Aye, Calypso!

A world figure, a towering woman both literally and figuratively; Oprah's mentor and the inaugural poet - but no matter how grand she got, I like that she was always ready to acknowledge the full range of her career, including her stint in cabaret.

Where Were You?

Technically speaking, I wasn't, yet, at all on the night of Sunday, April 23, 1961 - 53 years ago tonight - but nonetheless I know where I would have wanted to be.

And Now, a Word From Our Sponsor

Featuring birthday girl Miss Charlotte Rae!

Birthday Girl: Lost

91 today.  I don't know that I've ever heard anyone but Lenya sing this, that I remember, and it boggles the mind to think that this was what pop television - even, admittedly, failed pop television - was like a half-century ago (feeling old yet?).

Birthday Girl: She's Hip

If nothing else, perhaps we can consider a few moments spent considering this lovely artist a corrective to yesterday's rather, I suppose, heavy-handed musical interlude.  Nothing, I think, could be less like that than the sophisticated magic of Miss Blossom Dearie, who had she not returned to Fabulon four years ago would be an I'm sure still girlish 89.

I still can't quite conceive that Manhattan no longer boasts the kinds of rooms in which Dearie and her fellow spirits once flourished, nor that she is no longer at the helm of some amusing boite on one side of town, while uptown a few dozen blocks one could find the likes of Bobby Short or Barbara Carroll and downtown somewhere warm and cosy hosting Karen Akers or Anne Francine.  I was lucky enough to live there in the waning days of cabaret, when going to see Blossom was just something one could do of a weekend; she tended to play in places that might have a cover charge, but not the kind the one had to save and plan for (as we did for the Rainbow Room or the Café Carlyle).

And don't be deceived:  her music may seem featherlike, but her lilting voice was still an instrument of remarkable suppleness and range, and her singing boasts a diction matched only by that of Mabel Mercer.  On top of that, she was a formidable pianist, able not merely, as here, to swing out a standard or two en français, but also wholly to reinterpret a number you think set in stone.  Don't believe me?  Check out her "Ladies Who Lunch."   It's eons away from Stritch - who does, admittedly, own the song outright, and never more so than in this sad week when she leaves New York behind - but in its own way equally implacable.

While she was around, Dearie was too often dismissed as just another fixture of the scene, a singer of knowing little novelty numbers like "Peel Me a Grape" and "My Attorney Bernie." She did them superbly, of course, but listening to her now, we know how much more there is to the kinds of songs she used sing in late-night clubs and can appreciate, now that they're all but gone, how singers, musicians like Blossom Dearie brought them to life.  C'est vraiment ça:  c'est le printemps.  Et je l'embrasse, toujours...

Start Spreadin' the News...

Big news on the Rialto, kids - Pia's back, and Manhattan's got her!  Yet another reason to regret our Sandlandian exile, for if only we were back on the other side of the world, we could toddle up to the Big Apple this week and catch That Somewhat Different Bombshell, The Lonely Lady herself, the one and only (and thank goodness for that) Miss Pia Zadora in her first cabaret engagement in yonks.  Not since Edie Beale took the backroom at Reno Sweeney's by storm has there been such an eagerly anticipated gig.  Catch all the details - from no less august a source than The Wall Street Journal - here.

Truth to tell, for someone who's seen the ups and downs she has, Pia sounds like a pretty good egg.  A PickFair-destroying, Golden Globe-buying, Voyage of the Rock Aliens-starring, Jermaine Jackson-dueting, "Clapping Song"-making good egg, true, but after all these years, I suppose that's mostly water under the bridge.  If any Gentle Reader happens to be in town this weekend, please do drop by the Metropolitan Room over on West 22nd Street and give us a full report.  If the simple Pialicity of the occasion doesn't appeal, you might be tempted to know that her gowns (and you can bet there will be plenty) are by Bob Mackie!

Birthday Girl: Infinite Joy

Today marks the 113th anniversary of a singularly good thing: the birth of Miss Mabel Mercer, the Queen of Cabaret.  I rarely run sound-only videos, but the combination of this roguish snap and her just about perfect go at Cole Porter's "Experiment" seems a lovely way to mark the day.  The lyric is one of those deceptively simple things that Porter makes seem so easy, while Miss Mercer turns into it as good a credo to live by as any I can think of:

Be curious, though interfering friends may frown;
Get furious at each attempt to hold you down.
If this advice you only employ
The future can offer you infinite joy
And merriment. Experiment -
And you'll see.

