Stephen Hanks - Page 5

TUNE IN TIME, New York City's exciting, new musical theater challenge returns to Stage 72 today, July 1 at 9 pm with a new crop of exciting up-and-coming musical theater songwriters. The composers and lyricists must write a song from a musical whose title is literally picked from a hat, and in the genre determined by a spin of "The Dreaded Genre Wheel." Will it be a historical epic? Something a la Rodgers & Hammerstein? Or even [insert name of large theme-park owning megacorporation-turned-Broadway-megalopolis here]? Oh yeah, and they have just 20 minutes to do it.

TUNE IN TIME, New York City's exciting, new musical theater challenge returns to Stage 72 on Tuesday, July 1 at 9 pm with a new crop of exciting up-and-coming musical theater songwriters. The composers and lyricists must write a song from a musical whose title is literally picked from a hat, and in the genre determined by a spin of "The Dreaded Genre Wheel." Will it be a historical epic? Something a la Rodgers & Hammerstein? Or even [insert name of large theme-park owning megacorporation-turned-Broadway-megalopolis here]? Oh yeah, and they have just 20 minutes to do it.

A year ago this summer (July 31, to be exact), Terri White performed a one-off show at 54 Below that was so stirring in its show-woman ship she was voted the winner of the 2013 BroadwayWorld New York Cabaret Award for 'Best One-Show Special Event.' Based on the Broadway and nightclub veteran's performance in her recent June 22 show at the same club, White should be a candidate to pick up the award once again this year. Maybe it's time to just call her, 'Terri Terrific.'

When Margaret Whiting died on January 10, 2011, the news was like a dagger into the heart of the New York cabaret community. Whiting was a beloved singer for almost seven decades, who seemingly delivered every American popular song ever written, conquered almost every musical art form--from Big Band to Country to Musicals to Cabaret, from radio to the recording studio. On top of all that, Whiting worked with and mentored many New York cabaret musical directors and performers, including the late Mary Cleere Haran and K.T. Sullivan, who along with Whiting's daughter Deborah, hosted a 90th birthday Whiting tribute show on Monday night at Carnegie Hall's elegant Weill Recital Hall. Presented by The Mabel Mercer Foundation, for which Sullivan is Artistic Director, It Might As Well Be Spring! A Celebration in Song of the Life of Margaret Whiting was an almost three-hour concert featuring two All-Star teams worth of cabaret stars spanning a few generations.

After a successful launch with two shows / competitions in April, New York City's exciting, new musical theater songwriting challenge, TUNE IN TIME, returns to Stage 72 (The Triad) tonight, June 25 and Tuesday, July 1 at 9 pm.

The biggest challenge in personalizing a tribute show is when the set list is structured to tell a story about the performer's life. Those songs better be good, that life better be interesting, and that storytelling patter better be clever, humorous, and self-deprecating or an audience (let alone a reviewer) will tune you out quicker than a liberal accidentally hitting FOX News on the remote. I recently saw two different shows at The Duplex from enchanting young women performers—Carly Ozard and Nikki MacCallum--who deftly managed to weave their love of a singer (Bette Midler for Ozard) or a songbook (Kander & Ebb for MacCallum) into a tale of life journey and personal growth to produce charming and entertaining shows.

In the TV musical comedy-drama, Glee, the award-winning actress Jane Lynch plays the deliciously evil high school cheerleading coach-turned-principal Sue Sylvester, who is constantly trying to sabotage the efforts of the school's glee club to compete in singing competitions or even exist. It's a good thing nobody tried to prevent Lynch from taking a real-life crack at nightclub singing, as her debut show this past week at 54 Below (the last show is tonight at 8pm) was a delightful breath of cabaret fresh air.

Rising cabaret star Marissa Mulder's most recent performance of 'Living Standards' at the Metropolitan Room was certainly up to the high standard she has set for herself over the past couple of years. In fact, she's so consistently solid that she overcame the show's misguided and clunky premise that some very good contemporary songs should be thought of as 'standards.'

Cabaret performers thinking about launching duo shows could certainly take a lesson in chemistry from watching and listening to singer Karen Oberlin and guitarist Sean Harkness in their current show, A Wish, which is based on their superb recently released CD of the same title, launched with two shows at Kitano on February 1 (to celebrate the CD release), and has taken up a once a month residency until late August at the Metropolitan Room (the next show is on June 25 at 9:30 pm). While theirs is not a romantic off-stage chemistry (both are happily quite happily married, thank you), on stage and in the recording studio Oberlin and Harkness have concocted a delicious musical interaction that conjures up romance to the nth degree.

