Interview: Catching Up With TIME STAMPS' Rian Keating

Rian Keating has a great appreciation of the art of cabaret. The teacher with a passion for Broadway cast albums can, frequently, be found in the audience at The Triad, The Laurie Beechman Theatre, and (especially) Don't Tell Mama, reveling in the artistry on the stage and supporting the artists making the music. Since the day he first arrived in New York City ( the day after he finished school), Rian Keating has been an ardent admirer of live entertainment, even when his personal path took him in a different direction.

A few years ago, though, the two paths of his life merged, as he returned to the cabaret community in nightclub acts designed as scholastic fundraisers. In recent years, Keating's club acts took on a new life, as he worked with director Tanya Moberly to bring extremely personal experiences to the stage as a storyteller. Mr. Keating's last two outings on the New York cabaret stage have been received to such widespread acclaim that he has developed a strong reputation as a talent of note. Having recently concluded an oft-extended performance of his show TIME STAMPS, Rian revisited his 2019 hit IN THIS TRAVELING HEART, stopping only long enough between shows to answer some questions from Broadway World about philanthropy, community, and the life of a cabaret artist who happens to be hearing impaired.

This interview was conducted digitally and is reproduced with slight edits.

Rian Keating, welcome to Broadway World!

Good afternoon, it is so nice to get some time to talk with you at long last.

You recently played your final performance of your new show, TIME STAMPS, after extending it over and over. What made you decide to call it a day with this one?

Well, it was extended far beyond the initial run primarily because the response was so positive and the word of mouth brought in people whom I did not know - every cabaret artist's dream! But because of the threat of omicron and not knowing whether or not we would be able to perform it or have an audience, we kept adding dates, thinking we might have to cancel. But when it got to be March and our opening number was about the birds leaving in autumn, it was clear it was time to find a new opening number or call it day. But I do feel my work on it is not quite done, so I hope to bring it back later in the year.

You are bringing back IN THIS TRAVELING HEART - why the choice to revisit this program, two-plus years later?

There are a couple of reasons I wanted to bring it back. IN THIS TRAVELING HEART was about my early childhood as an "accidental immigrant" in Ireland where I lived for a couple of years because my father was searching for his roots. It was a traumatic experience which made assimilating back to the United States and my hometown in New Hampshire incredibly difficult. It might be a cliché to say that discovering original cast recordings saved my life as an adolescent, but they took me out of my unhappiness and gave me something to focus on and indirectly led me to coming - here comes the real cliché - to New York City the day after graduating high school.

It was the "prequel" to TIME STAMPS and there were many audience members who had not seen it and wanted to know the backstory, as it were. So I thought it would be nice to revisit it while there was interest but also revisit it for myself because the pandemic has given me a different perspective on those years.

You are building up a solid reputation as a storyteller, but I know you to be a modest man. How are you finding the balancing act between humility and so much praise for your growing artistry?

Well, you might be mistaking the social anxiety that comes from being hard of hearing for modesty! The truth is while the storytelling has been lauded, the singing always will be at the mercy of the effectiveness of the hearing aids and acoustic of the room. So that will always keep any ego in check. I have had to make peace with the fact that one will always be better than the other.

The format of your shows is so story-heavy, with detailed monology and a great deal of vulnerable confession. What is the process through which you put yourself to dive so deeply within for these scripts?

I have always relied on the "patter" to ameliorate any vocal deficiencies. The audience response to the patter has always been incredibly positive and as the hearing got worse as I got older, what once was casual and off the cuff metamorphosized into something more formal. The process is pretty simple: you begin with an anecdote or memory and craft the writing in a way that will allow the audience to relate to it on a personal level. The story that results needs to be universal enough so the audience can have what we call a self-to-world connection. In other words, it no longer becomes about me but about the larger themes that are universal to which the audience can relate or empathize.

The "vulnerable confession" aspect came about when I was putting together IN THIS TRAVELING HEART with my director, Tanya Moberly. I had written superficially about my 4th-grade teacher in Ireland, a Christian Brother, but in discussions with her, I had mentioned he had groomed me using holy water from the Shrine at Lourdes in a promise to cure my deafness. She felt this was too important to leave out of what was already a personal show, and it became the nucleus of the eventual show. I was very skittish about revealing the molestation, but after the first performance, it became clear that retelling the incident served the overall arch of my story in a way that made it necessary. My friend Lucille, who had seen earlier shows, remarked, on the way out, that this had been the missing link.

