrangements of former Whiffenpoof Rob Tate. For all the cynicism, an unabashed romantic streak keeps surfacing in songs like "Thoughts in Transit," a bittersweet peek at the flustered feelings of two shy types on a bus. But no mere ballad stands a chance against "My Chiropractor's Hands," the hero of which Carol Spencer extols as she writhes in ecstasy: "I like a man who knows his scoliosis from sciatica. When he makes his diagnosis, he is so simpatico."