Disney Cruise: Pianist, ventriloquist add to the fun
Fri, 13 Aug 2010
 Ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous Alex on the keys. (Theme Park Ranger Matt Palm has been fighting the end-of-summer blahs by reliving his Disney Cruise Line vacation aboard the Disney Magic earlier this year.)
Beyond the large-scale stage shows (which I wrote about yesterday) aboard the Disney Magic’s Mediterranean cruise, there were a number of entertainers doing smaller-scale acts.
We didn’t always see them, as we often lingered over dinner, but we liked what we saw.
Our 2 favorites: Amazing Alex, who sang and played piano in the Sessions lounge, and Paul Zerdin, a ventriloquist we thought so funny we saw his family-appropriate and his adults-only shows.
Alex, from Australia, could play just about anything you could name. And he could sing it, too — really well. We found him by accident, just stumbling into Sessions one night. And then we came back. Again. And Again. I’d call us stalkers, but we weren’t trying to hide. By the end, we’d sit in a booth right next to the piano so we could chat with him.
His themed sets were fun — An Elton John tribute and a pop and rock set were our favorites. The latter set produced a beautiful version of Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love.” Yes, sung by a solo male accompanying himself gently on piano. Beautiful. He graciously played it for us again later in the cruise.
We actually fell in love with Sessions, in general. It was never crowded but never empty, either — just a nice-volume of conversation buzzing in the background. Super-friendly servers and bartenders, too.
 Paul Zerdin with his pals Sam (front) and Baby. Paul’s ventriloquism was astonishing to us — though we had little experience with the artform. He could change voices in a second, having whole rapid-fire conversations. And his puppets (they were too smart to be called dummies) had their own unique personalities. We would gladly have seen more shows by him.
We also enjoyed playing shuffleboard and foosball, attended a lecture on one of our ports of call, enjoyed the cast farewell show, and sang karaoke. (As a side note, who knew little kids were such karaoke hogs? Don’t they know it’s not polite to sign up for three songs in a row? Give the rest of us a chance!)
In short, there was plenty of nighttime entertainment — there were also movies, bingo, art auctions, other games … even in 10 days we didn’t have time to try it all.
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