Every fall over three days, some of the best cabaret artists in the country appear at the Mabel Mercer Cabaret Convention at Rose Hall at Lincoln Center. If you never go to any cabaret in the year, you must go to this one. Which of course will hook you on cabaret forever!
I first heard Libby York in Key West. A classic jazzy cabaret chanteuse. So, of course I wanted to see her at at the Mezzrow Club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. She was appearing there with Roni Ben Hur on guitar and Obasi Akoto on bass.
Avignon – The place for jazz cabaret at the Avignon OFF is chez Madame Jazz(e), the French-Gabonese chanteuse Abyale Nan Nguema known as Abyale (say A B Al), whose honeyed voice is seductive as she sings the songs made famous by the jazz divas, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan, Josephine Baker and others. She doesn’t imitate them, she pays homage to them.
A history of American jazz in 90 minutes? The Anderson Brothers’ “The Journey of Jazz” does so in fascinating pastiche of music and visuals, starting with Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” smartly performed by pianist Dalton Ridenhour, and finishing with Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme.” They show along the way how styles evolved, how jazz composers were affected by classical music (think Thelonious Monk) and went on to influence the music of Broadway and popular culture (Richard Rodgers).
KT Sullivan, a doyenne of jazz through the Mabel Mercer Foundation she heads, presented the Cabaret Convention’s Great “American Songbook: American Standards,” at the three-day event’s finale at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Oct 28. This thrilling event brought singers from the U.S. and abroad to an annual gathering of cabaret fans. And as they are standards, it’s worth noting who wrote them.
Yip Harburg (1896-1981), was a socialist song writer born on the Lower East Side of New York, where he was named Isidore Hochberg. He changed that to the “American” Edgar Harburg, which would turn into “Yip” Harburg. Yip stood for Yipsel, the acronym of Young Peoples Socialist League, the youth group of the Socialist Party. How did he know that in some future years, that would label him “un-American”!
La Tanya Hall is a classy cabaret singer whose moody voice ranges from low to high in dulcet tones with a distinctive jazzy inflection. Songs are delivered with a mellow, honeyed often understated sound which sometimes has a hint of New Orleans.
Nov 4, 2019 – This is the 30th anniversary of Cabaret Conventions, the iconic yearly gathering of the best cabaret singers and their fans in New York to celebrate and promote an art form that started centuries ago and was noted in France back in the 1900s. It is sponsored by the Mabel Mercer Foundation, named after the great American jazz singer.
Aug 16, 2019 – The Anderson Brothers take you on a gorgeous trip to the jazzy 1930s and 40s of the great composer Duke Ellington. With their swing jazz horns, Jeb Patton‘s fast-fingered piano and Molly Ryan‘s ethereal voice, you have magic.
Aug 15, 2019 – Karen Oberlin, a well-liked figure on the New York cabaret scene, bring a welcome slightly jazzy tempo to this musical tour through the discography of Doris Day. Her voice has the Day honey and lilt, but I think she improves on the tempo. Oberlin did two shows Aug 13 at the Birdland Theater.
KT Sullivan is a smash as a comic Elaine Stritch in Noël Coward‘s “Why do the wrong people travel?”
July 14, 2019 – Freddy Cole didn‘t make it to his 8:30 set at Birdland last night. He was stuck in a nearby hotel when the power outage struck and, at 87, he couldn‘t take the stairs.
For 19 years, impresario Scott Siegel has been delving into the past of American musicals to put before theater and cabaret fans the best known and hidden gems of the decades. And also presenting some of the finest performers to them. He picks a couple of years. The years 1943 and 1951 in this show were typically marked by blockbusters and some shows I never knew.
There‘s a difference between cabaret and just a singer on a stage warbling a melody. And there‘s a reason so many good cabaret singers come from Broadway. Cabaret is not just about the words and the music, it‘s about telling a story. Sometimes, it‘s even a mini-musical play. And that is what is good about the Cabaret Convention, in its 29th year, annually four nights in October, at Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
I love jazz, I love jazz vocalists, so how could it get better? It does with the Anderson Brothers who add text and video to tell the stories of the composers, lyricists and performers they feature. You are pulled into not just the sounds but their personal and musical lives. In August they appeared at Symphony Space and one week after another they featured Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Hoagy Carmichael and Jimmy Van Heusen. I caught the Van Heusen show. It was a delight.
