Review: Lorna Dallas Resplendent In THE CABARET FILES at Chelsea Table + Stage
Lorna Dallas has sprung and the bloom is beautifully on the rose.
It’s award season in the cabaret community. Five days ago, everyone sped off to the Bistro Awards, and two days from now, all the people will head over to the MAC Awards. Last night, at Chelsea Table + Stage, there might, well, have been another award ceremony, considering all the luminaries filling the venue - many of the industry’s brightest lights were nestled into the chairs of the chic club, many of them former winners and nominees of both the MAC and the Bistro, all there to collect the prize of the evening: a new Lorna Dallas show.
Lorna Dallas is one of the leading ladies of cabaret, indeed one of the greatest artists the industry boasts. The fact that she plays only one or two dates a year, and always a one-off, as opposed to a run of shows, is both a blessing and a curse - a curse because we need more of La Lorna throughout the year, and a blessing because, with these limited appearances in New York City, her stock rises, every show is a must-see, a treat and a treasure to which all the people flock. Dallas and her impeccable musical cabarets are a rarity for which the aficionados wait, something they keep their eye out for, an event not to be missed. And, thanks to the Dallas work ethic, commitment to artistry, and dedication to quality control, each show has a solid foundation and strong backbone. THE CABARET FILES is no exception.
For thirty-five years, Dallas details, she has been crafting cabaret with her beloved “Team Dallas” (Director Barry Kleinbort, and Musical Director Christopher Denny), and those pursuits have bestowed upon her an extensive filing cabinet filled with scripts, shows, stories, and songs. So, for her spring offering of 2026 (Dallas cleverly chose the first day of spring to debut the show), Lorna Dallas has opened up the filing cabinet in order to curate a musical gallery of memories, some of the portraits with accompanying dialogue, and some with a wish only to have the stories state their case on their own. This is one of the joys, one of the benefits, one of the trademarks of a Lorna Dallas show. The Lady does not feel the need to explain everything; she does not restrict her audience to only her points of view, she does not pander. Lorna Dallas presents her tales with true and complete detail, allowing each audience member to paint the picture in their head, based on what they experience from her performance. The monologues she performs are in place only if they serve the complete story, and serve it, they do.
Observe how Lorna Dallas provides comprehensive reminiscences of her time with Cleo Laine and Ivor Novello, of the creation of her cabaret files, how songs got filed away for later, forgotten, found again, and freshened up for their debut in 2026, and of the people who have mattered to her most, from Laine to Novello, from Kleinbort to Denny, and, especially, her late husband Garry Brown. It is very clear that, for Lorna Dallas, the most important parts of her life are the love and the music. Even her chuckle-worthy stories about her smaller-than-that hometown, her churchy family, and the need to get away from both are laden with love and affection… and deliciously cheeky winks at the audience, sideways grins, and an eye roll or two. This is another facet that makes every Lorna Dallas show a gem - her absolute ability to access her emotional truth on the spot. There are cabaret and concert lovelies who get up on the stage and look pretty and sing pretty and 
say pretty, all the while denying us the soft underbelly: not Lorna Dallas. Lorna Dallas is in it. She is in every story, she is in the pocket, she is in the moment. Though clearly scripted and rehearsed, Dallas makes a point of not being locked into that which she has prepared and practiced. Her monologues are memorized to protect her, but her speeches are spoken in real time, to her audience of people into whose eyes she looks as she jokes about the silly stuff, and shares about the intimate moments. She’s a professional. She shows up to work, to entertain, to take you on the journey, whether it’s through the spoken word or the songs sung - and the accessibility we see during the talkie bits carries over into the musical performances, something that those pretty looking, pretty singing, pretty speaking players sometimes struggle with. The acting of the musical numbers, here, is spectacular. You could turn off your hearing aids, put on your noise-canceling headphones, then sit back and just watch Lorna Dallas’s performance and get the full story, just by watching her facial expression and physical intentionality, as is the case with a fully realized performance of “I Wish It So.” These are full presentations of these stories played to exceptional arrangements by Misters Denny and Kleinbort, sung in a manner that will open your eyes and drop your jaw. Lorna Dallas is singing way above our weight class, but to her, this is as easy as cutting an ice cream cake with a hot knife.
Observe the ease with which Ms. Dallas traipses through the Gershwin classic “By Strauss” - this is some complicated stuff, here, yet it is as though Lorna walked into a cocktail party with an anecdote about some local character she has just passed on Ninth Avenue. She is flitty and flirty and filled with fun while executing complex musical phrases that she and Denny have made even more so through their own embellishments of the composition. Note the depth of emotion and timbre in her performance of Mr. Novello’s “Dark Music” - is this a coloratura singing a torch song? Why, yes, it is: I’ll take two to go, please. It’s like an espresso made of freshly roasted dark beans, with a slice of dark chocolate mousse cake on the side. Make that three to go, please, because this writer has never heard this side of Lorna. She is in exquisite voice, hitting notes that you expect, yet still, they surprise you. The notes, though, are not the only surprises in The Cabaret Files because, in a rare treat, Christopher Denny duets with Lorna on the “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow” duet from Mr. Sondheim’s modern-day classic Follies (and what a sweet voice he has, too!), and although we all have come to expect some pithy Barry Kleinbort specialty lyrics in a Lorna Dallas show, the ones he scripted for the “Let’s Fly Away/Let’s Get Away From It All” mashup drew many a gleeful titter from the crowd. Thank goodness for this dream team, and long may they reign. The gentlemen serve the Lady’s artistic aesthetic as much as she serves theirs; it is a perfect balance of artistic collaboration.
The Cabaret Files is lush with special moments, so it is difficult to name those which rise to the top, but this writer found particular resonance with a blissful, a beautiful, a bountiful performance of the song “Chain of Love” from the woefully under-represented musical “The Grass Harp,” a magnificently mashed-up opening number that melds “There’s No Business Like Show Business” with “The Glamorous Life” from the film A Little Night Music, and an emotion-laden performance of “Was” from Kleinbort’s musical of the same name about a senior citizen named Dorothy Gale who is suffering from dementia in which Denny’s arrangement impeccably incorporates a famous ballad from the film The Wizard of 
Oz. These three musical moments in The Cabaret Files are richly rewarding but the undisputable highlights of the night were a breathtaking medley of Portia Nelson’s “As I Remember Him” and Jerry Herman’s “And I Was Beautiful,” and the opportunity to hear Lorna Dallas sing two songs from Show Boat, which, in 1971, introduced Dallas to her mentor and lifelong BFF Cleo Laine, as well as international stardom. To hear Dallas sing “You Are Love” fifty-five years after she played Magnolia Hawk's in the West End is reason enough to get out of the house and get to the cabaret. But that’s just one number in a marvelous night of musical storytelling by the masterful, the magical, the once-in-a-lifetime Mistress of Music that is Lorna Dallas. She is an award to be acknowledged, appreciated, and absorbed every time she sets foot onto a stage, and The Cabaret Files is not a show to be filed away as a one-off event - it is one that should be considered mandatory viewing, the next time it plays this or any other town.
Find great shows to see on the Chelsea Table + Stage website HERE.
Visit the Lorna Dallas Instagram page HERE.
THIS is the Christopher Denny Facebook page.
Barry Kleinbort can be found online HERE.
Photos by Stephen Mosher.
Reader Reviews
Videos