Mabel Mercer, did for 84 years.  I was lucky enough to hear her once, and in some ways things never again were the same.  For which I am eternally grateful...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: A Sea Change

 

The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Today's SSCE requires me to, as David Niven said of the Oscars streaker, reveal my own shortcomings.  I have to admit that I either never knew or have utterly forgotten that the great British director/aesthete Derek Jarman filmed a version of The Tempest, let alone that it featured such a magnificently charming thing as this interpolated number.

Miss Elisabeth Welch, who was rather the UK's iteration of Miss Mabel Mercer, ravishes the eye and ear, singing "Stormy Weather" (very much her tune, long before it was Miss Horne's) in a costume that conjures up both her own glory days in lavish London revues and a thoroughly 1979 take on an Erté fairy queen.  It is a '30s moment, transmogrified, with its sailor suits and baroque shepherdess costumes, and above all by Welch's own serene, imperial presence, into something quite appropriately, for the work, "rich and strange."

I'm especially charmed by the way in which she has completely conquered the lineup of fetching young chorus boys - I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jarman hadn't briefed them on just why they should be amazed at the woman who, at the time she breezed through this lovely moment, had been a star for rising 60 years.  I couldn't be more pleased to have accidently stumbled on this while lost in the wilds of Youtube, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Things Are Just Where They Should Be, Tonight...

Have I ever mentioned that I'm a total Cabaret Queen?  I'm going to guess that that's not a total surprise.  I just believe that honest songs, sung simply, can communicate more clearly, more tellingly, more directly than anything I know...

So anyway, this evening, I had one of those moments, one of those things that mark out, somehow, the glory and splendor and weirdness of our lives.  Nothing special, really - just driving home, after yet another office party (the season is winding down, and soon we'll be done with those, blessedly, at least until September or so).  So maybe, yes, I'd had a glass or two (something we're really not supposed to do, in these parts that take a very dim view of Demon Rum), and yes, maybe I'm just a little tired and ready for vacation (coming soon, and more of that anon).  Whatever; I think it was a gift.

Just one of those realizations, really, as I pulled around the corner, in my silly little car (have I ever talked about my Rolling Midlife Crisis?  Perhaps not.  It's red, and convertible, and very inexcusable, but kind of fun), and down our street.  One of those thoughts that strike one, now and then:  how inexpressibly odd and unpredictable and, more than anything, worth treasuring, this life is.  It all came to me, suddenly: how strange, to be living here in the middle of Arabia Felix, accompanied against all odds by someone who thinks, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, the world of me, not to mention two (two!) mad terriers, and living in a large white house with a garden full of bougainvillea and hibiscus (me from a cold small town in Pennsylvania, where we waited each year for a tulip or two and a few stunted roses in the garden), and...

In any case, suddenly, cabaret seemed the only thing that might explain this sudden rush of something, half sentimental, half bittersweet.  I first heard this song sung by the marvelous Miss Andrea Marcovicci, but since she's unavailable on YouTube, I do think this gentleman, Mr. Eric Michael Gillett, does a very creditable job.  If you've ever wondered, actually, what I myself might be like on stage, had I not abandoned such things early on in the face, ineluctable, of No Talent At All, he's not far off (except talented), although I think I'd eschew the sweater, and I'm not sure I'd in the best of circumstances have quite such a firm grasp on staying on key.

"there's a key on the table/such a beautiful sight/as I hoped that it would be..."

And the dogs come rushing down the stairs, and from upstairs I hear, "Where have you been?" And... things do really turn out differently than one ever imagined - but sometimes, so much better.  As the dear Pet Shop Boys once asked, in a very different vein, what have I done?  Myself, I can't imagine, but I do, now and then, count my blessings, every one.

That Combination So Rare

I've only just seen, in the New York Times, the sad news that we've lost Donald Smith, the impresario extraordinaire who did an incredible amount over the past three decades to keep the sputtering flame of cabaret alive.  In his honor, then, let's spend a moment with the woman who inspired him, the immortal Mabel Mercer.

What, exactly, this slippery art form is, remains the subject of much debate.  To purists, it's the kind of intimate, sophisticated singing Mercer personified, one in which interpretation trumps voice - Mercer's style is called, after all, parlando; in France, she would be called a diseuse.  To too many today, it's a kind of over-amplified karaoke, tipsy people singing "Memory" from Cats too late at night.  I think it's just honest singing, to an attentive audience, preferably with cocktails.

