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.

Sally Olson

Robert Windeler
Creating a cabaret tribute show can start with a performer's simple, perhaps youthful, admiration for the chosen subject. Internet searches may provide at least the bare bones of a biographical narrative. Memorizing the key numbers in an honoree's song list is a must, of course. But there is so much more that's needed beyond a...

Polly Gibbons

Robert Windeler
Though her label, Resonance Records, and her New York club of choice for this engagement, Iridium, are both bastions of mainstream jazz, her London home base, Ronnie Scott's, can be quite a bit broader in its booking charter than that. But even that fact and her wide touring schedule and home country following hadn't prepared...

Rochelle and Paul Chamlin

Robert Windeler
In their splendid new show, based on songs written for the movies and directed by Marilyn Maye, Rochelle and Paul Chamlin demonstrate not only a clear and contagious love for their chosen subject, but also a new polish in their paired performance style. The first thing to notice is that Paul and Rochelle at the...

Gay Marshall

Robert Windeler
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...

Micky Dolenz

Robert Windeler
Those of us who are fans of both the Monkees songbook and Broadway show tunes are twice blessed by the current Micky Dolenz show at Feinstein's/54 Below (co-directed by Van Dean and Dolenz himself). Some fifty years on, Dolenz is still best known as the lead singer of The Monkees, a "Fab Four" group manufactured...

Susanne Mack

Robert Windeler
Anyone who can legitimately include the Patsy Cline country standard "I Fall to Pieces" (Hank Cochran, Harlan Howard) in a show about a German girlhood near the Black Forest certainly has my admiration as well as my attention. Susanne Mack accomplished that and more in her recent compelling outing at Pangea (directed by Gretchen Cryer)....

Marta Sanders

Robert Windeler
A deft three-song medley of "Follow Me" (Lerner & Loewe), "Gotta Move" (Peter Matz), and "The Gypsy in My Soul" (Clay Boland, Moe Jaffe) perfectly sets up the trip that is Marta Sanders's current show at the Laurie Beechman Theatre. Her longevity as both a person and a performer could have allowed her to rely solely...

Jana Robbins

Robert Windeler
When this show was previously done at Feinstein's/54 Below, it was called "I'm Still Here!" but for this second outing at the club, it was newly named "Jana Robbins Returns!" Both titles turn out to be apt enough. After all, by her own upfront admission, she's been a New York-based singer and actress for some...

Rebecca Kilgore

Robert Windeler
In a welcome, too-rare, and too-brief return to New York cabaret, the Portland (OR)-based Rebecca Kilgore proved anew that sometimes just singing the song more or less how it was written or previously sung by others can be quite enough, even for a jazz singer. Don't get me wrong. Kilgore certainly possesses a subtly swinging...

Lee Squared

Robert Windeler
Showbiz mavens of a certain age will likely chortle nonstop during "Lee Squared," the show created by David Maiocco and Chuck Sweeney and currently playing at the Metropolitan Room. The pair portray, respectively, Liberace and Peggy Lee, in what can scarcely be called a tribute. (Ms. Lee, at least, has already had her deserved share of...