Robert Windeler

Robert Windeler is the author of 18 books, including biographies of Mary Pickford, Julie Andrews, Shirley Temple, and Burt Lancaster. As a West Coast correspondent for The New York Times and Time magazine, he covered movies, television and music, and he was an arts and entertainment critic for National Public Radio. He has contributed to a variety of other publications, including TV Guide, Architectural Digest, The Sondheim Review, and People, for which he wrote 35 cover stories. He is a graduate of Duke University in English literature and holds a masters in journalism from Columbia, where he studied critical writing with Judith Crist. He has been a theatre critic for Back Stage since 1999, writes reviews for BistroAwards.com, and is a member of The Players and the American Theatre Critics Association.

Lucille Carr-Kaffashan

Robert Windeler
Having created and performed two prior shows that featured the work of female composers, in her recent offering at Don't Tell Mama, Lucille Carr-Kaffashan focused exclusively on the output of male songwriters. Unlike her 2017 Bistro Award-winning theme show celebrating 21st century women singer-songwriters, this new show, How the Light Gets In, reached back to...

Broadway’s Next Hit Musical

Robert Windeler
Satirical improvisation based on audience suggestions is tricky enough when it merely involves words and actions in unrelated set pieces. But add impromptu music, lyrics, and a quirky overarching theme to the mix, and you really have a challenge. It's one that, by and large, this cast of four composer-performers was well up to the...

Christine Aziz

Robert Windeler
It's always encouraging to see a performer, too young to have personally experienced the subject of her tribute show, go to great lengths to impart to her audience a real-life sense of the honoree. The flip side of that cross-generational combination is, of course, that the distance between live artist and deceased subject can be...

Nancy McGraw

Robert Windeler
They were both born in Georgia. And as members of the Southern diaspora and living most of their lives elsewhere, Down Home was so often in their thoughts. He was Johnny Mercer, one of the preeminent lyricists of the mid-20th century American songbook. She is Nancy McCall McGraw, who recently chose Mercer as the subject...

Lynda Rodolitz

Robert Windeler
In the show she performed in 2016, Lynda Rodolitz declared, convincingly, that she was "Off Her Rocker." She underscores, maybe even expands, that comic assertion in her laugh-rich current show, Animal Magnetism (at Don't Tell Mama, directed by Lennie Watts). In this musically sophisticated outing, she purports to solicit dating advice from the animal kingdom—by...

Daryl Glenn

Robert Windeler
You would think that by now there couldn't possibly be a new way to present an all-Sondheim cabaret show. But, as Daryl Glenn proved in this recent Don't Tell Mama outing (directed by Vince DeGeorge), you'd be wrong about that. From the moment Glenn bounded onstage in a colorful paisley tailcoat and launched into his...

Ronnie Marmo: I’m Not a Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce

Robert Windeler
Like most comics who came of age in the middle of the last century, Lenny Bruce started out on a fairly conventional path. After coming home from the World War II Army, he took a job as emcee at the club where his entertainer mother, Sally Marr, was working. "Stealing material from my mother," as...

Andrea Wolff

Robert Windeler
In her new show, I Can't Trace Time, directed by Dan Ruth and currently at The Green Room 42, Andrea Wolff stays true to her title premise by not offering a chronological autobiography, but, instead, presenting moments in, and aspects of, her life—and her thoughts about them—in no particular sequence. Employing an eclectic, effective array...

Kenneth Gartman

Robert Windeler
When doing any cabaret show that takes the form of a travelogue, it must be very tempting to open the show with "Come Fly with Me" (Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen). That ubiquitous anthem to soaring holidays is used in a television commercial even today, some seven decades after its composition. In his recent show...

Branden & James

Robert Windeler
Both classically trained, but also separately exhibiting long-held pop and "legit" tendencies, singer Branden James and cellist James Clark have combined their considerable talents and have been touring internationally as a team. They recently introduced their new show, The Broadway Covers Project, at Feinstein's/54 Below, which venue James (i.e., Branden) aptly announced as "the Carnegie...