Mark Dundas Wood

Mark Dundas Wood is an arts/entertainment journalist and dramaturg. He began writing for BistroAwards.com in 2011. Currently, he writes the "Bistro Bits" column for the site. Other reviews and articles have appeared at theaterscene.net and talkinbroadway.com, as well as in American Theatre and Back Stage. As a dramaturg, he has worked with New Professional Theatre and the New York Musical Theatre Festival. He is currently literary manager for Broad Horizons Theatre Company.

Matt Doyle

Mark Dundas Wood
Actor/singer Matt Doyle recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday with a single-night engagement at The Green Room 42, a commodious, spanking-new showroom on the fourth floor of the Yotel on West 42nd Street. Known mostly for his theatrical appearances in such shows as Spring Awakening, War Horse, and The Book of Mormon, Doyle began a side...

Jazz in the City: The New York Connection

Mark Dundas Wood
At the Duplex, Jazz in the City: The New York Connection combines narrative by historian and music aficionado Charles R. Hale with song selections by the David Raleigh Trio (which is really a quartet if you count pianist-singer Raleigh himself). Raleigh's fellow musicians at the performance I saw were saxophonist/clarinetist Tony Carfora, bassist Evan Gregor,...

Carmen Cusack

Mark Dundas Wood
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...

A Mexican Affair

Mark Dundas Wood
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...

Deborah Stone

Mark Dundas Wood
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...

Kim Sutton

Mark Dundas Wood
With Live to Tell: My Life, Madonna's Songs, performer Kim Sutton, director Lennie Watts, and musical director Steven Ray Watkins have created an immensely ambitious cabaret event. Using songs associated with—and often written (or co-written) by—pop star Madonna Ciccone, Sutton presents a sort of sung-through musical pageant based on her own personal history. We see...

Risa Finkel

Mark Dundas Wood
Risa Finkel drives a mean welcome wagon. For her recent show at Pangea, "Moment to Moment," the singer assembled a program with a smart balance of humor and seriousness. She displayed a warm and pleasant singing voice, as well. But Finkel had something even more essential going for her: an impressive talent for making listeners...

thirtywhatever

Mark Dundas Wood
The musical revue is a durable genre—and why shouldn't it be? A link of sorts between a standard cabaret show and a musical play, the revue is a straightforward way of showcasing the work of emerging songwriters as well as of performers. The careers of such talents as Rodgers & Hart, Comden & Green, Jerry Herman, Eartha...

Love for Sale

Mark Dundas Wood
Tilted Productions' Love for Sale—a "cabaret play" directed by Robert F. Gross—features international songs from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, many of them titles from the Kurt Weill catalogue. Kelly Burke portrays an unnamed American chanteuse—a struggling but spirited character with a penchant for self-dramatization—who undoubtedly will bring the name Sally Bowles (or, at any...

Mary Sue Daniels

Mark Dundas Wood
Mary Sue Daniels's delightful show at Don't Tell Mama—"Straight Outta 'Conda" (directed by Lina Koutrakos)—had something good in common with the previous show I reviewed for this site: Jen Fellman's "Frenchy." Both were staged memoirs in which carefully chosen songs were integrated into a narrative that would be solid without any music at all. Also...