A woman on a stool, in a glittery top, singing "I'm Still Here": That's the terrifying image of cabaret that sends so many running. And yet, generation after generation, cabaret endures, maintained both by standards-singing standard-bearers and fresh faces struggling to stand out in the crowd.
The sobering truth is that for many aspiring actors, Broadway doesn't beckon right away. Or ever. Brandon Cutrell recalls coming to New York fresh out of the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music and being frustrated in his hope of finding prompt employment on the Great White Way. While still auditioning, he took a job as host at the recently closed Danny's Skylight Room.
This meant showing patrons to their seats — a far cry from his current hosting gig at The After Party, where on Friday nights you can find him singing and schmoozing at Midtown's Laurie Beechman Theater.
A couple of years after he started working at Danny's, Cutrell made his own cabaret debut, still "starry-eyed and bushy-tailed enough to think that it would get agents and casting directors in the door," he says. "It really didn't."
For the First Time
Certainly there's no established path from point A to point B in the entertainment industry. It's hard to think of a more inexact science than "making it." And, as Sidney Myer, the longtime booker of Don't Tell Mama and himself an accomplished cabaret and theatre performer, notes, "Cabaret is often the first and only open door when a performer comes to New York. You look around and see no one will put me in their show, so you say, 'I'll put myself in a show.'" Still, practical considerations often cut against cabaret work kick-starting an acting career. While it may seem a good way to make your own luck, it's also a lot of responsibility for someone without much experience.
A common problem with many first-time cabaret acts is identified by music director Brian Nash (Crossing Brooklyn, But I'm a Cheerleader), who co-hosts Mostly Sondheim, the popular open-mike night at the Duplex, and supplied the dreaded opening-sentence image. "A lot of people — especially young people — haven't really gone to see cabaret and don't really know what it is," Nash says. "They think if a person's standing on a stage and singing songs while people are in the audience drinking drinks, then that's cabaret. There's a little bit more to it."
Many people doing their first show have only thought about song selection as it applies to auditions. Having never before tackled the challenge of putting together a complete evening, they fall back on performing their audition books and attempt to create a through-line out of their own lives. The results can be deadly. As Cutrell admits, given a choice between jumping off a bridge and watching "another show about how someone graduated high school and headed to New York on a Greyhound bus," he'd much rather go overboard. He's not alone.
Virtually everyone who's performed in, booked, or even walked by a cabaret room groans at the memories of the numerous underdeveloped performances they've been subjected to over the years. Donna Lynne Champlin (John Doyle's Sweeney Todd revival; The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, for which she won an Obie) puts the point plainly: "The stool, the songbook, and the sad story is inexcusable when people are paying money. Do that in your place for free. At a club, I want to be entertained. I'm desperate to be entertained."
Jim Caruso, the performer-host who produces both Broadway at Birdland and the open-mike Cast Party, understands the lure of the self-involved star turn. Indeed, he confesses that his first show was "all about me." But, providing an example of how cabaret and theatre can dovetail, he urges performers to look at the construction of a musical in assembling their own shows: "You have to meet someone; you have to learn about them; you have to save your big moments."
The Sound of Money
In this regard, a director can be instrumental — but they seldom come free. Even a director willing to work inexpensively will likely charge at least $50 per hour, and availing yourself of only a couple of hours of time isn't a particularly good investment. Lennie Watts, the director-performer who also books the Metropolitan Room, notes that he won't let performers put his name on a show unless they've worked with him for at least 10 hours. With less time, he explains, performers can't start realizing the benefits; usually they work with him for far longer.
Musical directors also have to be factored into the financial equation. A performer working with both a director and a music director for just 10 hours each is probably shelling out a thousand bucks — and that's cheap. With more hours or less generous rates, a performer could be looking at investing two to three times that amount, and that's before paying for the shows themselves (an extra $100 to $200 per musician per performance) and, depending on the venue, perhaps also a room rental fee.
Oh, and then there's the pesky matter of promotion, without which the exposure sought in the first place is sacrificed. If a performer's going the old-fashioned postcard route, there's design (which is admittedly cheaper in this digital age), printing (the same), and postage, which, as Watts observes, is the only non-negotiable part of the process.
All of this is to underline that putting on your own show also means producing your own show. And, at the end of the day, it's probably not going to net you an acting opportunity. Watts reflects, "A lot of people do cabarets because they think they'll get an agent — and I'm sure that's happened at some point — but I've never seen it. As a rule, I've found they don't come unless they know you." As Caruso quips, "Agents just 'love' cabaret."
Yet performers keep turning to cabaret — and not just as a means to an unlikely end. Actor Liz McCartney (Broadway's Taboo, Mamma Mia!), who recently brought a Rosemary Clooney tribute to the Beechman, sums up her first cabaret experience: "I don't think it did a heck of a lot for my career, but it did a lot for my self-esteem." There's much to be learned from navigating the pitfalls of assembling and performing a full program. Myer muses, "If you can do a cabaret act and hold an audience for an hour as yourself, I think you can do just about anything on a stage." And even if you're not quite at that stage, Myer advocates taking advantage of piano bars, which he refers to as "on-the-job-training manuals.... Sometimes I think you can get more attention standing on a subway platform than in a piano bar," he warns, "but it's great experience, and it only costs the price of a drink."
Welcome to the Theatre?
Of course, there are exceptions to every showbiz rule. Blythe Gruda, an actor whose credits include an international tour of Jesus Christ Superstar, was discovered at a well-known East Side gay watering hole: "The first manager I ever worked with saw me singing at the Townhouse. He approached me, and he turned out to be legit." Cutrell recalls that people have occasionally picked up agents or auditions at The After Party. Caruso, too, notes with amusement, "It does happen — people do get work from being seen at Cast Party."