The Cabaret Convention put on by the Mabel Mercer Foundation has for almost three decades brought together some of the best cabaret performers in the country, each of four days presenting as many as 20 singers, some prominent, some new, some doing standards, others jazz, to keep the tradition alive. Dozens appeared over four evenings; these are just my highlights. I notice that most are women. Well, so be it! They had the most pizzazz, the most drama.
There were 70 singers telling stories to music, swinging to jazz beats, crooning emotion and trilling high notes at the annual Mabel Mercer Foundation Cabaret Convention. In four days at the Rose Theatre, dedicated by Lincoln Center to jazz, you could hear performers as young as 15 and as old as 88 present stunning new and veteran talents – in fact, the special thing about cabaret is that it has no age limits.
In a velvet ankle-length gown, white gloves and white fur stole, the signature gardenia over one ear, Bonita Brisker glitters like the rhinestones on her costume. “What a little moonlight will do…” she channels Billie Holiday, her songs, her life. “Greetings FBI” to the government thugs who harassed her. She reminds the audience that she “cut a man for putting hands on me wrong.” And Count Basie fired her. And then, “Them their eyes!” It‘s a masterful performance that brings Billie to life.
Bobby Nesbitt‘s tribute to the cabaret greats of Las Vegas is much richer than any medley of songs from the star singers of the time. His performance at the Tennessee Williams Theatre reprises the iconic tunes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and more. But he also offers some social history that sets “the Rat Pack” – the name given by actress Lauren Bacall –in an American context. (She said, “You look like a goddam rat pack.”)
Jazzy tunes reached the best notes at the annual New York Cabaret Convention sponsored by the Mabel Mercer Foundation, whose artistic director KT Sullivan is a major cabaret singer herself. This was the 26th, and over four evenings it brought major American singers to Town Hall. There were about 60 performers. I was there the last three nights, October 14-16, 2015, and attempt here to acknowledge the best.
When Julie Reyburn sings, you think you are at a theater stage. Her rich soprano last night entranced an audience at her “Fate is Kind,” a show of mostly kids‘ songs for adults. I liked her charming take on Frank Loesser‘s “The Ugly Duckling.”
I was glad, as it turned out, that not all “kids‘ songs” are for kids, especially when they are “On the Steps of the Palace” from Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim. Reyburn is a tuneful theatrical Sondheim interpreter.
Her performance was happily accompanied by the jazzy piano of music director Mark Janus.
Nathalie Schmidt is a French cabaret singer – and a playwright and screenwriter, theater and film director, artist and actress in plays by Shakespeare, Racine, Sartre and other European classics. A full creative life.
You see a lot of that talent in her cabaret show, Forgotten Lovers, at the Metropolitan Room. Certainly, her acting enriches a partly comic, partly cynical take on life. As a singer, she hits the right high notes, and she often sounds like Piaf. She‘s a personality that the New York cabaret scene needs.
My favorite in Charlotte Patton‘s show at the Metropolitan Room was “Quality Time,” a satirical piece by Dave Frishberg (1996) that fits today, as she tells us about a guy telling his wife that, “We‘re up to our ears in our careers and putting our hearts on hold,” so they need quality time. He says, “I know a small hotel remote and quiet, if they decide to sell my firm could buy it, then we‘d develop it and gentrify it.”
That said, the songs in this charming production are of a piece – not mushy or sad, but upbeat and smart.
The very fine Broadway and cabaret singer Christine Andreas channels Edith Piaf in an elegant, sharp, charming dance production choreographed by Pascal Rioult, a former Martha Graham Dance Company principal dancer.
The space is a cabaret/dinner theater space at the 42West Nightclub. Tables are set around a center runway and look at a proscenium stage. Andreas in gamine hairdo, black glittery silk dress, looks (a bit) and sounds like Piaf, her trills and tremors.
Rosemary Loar is a major cabaret singer, throaty, breathy, with drama in her strong torch-song voice. In a white lace tunic over a short purples dress, black tights and boots, she is edgy. Some of the stories she tells are dark, and she makes them come alive. Her cabaret is almost theater.