Peggy Eason is one of those characters who seem to have been made for the New York cabaret scene. She's a bodacious woman who is ubiquitous at the local clubs, possesses a passion for singing, and bills herself as the 'Chocolate Diva,' although on stage she's more like a Red Hot Mama. Eason opened her third solo cabaret show, I'll Show Them All, at Don't Tell Mama on Monday night (she's appearing again at the club on Sunday at 7pm) with the decidedly politically incorrect titled song written especially for her by David Conforte, 'Black, Blind and Beautiful' (Hey, 'African American, Visually Challenged and Beautiful' doesn't have the same ring to it.). But there was little that was incorrect about her fast-paced and entertaining show that was often poignant and funny at the same time.

After a successful launch with two shows/competitions in April, New York City's exciting, new musical theater songwriting challenge, TUNE IN TIME, returns to Stage 72 (The Triad) on Wednesday, June 25 and Tuesday, July 1 at 9 pm. A new roster of great up and coming musical theater--six composers and six lyricists-is ready to take on the challenge of writing a song from a musical whose title is, literally, picked from a hat in the style determined by a spin of The Dreaded Genre Wheel. Will it be a historical epic? Something a la Rodgers & Hammerstein? Experimental? Or even [insert name of large theme-park owning mega-corporation-turned-Broadway-megalopolis here]? Oh . . . and they have just 20 minutes to do it.

When the legendary Blues artist Joe Louis Walker and his band played a terrific gig at B.B. King's Blues Club in August of 2012, it was their chick/babe front singer Sari Schorr who blew the roof off the club with power vocals. Now Schorr's voice will be busting out all over in June, as she is booked for performances this month throughout the metro area. On Thursday, June 5, her new Sari Schorr Band will be at Stanhope House in Stanhope, New Jersey, where the sensual Schorr will be performing a mix of classic Blues/Rock songs and her own original compositions. On Friday the 13th (7 pm) cabaret audiences will be very lucky to hear Schorr as one of the headliners in The Dana Lorge Variety Show at the Metropolitan Room. And then on Saturday June 21 (7:30 pm), Schorr will perform at Brooklyn's ShapeShifter Lab.

I never thought that writing a rave review would be more difficult than constructing a less than positive critique, but Carole J. Bufford, damn her, is causing me creative problems. That's because for the third time in three years I'm compelled to praise this attractive powerhouse cabaret singer to the skies (you can find my two previous essays on her unassailable talent here and here) and my author's arsenal contains only so many superlatives. With yet another outstanding performance last Thursday night at the Metropolitan Room, the young woman who was named BroadwayWorld.com's 2013 Cabaret Vocalist of the Year has snatched my mental thesaurus (not to mention my online one) and trampled all over it. She's given me the writer's block blues.

It isn't called 'The Longest Running Nightclub Act on Broadway' for nothing. Terese Genecco and her eight-piece 'Little Big Band' are back at The Iridium (1650 Broadway at 51st Street) to celebrate their 99th and 100th performances at the venue on Tuesday, May 20th (shows at 8:30 pm & 10:30 pm.) The multi-award-winning singer/bandleader/comedian continues to light up Times Square with her unique brand of 50's-era Rat Pack-inspired musical mayhem.

If you are even a semi-regular reader of this column of reviews, you know that about every three or four months, I post a compilation of observations of shows from the previous quarter of the year. This cabaret critiquing mash up happens for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I admittedly see too many cabaret shows for the amount of time I have to promptly review them (and then, of course, the usual writer's procrastination sets in). So I have to prioritize the timeliness of the reviews based on the prestige of the performer, the length of a show run, the strength (or lack thereof) of the performance, etc. The quality of the shows in these compilations—which can range from a half dozen to a dozen reviews in one shot—are usually a mixed bag of outright raves, qualified positives, and constructive pans (I'm not a fan of the word “negative” in the reviewer lexicon). With that in mind here are a collection of cabaret show reviews going back to the start of a very harsh winter.