If Smith didn't exactly win the battle to keep the cabaret flame bright (the obituary carries another sad piece of, for me, news - that not only is the Algonquin closed, but when it reopens, it will be sans Oak Room), he did start people thinking seriously about this kind of music.  Now it's often called the American Songbook, and if the Oak Room has now gone the way of the Ballroom, Reno Sweeney's, the Rainbow Room, the Ruban Bleu, the Five Oaks, and so many other rooms, we still do have singers like Michael Feinstein, Audra McDonald, Betty Buckley, Andrea Marcovicci, Karen Akers, and many more, some of whom still spend at least some of their performing time in small rooms filled with transfixed listeners.

When it comes to cabaret, I should mention, I got lucky:  my initiation came from Mercer herself, when she was singing in Philadelphia at a place called Café Society, in 1977.  I wish I could say I remember every moment of the performance, which in memory was a brunch concert (something hard to imagine with this most late-night of singers, but I suppose possible).  I don't.  I was just a teenager dragged along to something by his parents, to something that was meant to make Grandmother Muscato, in failing health, happy.  That it did; for me it opened up a world.  My memory isn't the songs, but rather that regal figure, in her armchair, and the incredible warmth that washed across the room when she performed.  I didn't know anything about Cole Porter, or Alec Wilder, or why this music made you feel so good, so much, but somehow, it clicked.  I've heard a lot of singers since, from the sublime (Miss Lee at the Ballroom; Miss Akers at the Rainbow Room) to the ridiculous (late nights at Marie's Crisis, anybody?), but Mercer set the standard.

Many thanks, then, to Donald Smith, for his lifetime in the service of night life.  The obituary does pass on one piece of good news: his great invention, the New York Cabaret Convention, looks set to continue, under the expert eye of the wonderful KT Sullivan.  With any luck at all, that means that there will be more teenagers pulled into the spell of cabaret - even if, for some of them, it does involve "Memory" from Cats...

Jifts of the Season

One of the great joys of a summer in Xanadu-on-Sea is the opportunity to catch up on what's been going on in the Great Wide World of Drag. On any given night, there are upwards of a dozen choices, ranging from almost embalmed traditional evenings of more-or-less straightforward impersonation* to performances that take makeup and heels as a springboard for something much, much more ambitious/transcendant/surreal.

Of these, I don't think there can be anything better than the creature pictured above, the incredible Dina Martina. It's actually rather hard to describe an evening in her presence, except that it is raucous, mindbending, and, most surprisingly, startingly cosy. She reminds me of one of my favorite Susan Sontag lines: "Camp is a tender feeling."

Who else could make an audience vie fiercely for the privilege of winning what are billed as "the world's largest underpants" (emblazoned, live on stage, with the star's own makeup faceprint)? Who could create a mash-up on "Fever" and "No Scrubs"? Most of all, who else could take an act made up of just about equal parts malapropisms, mispronunciations (g frequently becoming j -Ms. M. is very pleased with her "jifts"), hoary jokes, show-biz lore, and a healthy dose of the very difficult art of singing just badly enough (it really is tough, kids - just ask Jo Stafford)? I can think of no one but Dina.

Each of the acts we've seen these past few weeks have been pretty fab - the tight, Vegas-style evening of cabaret with Cher-extraordinaire Randy Roberts (whose own character, a diva poised somewhere between Ann Margret and Rita Hayworth, is even better than his star takes), the trip into Varla Jean Merman's glamorously demented song-stylings, nights with Miss Richfield and Miss Burlington and more, and of course the truly awe-inspiring trainwrecks that are each week's edition of the town's legendary "talent" contest/revue Show Girls. Still, it's Dina I'll take away as someone I'd not only like to see again, but maybe have a cocktail with, in character or out. I know nothing about the man behind the legend, but it must take a fascinating brain to go so far out and still feel so very much at home.

* Although no one, alas, seems to be doing Bette Davis this year. I have a hunch that you can guess who this year's sensation is, done in tributes ranging from respectful to disembowelling. If you were to guess that her initials are L.G., you wouldn't be far off (and no, it's not Linda Gray).

Hot-Hot-Hot-Hot-Hot-Hot-Hot...Not

Remember my little Ann Sothern problem? Things haven't gotten any better.

Now, like all sensible people, I find people who talk about their dreams almost invariably incredibly boring. But of course my dreams are different. Especially this one, which has now popped up at least three times.

