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.

Teresa Eggertsen-Cooke

Mark Dundas Wood
There's a particular challenge for cabaret performers who are singer-pianists. When they come to the stage and sit down at the instrument, the very configuration can suggest a "piano bar" sort of show. Such singers face the ivories as much as they face the audience. Their hands are primarily occupied with the keyboard and are...

Jason Morris

Mark Dundas Wood
Jason Morris certainly has talent. He is blessed with a malleable singing voice with a pleasing timbre. He seems at home with the conventions of contemporary pop singing. He favors melisma, but keeps it in check. For his show "Musically Yogic" at the Metropolitan Room, Morris has surrounded himself with some top-of-the-line collaborators, including director...

Tom Andersen

Mark Dundas Wood
The closing performance of Tom Andersen's recent Don't Tell Mama show (his first solo program in almost a decade) had a casual pre-Labor Day vibe. He wore cool summer attire, befitting a box social. And he'd tucked plenty of fresh, thoughtfully prepared musical treats in his picnic hamper. He opened the show with "Gosh, It's...

Jake Mendes

Mark Dundas Wood
Although his recent Don't Tell Mama show, "Lady Songs," had more than a few rough edges, Jake Mendes is, I think, on the right path to finding out who he is as a solo performer and what his place might be in New York's cabaret community. Or, if he isn't on that path quite yet,...

Lillias White

Mark Dundas Wood
There is more than one way that cabaret can succeed. Some shows—Shana Farr's recent program of Noël Coward and Cole Porter songs, for example—are carefully manicured gardens. Everything has been planted with care and set to blossom on schedule, down to the last petal. This sort of show can make for a memorable, emotionally rich...

Pat Kirkwood Is Angry

Mark Dundas Wood
If Off-Broadway's recent one-woman musical Pat Kirkwood is Angry (directed by Lee Blakely) did nothing else, it certainly brought the late British music star Kirkwood to the greater attention of a number of American theatergoers. I knew of Kirkwood only because of the song "Love on a Greyhound Bus" (Ralph Blane, Kay Thompson, George Stoll),...

Kristoffer Lowe

Mark Dundas Wood
According to biographical notes provided to reviewers, Kristoffer Lowe is an award-winning classical singer and a musical-theatre actor who has previously worked largely in regional theatre, along with spending some time singing on a cruise ship. Perhaps in cabaret he has found an outlet in which his talents can flourish here in New York. Directed...

Joyce Breach

Mark Dundas Wood
For all I know, Joyce Breach sits at a piano or desk and maps out meticulously each moment of every song she sings—measuring every breath, polishing every phrase, tailoring every nuance. But that certainly doesn't appear to be the case. Breach—a performer who moves in both cabaret and jazz circles—seemingly just enters a song and...

Paul Chamlin and Rochelle Breyer Chamlin

Mark Dundas Wood
Right at the top of Paul Chamlin and Rochelle Breyer Chamlin's new Jule Styne tribute show, "Gems by Jule," at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, the performers set up the personas that will carry them through the evening. They start out musically with a Fanny Brice / Nick Arnstein duet from Funny Girl, "I Want to Be Seen With...

Libby York

Mark Dundas Wood
There's something to be said sometimes for the loose, anything-goes quality of a song set in a jazz club, as opposed to the more formal ambience of a cabaret show. A "go-with-the-flow" vibe presides. There's less concentration, it seems, on the tidiness and polish of the whole package and more focus on what happens as...