That experience gave me the impetus to go deeper with TIME STAMPS. I took a memoir writing class over the lockdown, with a writer I admired, and each week there was a specific assignment meant to excavate something from the past. When I worked with Tanya choosing the writings that we would use and linking them to songs for the show, there were two stories that she insisted we include: one was a recounting of being fagbashed the summer I moved to New York at eighteen and the other was a long monologue about my sister's descent into anorexia and alcoholism. Tanya's eyes and ears were able to keep the self-to-world connection intact and the response, for the most part, was overwhelmingly positive. The monologue on my sister's illness ran twenty minutes and it was as if the audience was breathing with me. We had a lot of people come back for a second and third time. It has been very fulfilling to know that, although getting so personal is always risky, those moments of pain have ultimately proved useful in a way that transcends the trauma.

Your shows always benefit a charity. How are your fundraising efforts these days, and why is it so vastly important to you to commit to this philanthropy?

When I started doing cabaret in the 1980s it was the height of the AIDS epidemic and it just seemed, at that time, natural to raise money for GMHC or Act Up, and although cover charge might have been nominal, people gladly opened their walls. When I came back to cabaret after starting my teaching career, I established the Golden Door Scholarship Fund, the proceeds of which are given to an undocumented immigrant at my school who is pursuing the dream of a college education in America. A lot of our recipients came here not only because of economic circumstances but for safety reasons.

It is vastly important to me personally because, when I finally went to college at thirty to become a teacher, I received a full scholarship from CUNY, and I believe in the concept of always paying it forward. While the money raised from the cover charges is nominal, there are plenty of people who won't necessarily come to see me perform but are happy to write very generous checks. In the eighteen years since I came back to cabaret, we have given away over $75,000.00.

During the pandemic, you were forced to do a lot of online teaching. Put a picture in my head of your life as a teacher, these days.

Well, I am not a zoom person and teaching online was incredibly difficult, particularly because a lot of my students live in situations where they were ashamed to show themselves, or they didn't have internet access. So during the lockdown, a lot of the students went AWOL, while those who did show could only do so at odd hours since many families needed to share the computer. But these days we are back in person, trying to bridge the educational gap the pandemic created, as well as attend to the lagging psychosocial development. But even with not always being able to understand them through their masks and trying to read their facial expressions above their noses, it is great to share the same physical space and have some laughs as we attend to the business at hand. They know full well they are living through a historical time. I insist they keep a journal for their grandchildren.

You are one of the bright lights of the cabaret community, attending everyone's shows, always offering your support to other artists. Where does the instinct to be so active in the community originate, for you?

I had an epiphany in my mid-fifties: in spite of not being able to hear in crowded spaces, I would rather be out listening to music than at home watching Netflix and eating ice cream. I had read on Facebook postings about Salon's Sunday night open mic and decided I would give it a try. And then Lennie Watts started Singnasium, and the opportunity to study with some terrific people presented itself. So one thing led to another and now I seem to know an awful lot of people. But what I have really found wonderful in the past few years is watching how some performers have challenged themselves and grown. It is all a process, and I like witnessing the metamorphosis.

In what ways has your trajectory in the cabaret community lived up to your expectations, and in what ways has it surprised you?

Well, I did my first show "The Boy From Tenth Avenue" when I was 25 at the Horn of Plenty on Bleecker and Charles Street, and although a lot has changed since then, I learned immediately that there was indeed a community. So the expectation was, if you put yourself out there in an honest way, the community would respond appropriately.

Do you see yourself going back into the vault for a new show in 2022?

I am going to be doing an evening of Jacques Brel songs with no talk in May and June.

Professor Keating, what is the greatest lesson that your students have taught you?

Never judge a book by its cover. We can only ever know but a fraction of a person's experience.

Read the Broadway World reviews for In This Traveling Heart HERE and for Time Stamps HERE. Read Bart Greenberg's review for In This Traveling Heart HERE and Betsyann Faiella's review of Time Stamps HERE

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