Stephen Hanks - Page 12

Stephen Hawking and his fellow physicists may not have yet figured out the formula for traveling through the time-space continuum, but apparently the Metropolitan Room discovered the secret. Last Friday night (October 26), I walked through the curtain into the main performance space and entered a time tunnel that took me from the 21st century into the 1960s and '70s. Two lovely, rising young stars of cabaret, Lauren Fox and Jennifer Sheehan (photo left), had obviously hurtled though that same time warp because in two separate shows on the same evening, they performed songs that had been written and recorded 15 to 25 years before they were born. In the process they transported this particular Baby Boomer joyously back to his youth and to the days of cultural upheaval, generation gaps, peace, love, war, and some of the best pop/rock music ever written.

In her new cabaret effort, It's a Good Day: A Tribute to Miss Peggy Lee (running four more times through next February at the Metropolitan Room), Stacy Sullivan so adroitly articulates and emotionally inhabits the songs-and Lee's life story-through the astute arrangements and the well-crafted script, that it is almost impossible not to come away with a new appreciation for one of America's greatest jazz/blues/pop singers.

There may have been 40 cabaret performers strutting their stuff this past week at the 23rd New York Cabaret Convention at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center, but the true star of the three-night extravaganza (October 17-19) was the late Donald Smith, the cabaret impresario and guru to the genre's luminaries, who died this past March at 79. Sponsored by the Mabel Mercer Foundation, which Smith founded in 1985, this year's Convention featured numerous homages to Smith from the performers, many of whom had their career's supported and advanced with the help of the colorful and beloved cabaret producer and promoter. Early in Wednesday's Gala Opening Night show, the 'first lady of the American keyboard' Barbara Carroll called her friend Donald Smith 'the quintessential New Yorker,' and when Mark Nadler closed night one with George and Ira Gershwin's 'Our Love Is Here to Stay,' he said, 'Everybody who cares about the myths of these songs are in this room tonight.' Well, it was clear that anyone who cared about Donald Smith was at the Rose Theater for at least one of the three shows.

Back in the 1970s and '80s, when the National Hockey League was at its pugilistic pinnacle, the joke was, 'I went to the fights last night and a hockey game broke out.' I thought of a variation on that theme last Saturday night (October 13) during a show at Town Hall that was part of the venue's eighth annual Cabaret Festival: 'I went to a Jekyll & Hyde musical convention tonight and a Linda Eder concert broke out.' Eder's audience showed up having imbibed the J & H Kool Aid, a toxic brew that makes one believe that some of the most manipulative, derivative and over-the-top musical theater songs ever written are Rodgers and Hammerstein classics incarnate. As most of the audience was transforming into grotesquely passionate full Jekkie mode, the show itself (co-starring former J & H stars Christiane Noll and Robert Cuccioli) manifested a spilt personality-part Eder concert, part J & H reunion show.

In a reprise of her highly-praised March 2012 run of her cabaret show, 'Illusions,' at the Metropolitan Room that served as a launch party for her new CD of the same name, Marissa Mulder proved again that her rise as a New York cabaret princess is no illusion.

Forty years after first coming together in 1972, Janis Siegel and The Manhattan Transfer (which includes Tim Hauser, Alan Paul and Cheryl Bentyne) is still going strong. This Thursday night at 54 Below (11pm), Siegel will preview songs from her upcoming CD before she even records them in the studio. In this exclusive interview with BroadwayWorld.com Cabaret Columnist Stephen Hanks, one of the country's greatest female jazz singers talks about all the current and upcoming performing projects that have her as busy and productive as ever.

In Cougar the Musical, book writer and lyricist Donna Moore humorously embraces the older woman-younger man dating phenomenon with the declaration that "inside the word C-O-U-R-A-G-E is Cougar," a notion that goes down as easily as the "Cougartini," the vodka and pomegranate juice cocktail the audience is served before the show. Thankfully, you don't have to be tipsy to enjoy this whimsical social commentary and musical tribute to older women and the men who love them-or who at least want to bed them.

Currently playing at the Metropolitan Room on Friday nights through September (at 9:30 pm), Two for the Road starring singer Shaynee Rainbolt and musical director/pianist Donn Trenner is a transcendent cabaret show infused with romantic nostalgia. While the pairing of Rainbolt, a critically-acclaimed jazz singer (and multiple MAC and Bistro-Award winner), with Trenner, an Emmy-nominated musical director, conductor, and arranger (who has played piano for a Hollywood Walk of Fame full of stars including Ann-Margret, Shirley MacLaine and Bob Hope) seems as close to a cabaret show slam dunk as you get, there is an intense connection between these two performers that is palpable from the moment Rainbolt wraps her luscious voice around Trenner's jazzy piano riffing for the show's opening number.

