A Life Behind Bars

Gerry Geddes
The title of Dan Ruth's remarkable show, A Life Behind Bars (currently enjoying a run at the Laurie Beechman Theatre), might lead one to expect an exposé of the prison system, but the bars in question are of a much more common variety—the drinking dens and dives of New York City and environs. In the...

Steve Hayes

Gerry Geddes
As part of TWEED TheaterWorks' Happy*Cry*Pretty! Monday night performance series at Pangea, comedian-writer-actor Steve Hayes recently presented We Only Have Brains On Tuesdays. That wild title only begins to describe this hilarious, off-the-wall evening of "observations, monologues, and old movie talk." Hayes has long been a reliable comic stalwart on the cabaret scene, and over...

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...

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...

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...

Broadway “Boozy” Brunch

Gerry Geddes
Broadway "Boozy" Brunch is a great idea—a hybrid of Sunday afternoon brunch, late night piano bar, and full-fledged cabaret revue. That's what Don't Tell Mama is offering on Sundays at noon and again at 2:00PM. Patrick DeGennaro oversees the festivities, playing piano with his accustomed mastery and providing vocals, both solo and in tandem with...

Amy Friedl Stoner

Gerry Geddes
Amy Friedl Stoner's Dreamchaser at the Metropolitan Room was one of the most stylish, assured, intelligent, entertaining New York cabaret debuts I have had the pleasure to witness. Using an inspired and well-thought-out program of songs spanning Broadway, the Great American Songbook, country, folk, and contemporary, she filtered all selections through a singular vision and...

Liz Rubino

Gerry Geddes
In Make Yourself Comfortable, singer Liz Rubino's Don't Tell Mama debut, there are two elements and styles at war with each other. One is that of a thoughtful, emotional storyteller making even very well-known lyrics live and breathe in ways that surprise and satisfy. The other is that of a nervous, inexperienced novice (which she...

Louis-and-Ella!

Gerry Geddes
Trent Armand Kendall and Natasha Yvette Williams are terrific singers with lengthy theatre credits, and the idea of them singing songs made famous by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald is very promising. Unfortunately, in Louis-and-Ella! (written by Kendall) at the Cutting Room, they were awash in a conceptual sea. Classifying the show as a "jazzical"...

The Outer Space

Gerry Geddes
The Outer Space, currently running at Joe's Pub, is a song cycle set in the future about the desire to escape the stress, fear, danger ,and drudgery of urban life and the inevitability that those same problems, albeit in different forms, are waiting in whatever destination that escape winds up. Ethan Lipton, who wrote the...