The 7th Season of The Parks Concert Series, (formerly The Concert for City Greens), a free outdoor concert series, commences on Wednesday, May 28 at 6:30 pm (Rain date: Thursday, May 29 at 6:30pm.) at Tudor City Greens, and will feature professional performers from Broadway and the New York City cabaret, jazz, classical and opera scene. All performers donate their time and talent for these concerts, which are hosted by Tudor City resident and Broadway and cabaret veteran Raissa Katona Bennett.

Ageless 86-year-old cabaret superstar and living legend Marilyn Maye performed her second show of yet another run at 54 Below (which continues May 9 and 10 at 8:00 pm, and May 13 at 7:00 pm), this time built around a tribute to the iconic comedian and talk show host Johnny Carson whose pet name for Maye was 'Super Singer.' Maye appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 76 times, more than any other singer.

Scott Siegel is two-for-two. The diminutive and indefatigable nightlife/cabaret impresario of such productions as Broadway By the Year and the Nightlife Awards at Town Hall, as well as regular variety shows like Broadway Unplugged and Broadway Ballyhoo, last fall decided to give the already skyrocketing cabaret career of Georgia-born southern belle Carole J. Bufford a booster shot when he became the producer, director, and co-creator of Bufford's latest effort, Body and Soul (which this Thursday night at 9:30 begins a weekly run at the Metropolitan Room). Siegel didn't waste much time finding another promising female singer to champion, producing and directing six new shows (on Wednesdays and Sundays between April 27 and May 14 at 7pm) featuring a lovely soprano who is also from the south—the south of Ireland, that is. Thirteen years ago, recently minted American citizen Maxine Linehan was just another starry-eyed singer/actress who traveled to New York City with dreams of a musical theater career. Today, if her May 4 performance at the Terminus Recording Studios is any indication, Siegel has another budding star on his performer roster.

I was just a little more than a year into my new side career as a cabaret show reviewer when I first saw a Karen Oberlin show. It was Valentine's Day night 2012 and Oberlin—with guitarist Sean Harkness and guest violinist Aaron Weinstein—would be performing her romance-laced set, Stringing Along With Love, at the Metropolitan Room. At the time, all I knew about Oberlin was that she was considered among New York's best female cabaret singers, and I hadn't researched her performing history pre-show. About a third of the way into her set I leaned over to my wife (it was Valentine's Day after all) and whispered, “You know, she has a real Doris Day quality in her voice and in the way she delivers some lyrics.” This immediately ratcheted up my appreciation for Oberlin since there are four passions I inherited from my Dad—baseball, reading the morning papers, sports writing and Doris Day (well, also Sophia Loren, but that's for another column). Since Dad had grown up during the prime of the Big Band Era of the 1940s, I heard the sultry sounds of a young Doris Day singing songs like “Sentimental Journey” on the family stereo more than a few times. Once I saw Day's strikingly adorable blondness on a record cover and her rocking body in one of her films, I knew what Dad was talking about. As popular, famous, and near iconic as Doris Day became, in my book, as a singer and screen beauty she's always been vastly underrated. Little did I know that Karen Oberlin had been doing a Doris Day tribute show so since 2001 at places like Firebird, Iridium, and the late Danny's Skylight Room, and produced a CD, Secret Love: The Music of Doris Day, in 2002. Karen Oberlin had instantly become my secret love.

When Mark Nadler last performed a solo show at 54 Below, it was a very personal musical exploration of Germany's Weimar Republic of the 1920s, a place and an atmosphere that was dark, dangerous and decadent. I'm a Stranger Here Myself was such a compelling tour de force that it was expanded into a highly praised off-Broadway piece that Nadler staged at the York Theatre last Spring. Nadler's new 54 Below effort, Runnin' Wild: Songs & Scandals of the Roaring Twenties, (which opened last Sunday, ran last night, and will also play on May 7 at 9:30pm and May 14 at 7pm) is like a playful and debauched sequel to Stranger, only in this show—which would be more aptly titled “Reckless Abandon”--Nadler is clearly a gleeful member of the club. To this passionate piano man, America's big cities in the pre-Depression era 1920s were happy, hungry, and hedonistic. There was always a party filled with sex, drugs and booze looking for a place to happen. And goodness knows, Mark Nadler wishes he'd been invited to every one of them. But since he was born too late, all he can do is serve as congenial host in re-creating the speakeasy ambiance and in this show he manages to accomplish that--only without the sex and drugs. Damn!