Since bursting onto the New York musical theater scene in 1995 with his short-lived, but highly-praised Off-Broadway revue Songs For a New World, and then winning a 1999 Tony Award for Best Score for another short-lived show, Parade, pundits have been consistently predicting Jason Robert Brown's membership into the musical theater composer pantheon. While he has quite made it there yet, this week at his concerts at 54 Below (September 11-15), Brown offered a preview of songs from upcoming musicals that could finally allow him entree among the gods of Broadway musical composing.

Acclaimed cabaret singer, Broadway performer and host of The Broadway Breakfast on Sirius/XM Radio, Christine Pedi will perform her hilarious holiday show, There's No Bizness Like Snow Bizness at Savannah Georgia's Charles Morris Center on November 29, 2012. Proceeds from this one-night concert will benefit the American Traditions Competition. The multi-part competition is held January 15-19, 2013 at the Lutheran Church of the Ascension and the Lucas Theatre for the Arts.

In her current cabaret show at 54 Below, Marin Mazzie, who has starred in Passion, Ragtime, Kiss Me Kate, Man of La Mancha, Spamalot and Next to Normal, pays homage to her childhood and teenage years in Rockford, Illinois, to the songs her parents loved, and to some of the 1960s and 1970s hits that fed Mazzie's passion to be a singer. ("These songs were the foundation for what was to come.") And man, was she sexy doing it.

Originally written in 2003 and given a New York workshop reading in 2005, the Joe Iconis musical, The Black Suits, is concluding a mid-summer run at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, MA. Could the next stop for this energetic Rock and Roll musical about a Long Island garage band be Off-Broadway? BroadwayWorld.com columnist Stephen Hanks interviewed Iconis to gauge the potential.

American Traditions Competition (ATC) is now searching for singers to submit applications for their 2013, annual competition held January 15-19 in Savannah, Georgia. Deadline for applications is October 15, 2012. A downloadable application is available on the American Traditions website, www.americantraditionscompetition.com, on the Contestants Information page, along with complete American Traditions Competition details.

Three days before before being inducted into the New York Blues Hall of Fame at the soon to close Kenny's Castaways, Joe Louis Walker and his band played an August 16th show at B.B. King's on 42nd Street and not only brought down the house but made a believer out of this lapsed blues fan.

In preparation for the All-Day Long Island Al Jolson Festival (in Oceanside, NY) on Saturday, August 18, BroadwayWorld.com cabaret columnist Stephen Hanks offers his take on what made the 'World's Greatest Entertainer' so great, and muses about the reasons as to why he is such a devotee of the man who once owned Broadway and starred in the first talking picture.

When Lauren Robert powerfully performed her early August show at Iridium Jazz Club, her 12-song set of blues, R&B and gospel tunes included four original songs off her recently-released CD, Listen-I Mean It. But if her live show was just offering a titillating CD tease, the disc itself is a soulful seduction-a 15-song package of passion, intimacy, vulnerability, and risk, all wrapped in lyrical expressiveness, melodic intensity, and some of the best blues/rock/gospel singing to come down the pike since Janis asked the Lord to buy her a Mercedes Benz.

So many cabaret shows, so little time . . . to write reviews that is. During his almost two years as a cabaret reviewer, BroadwayWorld.com critic Stephen Hanks managed to do a pretty good job of writing critiques during a show's run or soon after the run ended. But this summer he just couldn't keep up. Finally, here are observations on 10 performances over the past two months.

It was a soulful force of nature that shook the music memorabilia on the walls of the Iridium on the night of August 7. From her opening number-a song from her recently released debut CD 'Listen, I Mean It'-veteran R&B singer Lauren Robert gave her musical testimony through her intense interpretation of blues, gospel and rock songs. She meant it. And everyone gladly listened.

In preparation for the All-Day Long Island Al Jolson Festival (in Oceanside, NY) on Saturday, August 18, BroadwayWorld.com cabaret columnist Stephen Hanks offers his take on what made the 'World's Greatest Entertainer' so great, and muses about the reasons as to why he is such a devotee of the man who once owned Broadway and starred in the first talking picture.

If you're looking for some cool cabaret/nightclub shows over the next month, try these on for size: Darren Williams (July 26) and Lauren Robert (August 7) are ready to rock Iridium, while two lovely ladies of cabaret will be featured at Feinstein's: Karen Oberlin (July 24-28) and Raissa Katona Bennett (August 21-25).