Remy Block - Page 2

When Kathryn Allyn, an opera singer now turned Great American Songbook chanteuse, took the stage at The Cutting Room last Tuesday night, she was all va-va-voom in a curve-hugging Valentine red dress. She joined her crackerjack band-musical director Frank Ponzio, bassist Tom Hubbard, and drummer Vito Leszack-to perform homage to her favorite jazz and big band singer Anita O'Day, whose heyday came between the World War II era through the early 1960s.

Veteran cabaret performer Raissa Katona Bennett and Musical Director Kenneth Gartman are very good friends who for the past few years have been performing together in what might be called the cabaret equivalent of movie shorts. But with 3Decades in the Dark: Raissa and Kenneth Go to the Movies (a five-show run that ended Feb. 21 at the Laurie Beechman Theater), Bennett and Gartman have finally presented their first feature length duo cabaret show. Both performers have garnered praise as individual performers in musical theater and cabaret. Bennett, who is the charming producer and host of the Award-winning Concerts for City Greens at Tudor City, once played Christine in Phantom of the Opera, and has performed solo shows at venues such as the old Feinstein's. Gartman, who recently musically directed The White City in concert at 54 Below, presented a highly praised solo show in 2011. Sounds like a match made in cabaret heaven, right?

Marissa Mulder, who has been collecting rave reviews and awards in bunches over the past couple of years, debuted her new solo show, Instincts (with musical director Nate Buccieri), to a packed Metropolitan Room on Friday night January 30. It was the first effort in her new 'Residency' at the Chelsea club, not a surprising status given her steady climb up the cabaret singer hierarchy. Mulder offered an eclectic program of songs by artists from Cy Coleman to Radiohead, representing 'a snapshot of where [her] life is right now, a week away from 30.' Her distinctive vocal sound-sincere yet playful and sounding like a combination of a bell and a trumpet-is uniquely expressive, perhaps from 'living instinctively for quite a while now,' as she said in one her of her rare moments of interstitial patter.

Pamela Lewis (a.k.a. Champagne Pam), the 2013 BroadwayWorld New York Cabaret Award winner for "Best Female Vocalist" (for her show Daddy's Little Girl), performed her new solo cabaret show, New York State of Mind: The Songs of Billy Joel, in front of a rowdy, revved-up, packed house at the Metropolitan Room on Friday and Saturday, January 16 and 17. The singer with champagne-colored streaks in her long brown hair, Lewis embodies cool. And hot. She's a brassy chick from Long Island who knows who she is and she wants to party with you. In this show, she celebrates her roots, singing the songs of another Long Islander she grew up loving, first for his tuneful pop melodies and later for his words. It's cool when a woman sings an entire show of songs written by a man, doesn't fear using the "wrong" pronouns, and puts her own spin on them by changing the feel, the tempo, and the arrangements. Pamela Lewis does all that with verve and then some in this show.

To borrow an analogy from Robyn Spangler, the Los Angeles-based singer (now spending more time in New York) who brought her show “Riddle, Ronstadt and Me” to the Metropolitan Room on Monday, January 12, a dress may be fine off the rack, but when tailored specifically for a particular body, it can uniquely highlight the physical assets of the woman wearing it. Likewise, the artistry of the musical arrangement comes when it wraps a familiar song around an individual's voice and style ands allow the song to be heard in a fresh, and hopefully, wonderful way.

Bridget Everett, performing a reprise of her one-woman cabaret show, Rock Bottom (at Joe's Pub for an limited run), has become the darling of the alt-cabaret scene because she occupies the clown/fool/buffoon space to the hilt, creating a hilarious and cathartic experience for those who can take it. Everett has not met a taboo she does not dare to decimate.

Life is fragile and that's the f***ing way it is. So states Sandra Bernhard in her new one-woman show, Sandra Bernhard is #blessed, playing two shows a night this week at Joe's Pub (culminating in a set on New Year's Eve). Her end-of-the-year residency-a tradition for the past several years now-is this always-intriguing comic performer's opportunity to reflect on the past year, and offer us her unique perception of reality. And if you like your reality served straight up with a twist, as I do, this is a show for you.

Remember the anti-folk scene, born in the mid-1980s, when songwriters with guitars took the stage at little clubs and sang songs that at first seemed like folk songs, but actually turned folk on it's head, trading trademark earnestness for darker, more ironic tales? Thus was created a new direction in acoustic songwriting, giving rise to such talented acts as Bongwater and Regina Spektor. I mention this because I think I may have recently witnessed the beginning of a nascent anti-cabaret movement at Don't Tell Mama with Meg Flather's new show, Meg and John.

Clad in all black and wearing a Dia de los Muertos mask, the pianist takes his seat. The cellist follows. From the back of the theater, the Grim Reaper wearing his black cape, white mask, and carrying his trademark scythe, seems to float through the audience, reminiscent of the way a priest enters a cathedral to celebrate a mass. Accompanied by Elton John's requiem-like instrumental, 'Funeral For a Friend' (from the 1973 album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road), the beginning of Thomas Honeck's show at the Duplex, Dancing with Death, starts as a macabre ritual.