The vocal trio
Three Graces -- Sara Gettelfinger,
Kelly Levesque, and Joy Kabanuck -- is an act built for the big time, not an unreasonable goal at a time in the music business when, for instance,
Josh Groban had the biggest-selling album of 2007. The idea here is to construct a sort of
Spice Girls or
Destiny's Child for the adult contemporary/contemporary classical charts. No less than seven producers have been enlisted in this effort.
Mark Portmann is the main one, getting sole or partial credit on seven of the 11 tracks, but there are also contributions from such high-profile figures in the field as
Desmond Child,
Guy Roche, and
Walter Afanasieff. These are guys accustomed to working with the likes of
Michael Bolton,
Celine Dion, and
Barbra Streisand, among others. They are experts at coming up with soaring power ballads of the sort that wake up dozing businessmen in musicals by
Andrew Lloyd Webber and warm the hearts of soccer moms accompanying their children to animated Walt Disney movies with scores by
Alan Menken. For
Three Graces, they have also applied the faux-classical approach of
Groban and
Sarah Brightman by having the trio sing in Italian, Spanish, and French in addition to English. Typically, however, they do not make it too hard for listeners by offering translated versions of old hits like
Phil Collins' "Against All Odds" and
Heart's "These Dreams." Gettelfinger, a Broadway veteran, Kabanuck, whose résumé boasts a batch of operas, and
Levesque, who has duetted on-stage with
Andrea Bocelli, all have good trained voices, of course, even if they seem to have been chosen for the group as much for their ability to look fetching in the off-the-shoulder gowns they sport on the album cover as for their singing. None, however, make a strong individual impression as a pop singer or even seem much invested in the material, even on the two songs for which the three receive co-writing credits with Jeff Cohen and Michael Ochs. But then, the songs, with their heavily clichéd lyrics and endless crescendos, demand more vocally in a technical sense than they do emotionally. A lot of money has been spent on this project (not the least of it on stylists and costume designers, who go uncredited, even though they are nearly as important as the musical producers), and either it's going to go platinum or the singers will go back to their individual stage careers. ~ William Ruhlmann