Last night was the second of two shows put on this weekend by Kim’s Encore Vocal Group. They do two Main Stage shows twice per year and several smaller shows in between. This is the second show they have put on at the Grand Ritz Theater in Escondido. They did last year’s fall show there as well. All of their shows have a theme, which guides the selection of songs and give the cast a storyline to follow and thread through all the performances. Naturally, for that to happen without undue constraint, the themes have to be pretty broad so that the musical options available are plentiful. The themes are picked more than a year in advance and the solo tryouts and rehearsals for the show start four or five months before the performances. Stop and think about that for a moment. That means that for nine or ten months of the year, the company is rehearsing once or twice a week in preparation for a couple shows that can go by and are done in the blink of an eye despite the 150 hours put in by 50+ people. Any way you slice it, it comes out to about 1,000 person-days of effort to put on four hours of performance. It’s quite an undertaking and since only a few of those people are paid for what they do, you have to assume that it is a labor of love. But I actually believe it is much more than that and I would like to take a shot at my explanation of what is going on here.
It is very true that singing means a lot to these people. It certainly means a lot to Kim, For her I imagine that singing takes her way back to her young roots as a girl where expression through song and dance was as good as it got. Kim can honestly say that she has dedicated her life to singing. The furthest away from it she got was when she taught drama in a girls private school in New York City. Even during those days she would sing in a choir that entertained older or hospitalized folks. And at one point, more or less when she turned forty, she decided to give up the security and benefits of a full-time teaching job in order to give her musical theater dreams a last go. I met her when she was 47 and working several survival jobs to make ends meet so that she could audition and keep trying to get that big break to sing in the big show on Broadway. As soon as we partnered up, she changed gears to sing cabaret and she has thrown herself into that world with all her might. She did shows, she served on related boards, she constantly networked in the community and she achieved some of the success at singing that she always wanted. She has won awards, she sang Cole Porter at Carnegie Hall, she sang in the cabaret convention at Lincoln Center. In the cabaret world, there have been others that have made more money at it than Kim did, but she pretty much reached the pinnacle of singing success in that world.
When we moved out here to this hilltop five years ago, Kim was still tightly wound into the New York cabaret scene, so she was unsure of where, if anywhere, she would take her talent out here. In the time of COVID everyone’s plans were put on hold, especially if it involved live performances, so she had no choice but to live without her usual singing quotient. I think that hiatus helped propel her to try out for the Encore Vocal Group here in San Diego. In normal modest fashion, she wondered if she would make the grade and get accepted. I thought it was a ridiculous concern because it was hard to imagine a group in San Diego that bills itself as “Bringing Broadway to San Diego” not wanting all the vast Broadway singing experience she has. Indeed, she was a shoe in. In the run-up to the first Main Stage show, she tried out for a solo and once again said that she doubted she would get the part. When she did, I was anything but surprised. As I got to know the Encore Group a bit as a loyal audience member, it was clear that there was a lot of talent in the group, but, it is still mostly a young group and one where talent greatly exceeds performance experience the likes of which Kim has. I could see in the shows that while the vocals were generally good, the performance skills were lacking and Kim’s performances always stood out (I admit I am biased, but I still think that holds true).
Kim has been in half a dozen Main Stage shows now and has won solo parts in all of them. That is not the norm in such a large group and it is indicative of her talent and performance skill. I listen to people I don’t know walking out of these shows and I know that others found her to be a stand-out as well. As the fall show this year started to take shape, Kim was asked to take on some added duties. Specifically, she was asked to do the staging for a lot of the show, including some choreography, and to do some explicit acting coaching, which is to say, helping the other performers bring up their performance skills to match their vocal skills. Kim threw herself into this task and worked the show like a paid Broadway director, except, of course, it was all pro bono. It was good to see her so engaged in something that she loves so much. In fact, while she performed in the show, I heard little about that over the course of the four months of rehearsals. All the chatter was about her new staging and directing role. That was so much the case that when I saw the show, I was pleasantly surprised to see that she actually did have a significant performing role in the second act.
What I can say unequivocally, is that the overall show was far and away the best performance show I have seen Encore do in three years. The impact of the work Kim did to improve performance skills was extremely noticeable to me. It ended up being a very professional show with lots of movement and animation. And it was a hard show for all the performers, including Kim, to put on. The final week of any show is hard work, but to have that fall on the same week as a critical national election was especially hard. You need to understand the people that comprise this vocal ensemble. I don’t know what the national average of LGBTQ+ content is of the general population, but in Encore, Kim figures it is about 30%. The national average of women in the population is 50.5% and in Encore it’s 64% women. The majority of the ensemble are in their early 30’s. The national average adult age is well over 40 these days, so I think its fair to say that they skew younger. All of this serves to say that less than 5% of the group are likely Trump voters, with the rest fervent liberals and progressives. That is not unusual in theater and musical groups. Artistic, right-brain sorts that engage in this sort of entertainment don’t tend to worry so much about inflation and world trade. They worry about people and loving and sometimes little else. So, as you can imagine, with the election results of this week, the ensemble must have been more than a little upset (I know Kim was). And yet, as with all performers, the show must go on.
They sang of dreams and hopes for a better day and it all seemed appropriate given everything. What cannot be taken from any of us is that we are all able to carry on living in dreamland, even when all else fails.