In this dream, I am planning to meet friends at New York's old Ballroom, once the most interesting cabaret room in town, for a special surprise. It's a surprisingly realistic dream, taking in my flat in Chelsea (four sordid rooms indeed), a walk up Ninth Avenue in what seems like an autumn rain, and arrival at my old stomping grounds.

The surprise, it turns out, is the act already under way when the doors open: the cabaret debut of Miss Katharine Hepburn, circa 1967 and resplendent in a jersey pantsuit number like one of those from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?. The song she is singing? Nothing else but that staple of 80s MOR radio, Ashford & Simpson's "Solid."

Words fail; fade to black.

Just a Jack Knife

I seem to be in a teutonic mood today - perhaps it was that kind of week - and after Dietrich, it seems an obvious progression to Lenya.

Here, in a truly shocking clip from 1962 (and under the direction of Ken Russell, no less), La Lotte shows us how us how it's done, in two and a half minutes that are an evocation both of the birth of Fascism and of the spirit of Cabaret.

Enjoy, among the shudders...

The Good Eartha

A sad day, darlings; we're all writing about her, and well we ought to be. The one and only Eartha has gone and left us.

How characteristic of her, too, to slip away on Christmas day, guaranteeing that we would as much celebrate as mourn her. Certainly, it's just as she would have had it, for few entertainers were such thorough celebrators as Miss Kitt: of sex, of life, of love, of all the pleasures of the flesh and spirit.

She had, onstage, the kind of matchless self-confidence that comes with being known as "the most exciting woman in the world." She could, with a glance, a gesture, a shrug, be the most bewitching creature you ever beheld, whether in sequins and feathers or reclining in a hotel armchair.

But she could also kick it up with the best of them, high-spirited and feisty and probably, at the occasional moment now and then, a little tempestuous. Poor Lady Bird Johnson found her so, but Jo Ann Worley would seem to have been a kindred spirit.

And through it all, from little clubs to New Faces of 1952 to Hollywood to television to exile to Broadway to discos to cabaret and even, however unlikely, to a new incarnation as a Disney villainess, she worked. I feel so lucky to have seen her in several of these guises, most often at the wonderful Café Carlyle.

She ruled that place, flirting and purring and whispering and shouting, singing songs old and new, seemingly as the mood struck but clearly with an enormous amount of dedication and preparation.

I don't really believe I won't see her there again and have the chance to hear what for a while was her closing number, a song she sung in such a way that it was autobiography: hers, yes, but somehow of everyone lucky enough to be her audience:

Here’s To Life
(Lyrics - Phyllis Molinary, Music - Artie Butler)

No complaints and no regrets;
I still believe in chasing dreams and placing bets.
And I have learned that all you give is all you get,
So give it all you've got.

I had my share, I drank my fill,
And even though I'm satisfied, I'm hungry still -
To see what's down another road, beyond a hill,
And do it all again

So here's to life!
And every joy it brings...
Here's to life!
To dreamers and their dreams...

Funny how the time just flies,
How love can go from warm hellos to sad goodbyes -
And leave you with the memories you've memorized,
To keep your winters warm.

But there's no yes in yesterday -
And who knows what tomorrow brings, or takes away;
As long as I'm still in the game, I want to play
For laughs, for life, for love.

So here's to life!
And every joy it brings...
Here's to life!
To dreamers and their dreams -
May all your storms be weathered;
And all that's good get better;

Here's to life -
Here's to love -
And here's to you...

She meant every word of it, and had 81 astonishing years to show for it. Here's to the old trouper, and let's hope she's raising hell in some celestial supper club even now, making balding, middle-aged business seraphim sitting ringside blush to "Just an Old Fashioned Girl" just like she did at the Carlye.

Merely Mabel

Chez elle, Miss Janey is pondering who, exactly, might best deserve the to be considered The Voice of Rock 'n' Roll.

In my own preferred genre, Cabaret, while there are stars, legends, and heavenly creatures aplenty, there really is only one contender for top spot, a singer equally revered by crooners like Sinatra and art-song singers like Joan Morris and Dawn Upshaw (and pretty much everybody in between).

She, of course, was (is, and evermore shall be) Miss Mabel Mercer, the Empress of all Saloon Singers.

Regal in her stage presence - usually seated, always elegantly gowned, often draped in a shawl put to good use as her only prop - Mercer ruled the rarefied world of club singing with poise, grace, and a voice that was, by the end, a whisper of a soprano combined with the diction of an angel.

My favorite of her songs - and of her albums - sums her up just about perfectly.

