Gerry Geddes

Gerry Geddes, critic for BistroAwards.com, is an award-winning director, writer, teacher, performer, lyricist, and a contributor to the podcast Troubadours and Raconteurs. He conceived and directed the acclaimed musical revues Monday in the Dark with George (Bistro and MAC Award winner), Put on Your Saturday Suit—Words & Music by Jimmy Webb, and Gerry Geddes & Company (in its five-year residency at Pangea). He has directed singers André De Shields, Darius de Haas, Helen Baldassare, and Lisa Viggiano. He has been active in the cabaret world for over five decades and has produced numerous CDs; his lyrics have been performed and recorded here and in Europe. Gerry’s workshop, The Art of Vocal Performance, is regularly offered to singers of all levels. His memoir of life in NYC, Didn’t I Ever Tell You This?, was recently published and is available at barnesandnoble.com. He is currently at work on his first novel.

Peggi Blu

Gerry Geddes
Lee Summers's Just A Piano concert series, now in its tenth year at the Triad Theater, recently presented Peggi Blu in Sinatra in Blu – If Sinatra Were Born a Black Woman, which she wrote. A grand champion on TV's Star Search, Blue later became a vocal coach on American Idol, while continuing a career in...

Veronica Swift

Gerry Geddes
At Birdland, singer Veronica Swift and the Benny Green Trio deliver a most satisfying evening of jazz, centered almost solely in the world of bop. At the late show on opening night, Green and his cohorts opened the set with three fiery examples of jazz artistry. On their first selection, Green's blistering original "Wiggin" (in...

Robin Westle

Gerry Geddes
A "concept" in cabaret is a tricky thing. It can be an elaborate and complex narrative or character that permeates every moment of the show. It can be a tribute to another performer or to a songwriter. It can be a loosely structured through-line that might reach the audience only subliminally. Or a show can...

Lea DeLaria

Gerry Geddes
As far as I know, the stage at Birdland might still be steaming and too hot to touch after Lea DeLaria's incendiary David Bowie show there last week, which centered on her latest CD, House of David: delaria + bowie = jazz, The Orange Is the New Black star opened with "Boys Keep Swinging," a bold, dynamic...

Linda Glick

Gerry Geddes
In her early years as a singer in New York, Linda Glick split her time between teaching high school Spanish and French during the day and appearing at some of the city's landmark cabarets, such Les Mouches and Reno Sweeney, at night. As her nighttime career bloomed, it overcame her daytime pursuits as she moved...

Caitlin Fahey

Gerry Geddes
Party of One, which is playing at Don't Tell Mama, is the entertaining and smoothly structured cabaret debut offering of singer Caitlin Fahey. Coming from the world of opera, Fahey has a strong, expressive voice, but wisely chooses to keep it in check unless the song calls for her to indulge its power. She seems...

Christine Andreas

Gerry Geddes
Christine Andreas's show Love Is Good proved, once again, that she is a consummate cabaret performer. There could not have been a better closing engagement for Mark Nadler's wonderful (and wonderfully successful) summer cabaret series at the Beach Cafe. In the intimate space that feels as much like a living room as a music room,...

J. Michael Reeds and Marc McBarron Kessler

Gerry Geddes
Songwriter-pianist Marc McBarron Kessler could not hope to find a better interpreter of his song cycle, Ghost of Vaudeville, than actor-singer J. Michael Reeds, whose bravura performance on stage at Don't Tell Mama held my interest and attention even when the songs, themselves, faltered in that regard. Kessler is a talented composer and lyricist, but this...

Tom Goss

Gerry Geddes
Tom Goss is an out gay singer-songwriter, or more to the point, a singer-songwriter who happens to be an out gay man. He has built a following and a career primarily through an ongoing series of videos—by turns funny, provocative, heartwarming, dramatic—of his engaging songs. But he takes his sexual orientation as a given, so...

Livingston Taylor

Gerry Geddes
The Rubin Museum of Art on W. 17th Street is a restful, almost zen-like space that inspires calm and contemplative silence. The museum's ongoing series, Naked Soul, takes place in a small, attractive performance space with cherry wood walls and a lone piano center stage. The mission of the series is to present completely acoustic events—no...