Politics and cabaret have been entwined since the beginning of the art form. Political and social commentary and criticism informed much of the early days of cabaret in Germany. In America, from the Depression and upheaval of the thirties and forties to the racial unrest and anti-war sentiment of the sixties, cabaret offered a soapbox […]
If you go to a cabaret show in 2017, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that the concept will be “how I got to New York and what I did to get a job in show business.” Sally Schwab of The Marvelous Wonderettes takes that contemporary cliché and runs with it in the riotously funny Adventures in […]
Singer Carmen Cusack has amassed an extensive collection of vocal riffs and shadings from pop, rock, folk, country, gospel, and R&B genres. Her background is as a musical-theatre performer—which may help explain her chameleonic quality. Though she hails from Denver, she gained much experience in London’s West End, where she appeared in Les Misérables and […]
The title of David Baida’s debut cabaret show, now on view at the Metropolitan Room, is Unexpected Surprise. Anyone who saw his work during last summer’s MetroStar Talent Challenge—which he won—will not be at all surprised that this show (directed by Adolpho Blaire) is clever, funny, inventive, and very entertaining. In addition, he has a robust […]
It’s not every day that a cabaret performer hits on an audience at the top of his set. But on the night I attended, that’s essentially what Rafa Reyes did in his Metropolitan Room show A Mexican Affair. “Would you like to have a Mexican affair?” he asked coyly. “Or would you like to have […]
Laura Kenyon recently revived her iconic cabaret creation, June Cool, in June Cool…Alive! at Pangea as the final presentation of the second season of the TWEED TheaterWorks series Happy*Cry*Pretty! This was by far the most theatrical evening of this season’s program, so in some ways it felt as though the prior evenings had been building […]
The title of Dan Ruth’s remarkable show, A Life Behind Bars (currently enjoying a run at the Laurie Beechman Theatre), might lead one to expect an exposé of the prison system, but the bars in question are of a much more common variety—the drinking dens and dives of New York City and environs. In the […]
As part of TWEED TheaterWorks’ Happy*Cry*Pretty! Monday night performance series at Pangea, comedian-writer-actor Steve Hayes recently presented We Only Have Brains On Tuesdays. That wild title only begins to describe this hilarious, off-the-wall evening of “observations, monologues, and old movie talk.” Hayes has long been a reliable comic stalwart on the cabaret scene, and over […]
Gay Marshall is the first to admit that feelings about Paris, and groups of songs expressing those feelings, are seriously in danger of evoking narrative and musical clichés. In her current show at Pangea, “Gay’s Paree,” she confronts this problem head on, and largely avoids it. In her opening number, Dave Frishberg’s “Another Song About […]
Early on in her show at Don’t Tell Mama, Still Exactly Where I Belong, Deborah Stone sings a pairing of Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer’s “I’m Old Fashioned” and Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s “Simple Little Things.” The first of these numbers seems to define this performer well. And I don’t mean that in a […]
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