You could say their life is a cabaret and you wouldn't be far off. The husand-and-wife team Alan Chapman and Karen Benjamin, who have achieved local renown performing Chapman's witty original songs at clubs and special events, have worked in and around music, theatre, and cabaret their entire professional lives.
Benjamin may be best known for her four-year run in the Los Angeles company of Phantom of the Opera, and Chapman recognized for his morning deejay gig at L.A. classical radio station KUSC. A former music professor at Occidental College, where he taught for 21 years, Chapman gives frequent pre-concert lectures for the L.A. Philharmonic, and his songs have been performed and recorded by the likes of Andrea Marcovicci and Amanda McBroom. Perhaps his most popular is "Everybody Wants To Be Sondheim," which parodies the master lightly and skewers his young acolytes sharply. Benjamin, who teaches singing privately, performed in such Southland musicals as She Loves Me, The Desert Song, The Most Happy Fella, and Blame It on the Movies.
But it's together that they seem to shine most brightly, and they'll do that this weekend, June 11 at the Cinegrill in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, as a benefit for the Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, an ongoing program for composers, lyricists, and book writers to which Chapman credits a great deal of his songwriting craft. (For information about the event, call (818) 502-3309.) The two got together recently to discuss craft, career, and kids' requests.
Karen Benjamin: Cabaret for most people is like a solitary thing: One person who presents their tales of isolation and alienation and despair. Here, we have a great family, kids, and we're just exhausted-that's our despair.
Alan Chapman: And since the songs are drawn from real life, the kids have been a large part of the songwriting thing. And they have preferences. They have requests. When Molly comes in she'll say, "Daddy, play "Everybody Wants To Be Sondheim.' "
Karen: Molly doesn't like me to sing. She'll say, "Sing only when you have to work," meaning, when we do our concerts. That's what she considers my work, but when I teach, she says, "Don't sing." It's fascinating. I think it's because it takes time away from her.
Alan: Molly more and more wants me to improvise songs of various topics. One of the big in-house hits is called "Molly's Constipated." It'll never be performed publicly, but it's a big hit in the living room.
Karen: What's so interesting is, if we're out with friends who've seen us perform and something happens they'll say, "That'd be a good song for Alan," and sometimes that happens.
Alan: I was out one evening when they were first spraying for medflies and I saw this line of six helicopters in the air and in 25 minutes, by the time I got home, I had the lyrics for the song "I'm in Love With a Medfly." Sometimes it just happens like that. "Everybody Wants To Be Sondheim" happened like that. On a Friday I went to Aron's Records and bought two CDs with stuff by New York writers. I listened to what they were doing and by Sunday the song was written.
What's funny about that song is-you always think you know what you're saying. The lines that are most important to keep in mind are, "I admire his style/But his style is his, not mine." It's an indictment of the would-be Sondheim imitators-that's what the song is about. But it's very common for people to come up after I play it and say, "Oh, I love your "Sondheim' song, because I hate Sondheim, too." And I usually don't take the time to enlighten them about what the song is saying.
Karen: Isn't that interesting-that people think you're saying that you don't like Sondheim, while you and I know that's not true?
Alan: It's the paleness of the imitators I don't like. The more individual a writer is, the worse you're going to come off as an imitator. If you want to imitate something that's really mainstream, fine. I know this guy who wrote children's shows with a collaborator for this department store in Portland, and they were charming and melodic and great, but when he did his serious musical projects, he had a switch he would turn-"I shall be Sondheim"-and his musicals were awful, grinding, and unlistenable.
Another thing about cabaret, too: It's one of the last, if not the last, bastions of the importance and craft of songwriting and music and lyrics. That's what makes it really special to me.
Karen: It's like putting it under a microscope.
Alan: Yeah, you really write lyrics that are meant to be heard. And especially as we are doing predominantly original material, we go in with the double whammy. You have to like how we're doing it, and you have to like what we're doing.
BACK TO THE LAB
Alan: Part of the great thing about having an outlet for songs is, if you're a songwriter, there's the thrill of creating a song and working out the problems, and then what? And here's the "then what"-a place to go with it and see how it works on people. You've got something to say and then someone to say it to.
Karen: That's another thing about cabaret is that it can be a laboratory. It's pure lab. It's really creative and it's never the same twice. That's what I like about it. And it's saved me from musical theatre. I had done four and a half years of Phantom and that was enough for me to realize what I didn't want. I didn't want to be in corporate musical theatre; I didn't want to be a part of the factory line.
Alan: Although if anybody has a starring role available, we'll look at it.
Karen: And people say to me, "When are you going to do your next show?" And the answer to that question is, "Unless it's a really good part where I feel my talents can be featured and I can really thrive, I'm not interested. I'd rather do what we do." And that's the honest truth. I'll tell you, cabaret has made me discover myself.
VOICE OVER ALL
Alan: I spent many years singing my own songs thinking, "I'm the songwriter singing his songs." And then I learned it was possible to become a singer, and become a different person and find things in my songs that I didn't know were there, and to go through that discovery that a singer would go through with any song. That was something I had to learn-something you knew all along.
Karen: Let's face it, songwriters sing their songs the best. Nobody sings it like the songwriters. I'm a real firm believer in that. They don't have to have a great voice, it's not about a great voice.
Alan: Are you saying I don't have a great voice?
Karen: You have a very nice voice.
Alan: I have a far better voice than I used to give myself credit for. I don't have a "Karen" voice." Hardly anyone has a "Karen" voice.
Karen: But you are really very well known for your voice in this town-your speaking voice. When people hear it, they say, "I know that voice!" You're probably more well known for your speaking voice than I am for my singing voice. That's the ironic truth.
IF MEMORY SERVES
Alan: The crowd who selects themselves to come to our shows-they know what they're getting into, they're often a more sophisticated crowd. The crapshoot is when we're brought into a corporate or private function by people who really understand and dig what we do...
Karen: But their friends don't.
Alan: I've often thought I'd write a song which will be a commentary on, "Hey, this one really isn't making it," and in the middle of a song that's just dying, I would stop and go into this alternate number-the way Johnny Carson could save the moment by making a self-deprecating comment about how his joke just laid a bomb.
Karen: We've added standards among the original material, because when people hire us, when they find out that I was in the Los Angeles cast of Phantom of the Opera, they want that. We do a parody number of "All I Ask of You" that's very funny-but what they want to hear are the original songs from Phantom. People really want that stuff, so we really do have to accommodate them to the best of our ability.
Alan: But we only do stuff we really believe in.
Karen: I can't sing "Memory," I'm sorry. Unless they want to pay us lots of money. We just got booked to do Jewish Vocational Services' big gala at the Skirball Center in the new Ahmanson Hall they're building right now. We'll be the first people to perform there. It's brand spankin' new. And the people who are honoring this couple, they love Guys and Dolls.
Alan: I haven't heard this.
Karen: Oh, you haven't heard this yet, honey? Well, she would like us to sing something from Guys and Dolls. So I said maybe we could do "Sue Me," especially in that crowd. There are going to be a ton of lawyers there. BSW