But these are all ad hoc, open-mike events, where an agent might happen to be socializing and scouting at the same time. A solo show, however well thought out, isn't likely to have the same appeal. Watts observes, "If you're an agent and you've spent a full day working and seeing people, the last thing you want to do at 9:30 is go out to see somebody you don't know."
It's also important to note that the audience for cabaret has changed as the price of attendance has increased, and this creates a danger for untried talent. "You used to be able to go to little clubs where it just cost a couple of bucks to get in," says Caruso. "They don't really exist anymore. People expect perfection now, and there's nowhere to really be rotten anymore." But then, it's no picnic for more-seasoned performers either. "If someone is starring on Broadway, there's a lot of expectation," Caruso adds. "It's hard. You have fans and you don't want to look like an amateur."
Still, for actors with name recognition, there can be benefits. "If you already have the contacts and want to show them a different side of yourself, and it's not just you singing on a stool going through your book, yeah, it might be useful," suggests Nash. Myer adds, "Even if you're working consistently in the industry, odds are you're still being pigeonholed. If you're only cast as a craggy-faced villain, it's great to be able to sing a tender love song."
Broadening an audience's perception fuels many performers, including Tony nominee Euan Morton, who is scheduled to make his Oak Room at the Algonquin debut next month. "I felt like I showed something in Taboo, and that opened doors for me to show something to myself. Yes, I want to show people I can sing — not just when I'm amplified and mixed — but I also want to say, 'I'm not going to be Boy George the rest of my life' — or, for that matter, whatever my last role was."
Over the past couple of years, Champlin has relied upon Finishing the Hat — a hybrid of standup comedy and cabaret — to remind people of her comic gifts. "More people saw me in Sweeney Todd and The Dead than Hollywood Arms," she says. "I played Carol Burnett on Broadway, but somehow people don't know I'm funny." Her show, which she describes as "Just me, acting like a dork," helped with that. It's also proven profitable.
Not Just Anyone Can Whistle
Even though Caruso kids, "Amish people can make more money than cabaret folk," some performers have made cabaret a lucrative part of their careers. Karen Mason came to New York hoping to work in theatre and clubs. Though she has certainly succeeded, performing on Broadway most notably in Sunset Boulevard and as part of the original cast of Mamma Mia!, she's found that "in theatre, you're usually in between roles." Singing has more often than not sustained her.
Musical-theatre veteran Jessica Molaskey (Parade, A Man of No Importance, Dream True) has similar thoughts, explaining, "The business has changed. It's not really the way it was when I started — that you can just go from one Broadway show to another to another." Looking for another artistic outlet — and one that might happen to be lucrative — she established what she deems "an entirely separate career" as a jazz vocalist. With husband John Pizzarelli, Molaskey has released four well-received CDs; nabbed a nationally syndicated radio show, Radio Deluxe, broadcast on WVOX-AM in New York; and booked glamorous gigs such as a two-month stint at the swanky Café Carlyle. The success and security have allowed her to be more selective about her theatre roles. She's currently back on Broadway in a revival of her favorite musical, Sunday in the Park With George.
Theatre is also something that Grammy nominee Maureen McGovern does for love — though, no, she hasn't appeared in A Chorus Line. The "Morning After" chanteuse supplemented a successful singing career when she was a replacement in the '80s Broadway hits Nine and The Pirates of Penzance. Recently she originated the role of Marmee in the Broadway production of Little Women. She's found her initial concert and cabaret success invaluable in making the leap to theatre, explaining, "The intimacy comes with — and that's how I bring the audience to me on a big stage." Like Mason, McGovern doesn't coast on her concert and recording history to nab stage roles; she works on her chops. She has gone to Oklahoma City to perform The Lion in Winter; Mason has gone to Boston to do Company.
Life as a Cabaret
Some performers, however, choose to leave the theatre behind. David Pellegrene came to New York nearly 20 years ago, having already performed with opera and ballet companies. In New York, though, he'd go to auditions and, he says, "find out they were already cast or that the people on the other side of the table just didn't pay attention." But Pellegrene landed jobs as a singing bartender at Brandy's Piano Bar and as a singing pianist at the Townhouse. Over the years, he's released a CD (At Your Request), and he's even begun producing cabaret shows, such as The New Faces of Cabaret at the just-opened Broadway Baby Bistro. "I realized this was more attention and more money and just kind of got content with it," he says.
If called in for an audition, Cutrell will gladly oblige, but he says he's not really pursuing it anymore. The same goes for Watts, who early in his career worked in theatre but consistently found himself landing what he calls "Stubby Kaye roles," which didn't utilize his more contemporary voice. In cabaret, he says, "I found an outlet for what I do best: talking, writing, singing, and putting things together."
Watts sounds a note echoed by everyone interviewed for this article. Cabaret may not be a bankable means to an end — a dependable way to make money or advance an acting career. But despite the fairly recent closure of three major venues (Danny's, Rose's Turn, and Helen's Hideaway Room), cabaret somehow survives in New York, offsetting those losses with the addition of the Metropolitan Room, Broadway Baby Bistro, and a revamped Don't Tell Mama and the conversion of the Zipper Factory from full-time theatre to eclectic home of theatre, cabaret, and burlesque.
Cabaret endures not in spite of performers approaching it with different backgrounds and divergent intents, but because it can support that mixture, because it's a tabula rasa. "I'll make fun of cabaret and its shortcomings," Cutrell remarks, "but for me it's the most liberating art form there is. It's whatever I want it to be."