Remy Block - Page 2

"If I get my sh*t right, you're gonna move," Michael Garin declared from the Metropolitan Room piano, energy crackling through every fiber of his compact form as he leaned into the microphone. On September 28, Garin opened his new show, A Punch In The Mouth, banging out a muscular, unexpected boogie-woogie 'Habañera' arrangement of 'Surf Carmen' (Bizet-Kern, arr. Garin). A 1992 Drama Desk winner (for the show Song of Singapore), Garin often performs with his 'tattooed ex-ingenue' wife Mardie Millet, but tonight she sat in the audience, leaving Garin to fend for himself. For the next hour, Garin held court at the keyboard, reeling off his show biz stories, teaching music theory, and wandering into emotional family history. 

Strange, enchanted boy David Vernon swept through the Metropolitan Room last Thursday night, greeting guests on his way to the stage. He cut a dashing, old-world figure in his long, fitted coat and austere, angular posture. The man possesses style. Opening his show LOVE: The Concert with Eden Abhez's 1941 beauty 'Nature Boy,' Vernon wove lines of dialogue into the singing, telling the beginnings of the spare yet vivid tale he would unspool over the course of the evening; the story of his two true loves, both men, which also contained the revelation of his own dual identities--masculine and feminine. 

Christine Lavin, prolific (and dang funny) songwriter and performer of the east coast cabaret and folk scenes, creates a hootenanny during her residency at Don't Tell Mama most Wednesday nights in September. Co-hosting the series is Don White, folk singer-songwriter and activist out of Lynhurst, MA. The special guest on the evening of September 9 was LA-based lyricist, singer, producer Hillary Rollins. Each weekly show features a guest with whom Lavin and White will sing and laugh and swap stories. It's a good time.

Back on May 14th, native New Yorkers Rachelle Garniez and Carol Lipnik each performed her own original songs at Joe's Pub, and while it was several months ago, the show remains embossed in my mind, as meaningful works of art have a way of doing. Each woman has a distinct and wonderful voice, both literally and figuratively. Both artists are exceedingly accomplished, writing and playing their music around New York City and the world for more than 30 years.

In Mr. Lucky, Jeff Macauley's urbane cabaret show featuring the songs of Henry Mancini, (which recently finished a three-show run at the Metropolitan Room) you learn that the famed composer came by his luck and success the old-fashioned way: single-minded purpose fueled by hard work and determination. Yet, Macauley, a former Bistro Award winner, makes telling Mancini's story look so easy. Debonair in his impeccable suit and fashionable specs, the singer uses a light touch to deliver songs he was determined to bring out of the background and into the spotlight.

In her new cabaret show Thirsty! (which returns to Joe's Pub for a second show on June 1 at 9:30), Scott regales the audience with tales of a young(ish) single woman living in New York City as an aspiring musical theater performer, whose antics tend to run toward the debauched, since she has 'no moral compass and [loves] being social.' Scott, named Time Out New York's Top Ten Cabaret Artist of 2013, has graced the stages of Joe's Pub, 54 Below, the Laurie Beechman, the Metropolitan Room, and every gay bar on the Eastern Seaboard.

I like Megan Hilty because she laughs a lot. She's fun! A young star of stage and screen-- having established herself as "Glinda" in Wicked on Broadway (2005-06) and subsequently becoming a TV star playing complicated and talented Ivy Lynn in the NBC hit musical drama Smash-Hilty opened her current run at the Cafe Carlyle Tuesday night to an excited, adoring audience. On stage with her band, directed by musical savant Matt Cusson--sporting a jaunty Newsies-style cap--at the keyboard (and including her husband Brian Gallagher on guitar, Ryan Hoagland on percussion, and Dennis Michael Keefe on upright bass), Hilty's effervescence was palpable, a heady mixture of genuine glee and sleep deprivation, as she effusively exclaimed her delight at being back at the Carlyle, following her last run when she was six-months pregnant. Now she has an eight-month old daughter. While her initial intention was to create a show about motherhood, the show ended up as a night of standards and Smash selections, giving the people what they know and love.

It wasn't so much watching a performance as it was bearing witness to an interior exploration, the chrysalis-busting conjuring of an artist stepping out of the shadows to claim her own territory. Lisa Fischer, the extraordinarily gifted vocalist featured in the 2014 Academy Award-winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, took the stage at Birdland for a run of shows from April 24-27. She was joined on stage by the band Grand Baton, led by musical director and arranger JC Maillard, filled out by Aidan Carroll on upright bass and Thierry Arpino on drums. Maillard, sporting blond dreads reminiscent of Lisa Bonet circa Lenny Kravitz, mostly played his custom made Sazbass, but also picked up the electric guitar and played keys. The set consisted of eight songs, including encore, but the arrangements were elastic, allowing each song to stretch into jams, riffs and solos, traversing diverse emotional and sonic terrain.

You probably know Gloria Reuben from the 1990s TV medical drama ER (in which she played Jeanie Boulet, an HIV-positive physician assistant on the hospital's staff). Or you may know her from playing the slave Elizabeth Keckley in the Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln. Or if you are super-cultured, you may know that she played Condoleeza Rice in David Hare's play, Stuff Happens. But I bet you didn't know that in 2000, she was one of Tina Turner's back up singers or that she began playing classical piano at age 5. But you should have known that Reuben sang at the Metropolitan Room last Thursday night to celebrate the release of her forthcoming CD, Perchance to Dream. I was there, so I now know that Gloria Reuben is not only an accomplished actor, but also a refined musician and an ethereal singer.

While the frat boys parked their boozy asses in the bar car (aka the couch) for the long road to the NCAA's Final Four over the past few weeks, NYC's village cabaret club The Duplex offered an alternative "March Madness": Cabaret shows about being crazy. As a devotee of time on a different sort of couch, I was drawn in to three separate performances--from Michael Shea, Stacie Koby, and Amber Petty--seeking some music therapy to get me through the tail end of a long winter.

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.