Interview: Paul Hope of PAUL HOPE'S CABARET PRESENTS CY COLEMAN! at PAUL HOPE CABARET

Paul Hope's Cabarets returns for its new season, kicking off with The Best Is Yet To Come: The Jazzy Broadway of Cy Coleman Part 1, which will be running Mondays on September 14, 21, and 28, 2026. Performances will be at Ovations nightclub in Rice Village. BROADWAY WORLD writer Brett Cullum got a chance to talk with Paul about Cy Coleman and how they are approaching his work.  

Brett Cullum: First up, Cy Coleman. Who was he? What would I know of Cy?

Paul Hope: Okay, well, you know, he was a very prolific Broadway composer, although right around the time he hit, movie musicals started cranking down. So, really, the only one of his shows to be filmed was Sweet Charity with Shirley MacLaine, which had been a hit on Broadway with Gwen Verdon, and directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, which was the same with the film. But Cy Coleman got started as a jazz musician. He was a child prodigy pianist and concertized at a very early age, and then he began writing pop songs in the ’50s. And had quite a few hits. Singers like Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, and Frank Sinatra all recorded his songs. Our first act is completely dedicated to his pop career, pre-Broadway. So, it’s all pop songs, which means it’ll zip by real fast, because that means I don’t have a lot to gas on about the shows and what have you. But I’ll let you know once my person has sung it, I’ll then let you know who recorded it, so you’re not comparing all the entire time they’re singing.

The song The Best Is Yet to Come is a fairly famous song of his, which was a big hit, and Tony Bennett and Peggy Lee both recorded it. And also songs like It Amazes Me, I Walk a Little Faster, You Fascinate Me So. These are all songs that probably audiences will go, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard that before,” because if you’ve been listening to an album of one of those singers, it’s probably popped up. A lot of these songs charted, but they weren’t at the top of the charts. But they are fantastic, fantastic songs. Liza Minnelli has recorded some of them. The wonderful Broadway singer Randy Graff, who was the original Fantine in Les Misérables, did an entire Cy Coleman CD and recorded many of these songs. So, he had this pop career, and he partnered with two lyricists during this period.

The first was a gentleman with the unfortunate name Joseph McCarthy, but he wasn’t that Joseph McCarthy. He wrote the earliest of Coleman’s hits, and then he partnered with somebody with whom he had a long partnership, which lasted into his Broadway years, with a lady named Carolyn Leigh. She had written some lyrics for the Mary Martin Peter Pan. And so they wrote some pop songs together, and then in 1959, they debuted on Broadway with Lucille Ball’s one and only Broadway musical called Wildcat. The opening number, Hey Look Me Over, has become a standard. People know that song. And Wildcat probably would have run longer had Ball run longer. But she was not someone who had the stamina for eight shows a week, and actually one night fainted on stage. She had money in the show; she was one of the producers, so Wildcat ran about seven months. And as long as Lucy was in it, people were lining up, and the score got good reviews.

Then came Little Me. And Little Me was a book by Patrick Dennis, who wrote Auntie Mame. And this was his second book, a satire on movie-star autobiographies. It’s about a very buxom but talent-free movie star and her memoirs, and her name is Belle Poitrine, which translates to big chest. And to do the musical, they got Neil Simon to write the script, and they got Sid Caesar to play all the men in her life. So he played seven characters in one evening. But also, Caesar had some addiction issues, and so he actually passed out on stage one night.

I think it was a tough season, because a lot of other really big shows were opening the same season. And Little Me was a hit until those shows opened. It was a bigger hit; it had more of an audience, but then those other shows sort of stole the audience from it. But it also threw standards like I’ve Got Your Number and Real Live Girl, which I—my first time to hear I’ve Got Your Number was Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore singing it on The Dick Van Dyke Show, doing a floor show, dressed as convicts with a chain between them, with the prisoner’s number across their chest. But that song is from Little Me, and once again, was recorded by people like Bennett, Peggy Lee, and Frank Sinatra.

And then his biggest hit in the evening that we’re doing, which was ’65, was Sweet Charity. And, which, by the way, Bob Fosse had choreographed Little Me. And then he developed Sweet Charity as a vehicle for his wife, Gwen Verdon. There you have a whole plethora of standards, like I’m a Brass Band " and " If My Friends Could See Me Now, all of which we will be doing. Just for the audience’s sake, I’ll rattle off some of his later shows, so you’ll also have some more context for his career. He also wrote I Love My Wife, Barnum, On the Twentieth Century, The Will Rogers Follies, and I think his last Broadway show was a show called The Life that came out the same year as Titanic.

And once again, none of these shows were flops. I mean, Barnum was a huge hit. On the Twentieth Century was a hit. Would have probably run longer if they hadn’t cast Madeleine Kahn as the lead. She lasted about a month, but she couldn’t do eight shows a week, so that was Judy Kaye’s big break. She was the understudy who got to take over the star part.

Brett Cullum: But who are your singers this time out? Who all is coming on board?

Paul Hope: I’ve got a couple of new people that I haven’t worked with before, who are quite wonderful, Chaney Moore and Lizzie Cooper. And they’re both just wonderful. Then I’ve got Tamara Siler back. She’s doing two of the three Mondays. She has to go out of town for the third Monday, so Lizzie and Chaney are taking her solos for that third Monday. And then my men are Pantelis Karastamatis, our Greek matinee idol, and Richard Paul Fink, who is back, our big baritone, and then Michael Schiavone and Jude Ebert, who are my youngins. So, they get to do some of the lighter-weight things that will benefit from their particular personalities.

Some new voices on board is always exciting, and they’re having a great time learning this stuff. Particularly with Lizzie, I said she was singing on the other side of the tracks from Little Me, and I said, “This should be an audition song for you. You need to keep this in your book,” because she was just knocking it out of the ballpark.

There’s another song that you might have heard, because Barbra Streisand recorded it early in her career, When in Rome, I Do As the Romans Do. That’s where I first heard that. That’s Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh. And so Chaney is doing that number. So, it’s just a really good group, and Steven Jones, as musical director, has done some lovely group arrangements on our group numbers. We’re doing The Best Is Yet to Come as a group number, and Hey Look Me Over from Wildcat is a group number, and he’s doing that.

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