Two shows this week by the English performer La JohnJoseph have just been canceled. Read more about it here on our sister blog, Upstaged.

Time Out Award honoree Poor Baby Bree

The Manhattan Association of Cabarets and Clubs, or MAC, has just released its slate of nominees for its 2009 awards, to be held on Monday, May 18, at B.B. King Blues Club and Grill. As usual, the nominees reflect a deep insularity on the part of the cabaret community: For example, the English singer Barb Jungr, who gave two of last year’s best performances, hasn’t been nominated, while many performers with deeper ties to the local scene have been lauded for lesser work.

That said, the MAC Awards have their place, which is to give recognition to smaller clubs and lesser-known performers, and the awards ceremony provides a useful chance to sample the wares of many performers at one admittedly long sitting.

Among the highlights of this year’s slate are two of its honorary MAC Award recipients: The marvelous Polly Bergen, who is to be recognized for lifetime achievement; and the unique Poor Baby Bree, who will received the Time Out New York Award, selected annually by yours truly. (Past recipients include Jackie Hoffman, Maude Maggart and Leslie Kritzer.) A copy of the full list of  nominees—not yet available on the MAC site—is after the jump.

Read more »

Last year, the sensational Barb Jungr took the top spot on our top-ten list of the year’s best cabaret shows. Her new set gives her an excellent shot at repeating that distinction in December. Simply put, this English chanteuse—whom TONY has written about several times in the past, including in this 2008 profile—is one of the very best nightclub singers in the world, and she knocks the genteel Café Carlyle on its pearl-studded ear.

Jungr’s engagement ends this Saturday, March 28. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a cabaret person, you must see this show. And here’s why (after the jump):

Read more »

Music and theater venues have been closing left and right lately, but none of the news has been quite so distressing as the sudden announcement—just a few minutes ago—that the Zipper Factory would be ceasing operations immediately. (I had planned to see a promising young British duo called Frisky and Mannish there tonight; the show has been pulled, along with everything else.)

The news is especially troubling because the Zipper has really been coming into its own over the past few months, offering full and eclectic schedules that have given Joe’s Pub a run for its money. Among the upcoming-show casualties is the second edition of Our Hit Parade (see photo), the wild premiere of which was one of the best shows of last year; my equally smitten colleague Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote a great description of it here. Part two had been scheduled for January 31; it’s unclear where the show will land now. (To track this question, check out the group’s fun new website—which features a weird new cover of a different pop song every day.)

Lovers of alternative theater and music in Manhattan are getting used to taking punches. But the Zipper closure hits below the belt.

The name Splash doesn’t do justice to the tidal wave of love that greeted Patti LuPone last week when she made a “surprise” guest appearance at the Chelsea gay nightclub to promote her wonderful new CD, Patti LuPone at Les Mouches. I haven’t seen such excitement at Splash since this summer, when the spectacular Leslie Kritzer… But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

First things first: Earlier in the night, the Gypsy star had been the featured guest at a New York Times panel on the subject of “Broadway Divas as Gay Icons.” Where better to adjourn than to Splash’s “Musical Mondays,” at which hundreds of gay men congregate weekly to pay their devotion to musical-theater clips, displayed on multiple huge video screens? News of LuPone’s appearance had been carefully leaked all day, and Splash was ready: The walls were plastered with posters for the CD, and the club’s patrons—many of them also plastered—buzzed with anticipation for their queen bee.

At 9pm, the Splash dance floor was crammed shoulder to shoulder with Broadway-musical aficionados (a younger and trendier version than you typically find at such show-tune haunts as Marie’s Crisis). Onscreen was Barbra Streisand at the height of her belting powers, sprinting to catch a ship at the climax of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in the film Funny Girl. “Run, Barbra, run!” yelled one spectator. “Don’t break a heel!” another helpfully added.

The plan was to prime the pump by showing a montage of LuPone’s most celebrated clips just prior to her entrance at Splash, including her Tony Awards–broadcast performances from Evita, Gypsy and Anything Goes. But only the Evita clip made it to the screen. At 9:30pm, LuPone pulled up outside the club in a black minivan limo and strode into the club. After a brief introduction from Michael Urie, who plays her son on TV’s Ugly Betty, LuPone said a few gracious words, lapped up an abundance of adoration, and then…left. The whole event—captured for posterity here—lasted less than three minutes.

The gays were delighted to see her, of course, but it seemed like a bit of an anticlimax. Not long afterward, LuPone was downstairs at the restaurant Elmo, at a reception for the CD release. I met her at the bar, she ordered a prosecco, and we chatted briefly; she revealed that she has started work on her autobiography, to be coauthored by Digby Diehl, best known for his work on Esther Williams’s tell-all memoir, The Million Dollar Mermaid. (“I’ve go a lot of stories to tell,” LuPone said cheerfully. “And some of them won’t make some people happy.”) Then she turned away to greet her guests.

Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity. “I have to sing!” LuPone announced. “I owe them a song! I can’t believe I didn’t sing anything! I have to go back and sing something a cappella! I’ll be back in five minutes.” And so at 9:55pm, LuPone and her entourage crammed back into the black minivan, which took them all straight back to Splash.

