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...

Jesse Luttrell

Gerry Geddes
Before I go into the show that Jesse Luttrell performed at Feinstein's/54 Below with the Fred Barton Broadway Band, let me digress into a bit of metaphorical art criticism. Imagine, if you will, that you have been invited to view the work of an exciting new painter at a gallery show of fourteen of his latest...

Bob Diamond

Gerry Geddes
It's funny how over time, words can lose or change their meanings in popular culture. Before it became a kiss-of-death description, the word "nice" was a perfectly acceptable positive description of something that was neither remarkably good, nor terribly bad. In matters of performing and cabaret, it would indicate a pleasant diversion for an hour...

Lavender Songs – A Queer Weimar Berlin Cabaret

Gerry Geddes
In Lavender Songs – A Queer Weimar Berlin Cabaret, actor/singer/writer Jeremy Lawrence, in the guise of his alter ego, "kabarettist extraordinaire" Tante Fritzy, manages to turn the tiny stage at Pangea into a veritable time machine, whisking the audience away to a beautifully realized evocation of a club in Germany in the thirties—a time when...

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...

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...

Judy Pancoast

Gerry Geddes
I think pretty much all of us at one point or another in our music listening lives had a soft spot for The Carpenters and for Karen Carpenter's extraordinary vocals, at once light and dark, gentle and strong; in her hands, the most saccharine of songs revealed a steely spine, and the saddest of ballads...

The Meeting*

Gerry Geddes
Justin Sayre has one of the most distinctive voices in New York clubs and cabarets. I mean that in both senses of the word "voice." He sounds like no one else—his voice is arch, camp, musical, barbed, questioning and hilarious. It is just the sort of voice and sound one would expect from the creator...

Life Is for Living: Conversations with Coward

Gerry Geddes
Sir Noël Coward, the subject of Simon Green's Life Is for Living: Conversations with Coward—which was co-created by its star, Simon Green, and its musical director, David Shrubsole, and is currently on view at 59E59 Theaters—was often referred to as "the master" for his prodigious talents as composer, lyricist, playwright, director, actor (on stage, screen,...

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...