Life Is A Cabaret

Life Is A Cabaret

Kim has been singing and dancing her whole life. It is a very big part of who she is. When she has music to learn and arrangements to consider, she is at her happiest. SHe discovered cabaret as her medium of choice shortly after we got together in 2005, so it is safe to say she has been doing cabaret for about twenty years. While we lived in NYC she was a member of the Board of Directors of the Manhattan Association of Clubs and Cabarets (MAC), which meant that she was a fixture in the largest cabaret community in the country. SHe sat on that board for more than ten years and because Lennie Watts was the Chairman and primary driver of that organization, when he left the board she did what acolytes often do, she stayed on the board for a few years to keep him updated as to its doing and also joined the board of his new organization, Singnasium.

Kim has put on perhaps a dozen of her own cabaret shows over the years and has won an award or two. She has also taken courses on cabaret organization, singing and arranging, mostly from Lennie. Over the years, she and Lennie have become fast friends. In our household, we refer to Lennie as her cabaret husband. Luckily for me, Lennie is gay, but I think he would agree that he and Kim are best friends.

Lennie stayed with us last week for a vacation week from NYC. He has done this before, but it has been a few years since he’s been here since his summers have gotten busier with teaching and workshop gigs in Connecticut and Italy, all of which have been good for his income stream during the off-season when teaching cabaret in NYC is quiet. It was funny that his visit came during a week that was after Kim did her monthly performance of singing with her jazz group, Straight No Chaser, which she does one Friday a month at the nearby Teri campus. It was also a week that was just before her latest Encore singing performance, which was last night. She had a cabaret performance that evening. We dropped Lennie off at the airport in the morning and by evening, Kim was acting as co-Emcee of the cabaret show, called This Is Life. She Emceed the first half of the show and performed the ending number of the second half by singing Better, a song from the musical A Class Act. While there are many good voices in the Encore ensemble, there are no better performers than Kim. It is not an accident that she was positioned to close the show.

Cabaret as an art form dates back to Weimar Republic in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Cabaret was as much a subtle expression of rebellion against the authoritarian rule that was forming in Germany as the National Socialists (Nazis) took hold of the country. The anti-diversity and discrimination against any aberrant lifestyles like the gay lifestyle, as it were, of the day caused the youth of Berlin to struck out through dance and song. Cabaret was the most prominent of these anti-establishment expressions, but swing dancing was another. Cabaret became better known because of a play and a movie by that name that came to Broadway and the big screen sequentially in the 60s and early 70s.

Cabaret in New York and elsewhere continued as a popular club performance format that combined song and mild storytelling in an intimate club venue that could be produced and run with minimal cost and provided club owners with a good source of regular customers. Kim got into cabaret when we got together. Before that she was auditioning regularly for Broadway musical roles and was regularly getting cast in the road companies that would go on long road tours of the U.S. or internationally. These companies must put on Broadway quality shows but with the people who wished they were on Broadway, but couldn’t quite break in. Kim had been in productions of Oklahoma, Sound of Music, State Fair and other Broadway standards. In fact, when we first met, she was offered a spot in the Asian touring company of 42nd Street. She turned it down in favor of spending the time on our developing relationship, a decision which I am forever greatful. After that, she shifted her interest to singing cabaret as her musical outlet.

One of my favorite cabaret shows Kim produced was with her friend Myra (a vocal coach at Juilliard). It was called What a Pair and was a series of vignettes of famous female pairs like Lucy & Ethel, Thelma & Louise, Wilma & Betty and others. It was thematic and fun and the songs were very entertaining. I always prefer a cabaret with a strong and fun theme. Whenever Kim is preparing a show I always quiz her about the theme and the pitter-patter that she plans. Generally she tells me to go about my own business since we seem to have very different views of what is entertaining. Since Kim’s shows are always great, I should probably just give up on trying to improve them, even from just this one angle.

Cabaret is not much of a business, which is really a shame. In some ways it is the perfect entertainment format for people of our age. It is relatively comfortable to attend with crowds not being like going to a Taylor Swift concert. The music is usually familiar, which I think is always more fun than new material. The timeframe of the shows usually last an hour or a bit more, which is just right as our attention spans diminish and our sedentary ways require us to get up and move around every so often so as not to stiffen up completely. I think that all of us have to have things that get us off the couch and get us out among other people and cabaret is a good vehicle for all of that. I feel very fortunate that Kim is a cabaret maven because I not only get to see her perform (I am her #1 fan), but through her I get to see other performers who are not up to main stage standards, but are actually very good. Last night’s show had about 15 performers singing a wide array of songs. Most of them were solo, some with an accompanist and others using an arranged orchestral recording. There was one duet and one quartet and all manner of styles, but they were all well rehearsed and good. I am sometimes less interested in others singing cabaret because I have found that it is sometimes too self-indulgent and less focused on entertaining the audience. That was not the case last night. All of these singers set out to please the small audience and they did a good job at it.

Encore is a 501© charitable organization, so they charge a modest amount for their tickets, sell some refreshments when the venue allows them to do so and sells merchandise and holds silent auctions during shows to raise money. Last night, Encore had a raffle for two VIP tickets to their November show with two Encore hats thrown in for good measure. I am in the habit of supporting Kim’s musical endeavors, so whether its her jazz ensemble or Encore, I always participate in whatever fundraising effort they are pursuing that day. Sometimes I sponsor a song, sometimes I buy extra tickets and invite friends and family. This time, when they came around with raffle tickets I bought $20 worth and sure enough, after the show I was duly rewarded by having the winning ticket. That will insure that I am at the November show (which I would have been anyway) and available to donate again for whatever cause they are pushing. Cabaret is a big part of our lives because for Kim, and now me, life is a cabaret.