A clip from The Drowsy Chaperone was playing when she arrived, and she strode straight onstage. The video and the crowd went silent. LuPone sang a sweet, unaccompanied song: “A Hundred Years from Today.” At the lyric “Hold me closer, say you’ll be mine,” she stretched out her arms at shoulder length, rather than above her head à la Evita Peron, but the reaction was the same: a wild ovation that stopped the song cold. For a moment, the stage at Splash was the balcony at the Casa Rosada, albeit a different shade of pink. And then, it was back to Elmo, where prosecco, colleagues and cocktail shrimp awaited.

Why does all of this, you may ask, remind me of Leslie Kritzer? Simple. Because… But wait. Yes, wait. Again. Because this blog post, dear reader, is already too long. And I have much, much more to say. So tune in next week, kids, for Les Mouches, Part II: Puttin’ on the Kritz.

If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear glitter in your hair—at least, if you’re part of Weimar New York, the brazen troupe of singers, performance artists and burlesque provocateurs that has been been entertaining and appalling Gotham audiences for the past two years in a series of outré concert events.

I first caught the series at its Joe’s Pub debut in March 2006, and wrote a profile of its high-spirited demiurge, Earl Dax, for TONY last year. Drawing inspiration from the subversive cabaret shows that spouted like beautiful weeds in Germany between the two World Wars, Dax has mixed some of the performance world’s most talented and shameless performers—including such irregular regulars as Justin Bond, Taylor Mac, Tigger! and the international metadiva Meow Meow—into an unstable solution of singing, cynicism and sleaze. The group’s cult following has grown steadily in New York, thanks to a series of shows at Joe’s and the Spiegeltent, and now it has its fanciest gig yet: two sets, tonight and tomorrow night, in the atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with Bond sharing hosting duties with the Scissors Sisters’ Ana Matronic. And that’s where TONY comes in. SFMOMA, it seems, cut a deal with the nice folks at Virgin America to fly these veteran, inveterate troublemakers out to the City by the Bay; and interested members of the press were invited to come along for the ride, which would include—it was rumored—a live, in-flight performance by the Weimar gang. I was interested. Dan Avery, TONY’s intrepid Around Town editor, was interested too. So this past Sunday, we two Frisco Kids embarked on what promises to be an adventure to remember, minus a few blackouts.

Did Weimar New York’s antics fly in Virgin territory? Find out beyond the fold…

Read more »

You heard it here first, gentle reader: Kiki & Herb are coming back to Carnegie Hall. I hope you’re not too gentle, though, because this demented punk-cabaret duo likes it rough: The last time they decked the Hall, in September of 2004, they knocked it flat on its well-practiced rear. It’ll be hard to top that explosive event, but Kiki & Herb are strapping on the musical dynamite to give it another go on December 12, in a Christmas show to be titled The Second Coming. (Longtime fans will of course remember their 2000 CD of uncowardly noels, Do You Hear What We Hear?) An official announcement is expected soon, so keep an ear to the ground—preferably in the gutter, which is where news about Kiki & Herb travels fastest.

Read more »

Ever since my esteemed colleague Elisabeth Vincentelli posted her riveting blow-by-blow account of TONY’s recent visit to the midtown karaoke emporium Spotlight Live, we have been flooded with literally hundreds…okay, dozens…okay, literally pairs of requests to learn more about this exciting excursion. Well, kids, today is your lucky day, because it happens that several of our musical performances were captured on DVDs that we have now uploaded onto YouTube, the better to be mocked by people we don’t know all around the world.

Here, for an appetizer, is my solo performance of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” backed by the inimitable Spotlight Live Dancers. (Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” tab below for the main course.) It’s worth mentioning that my voice was shredded from having attempted to sing Journey earlier in the night, so please be kind. You will want to turn the volume on your computer headphones WAY up for this, because sound mixing is not Spotlight Live’s forte:

Read more »

Only in New York is there a ten-minute line at the coat check in a building that is generally understood to be on fire.

The acrid smell of smoke began to rise through the floor near the bar at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub at 10:15pm last night, roughly 25 minutes into the second show of the evening: a benefit for the Waterwell theater company, one of the city’s cleverest and most entertaining young troupes. (Its recent offerings have included The Persians and Marco Millions.) The show had been off to a good start: funny banter from members of the group, interspersed with musical numbers from past Waterwell shows performed by established theater actors—including Urinetown’s spirited Nancy Opel and Company’s adorable Elizabeth Stanley. But it soon became impossible to deny that something was going terribly wrong at the back of the room. Ominous clouds of foul-smelling vapor rose visibly from the ground; the entire room was cleared into the lobby, and minutes later a fleet of fire trucks had arrived on the scene.

Read more »

Barb Jungr is nothing if not distinctive. Her expressive features may not make her a poster girl for the glamor wing of the cabaret community; but poster girls often lack depth, whereas Jungr has proved herself one of the most compelling interpreters around. As I wrote back in 2004, when she was making her first impressions on American audiences, Jungr is utterly original, with a profoundly committed style that teeters on the edge of emotional excess without tipping into self-indulgence. This week—on Thursday and Friday at 8pm, and on Saturday at 8pm and 10pm—she returns to the Metropolitan Room with a set devoted entirely to the songs of Bob Dylan, whose work she gets at from the inside, unveiling feelings and ideas that have sometimes been elided in Dylan’s own distinctive delivery. Jungr casts an unconventional spell, but her magic is real.

Leave a comment