With all due respect to mine and everybody's favorites (since I know that TJB is bound to bring up the also fabulous Miss Maye), when it comes to how sing the Great American Song: Mabel Mercer was more than Merely Marvelous. She is The Voice.

And - as is true of all Great Stars - my goodness, couldn't she just rock a turban?

Queens of Cabaret

Back in my Manhattan years, I was a big old Cabaret Addict. And, I think, very, very lucky - for I happened to be there, in the late 80s and through the 90s, at a remarkable and rather sad time, one that saw something like the end of the traditional cabaret scene.

The big rooms are pretty much gone like the dodo: the Ballroom, where once I saw British oddity Julian Clary literally cause people to fall over laughing; the Rainbow Room, most fabulous of them all, where one night I was there for the last time that Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert, West Side Story's first Maria and Tony, sang together.

The Café Carlyle hangs on, in a way, even without Bobby Short as its presiding genius, as does the Algonquin's Oak Room, and Michael Feinstein does seem to have found a way to make his club work, although it also doubles as a hotel breakfast room.

The smaller spaces and piano bars we haunted seem as far off as speakeasies or Vaudeville: The Five Oaks, home to 30s survivor Marie Blake, who made a rollicking blues out of Blondie's "Rapture"; 88s, where Karen Miller and Rochelle Seldin created a kind of cabaret salon for musical-theatre queens; Danny's Skylight Room, Rose's Turn, on an on.

One old hangout, Don't Tell Mama, hangs on. One real dive, Marie's Crisis, seems indestructible; I wonder if Sam is still playing the piano there, singing "Blue Champagne."

Luckily, some of the great ladies are still performing. In my time, my favorites included the timelessly elegant Julie Wilson:

Musical archaeologist Andrea Marcovicci, whose innate glamour is enhanced by her warmth and intelligence:

Regally sly Karen Akers; anyone who's heard her live (especially her song about a lovelorn Statue of Liberty - "who wants a date, with a large, green lady?") knows that no one more effectively combines fire and ice than she:

And, of course, Miss Eartha Kitt, about whom no more need be said than that she is Perfection:

Some of the other Grand Old Gals still make occasional appearances - Barbara Cook remains a phenomenon, and Maureen McGovern, Blossom Dearie and Barbara Carroll all come to mind, while Elaine Stritch has only gotten more and more active in recent years. Margaret Whiting is alive, but seems to have retired, and it's been many years since Lena Horne last sang.

So many, though, have gone on that big lounge in the sky; just from my memories of who used to come in for annual seasons or who were local fixtures, I can think of Dorothy Loudon, Peggy Lee, Sylvia Syms, Nancy Lamotte, Hildegarde, Jo Stafford.

Oh, dear. Too much nostalgia. Thankfully, there are some wonderful new voices out there; you likely have your favorites (do tell!), and here are two of mine:

Patricia Barber is as much as jazz star as a cabaret lady, but I'm very fond of her smoky, lazy vocals, which her deft piano playing complements just about ideally.

And then there's rising Canadian thrush Chantal Chamberland, a reflective, moody singer who turns the Eurhythmics' "Here Comes the Rain Again" into a saga of erotic longing.

And that's not to mention Madeline Peyroux, Jane Monheit, KT Sullivan, Mary Cleere Harran... But are they, any of them, really cabaret? I suppose I'll have to spend some time back in New York some day and find out.

Yet Another Miss M.

One does adore Andrea Marcovicci, if only because she has triumphed over an unpromising start (as the lead in a legendary flop, the musical Nefertiti) and an only middling film/tv career to take up the mantle of Miss Mabel Mercer and wear it triumphantly in cabarets around the world.

Nice shoulders, too...

Weekend update

Sunday with the Glamour Lesbians: brunch on a porch with little dogs; endless conversation about how next year, really, they will look around for a better place (you wait too late to make your reservation, girls, you end up in an attic at the Ptown Inn; that's the way the world works).

After a while, Mr. Muscato and I escaped; we were Men with a Mission. We had to achieve a dream that has haunted us since last summer:

Cupcakes at Relish. Until you've had them, you simply do not know the heights to which a humble buttercream can climb, the nirvana that can be achieved with a deceptively simple white cake.

We would have had six, but we had dinner reservations with the Girls. We ate, and ate, and ate. And it was good.

Then, having run the gauntlet of the busking cabaret performers, all shilling for their acts out on Commercial Street, we ran into a familiar face: the remarkable Lea DeLaria, taking a break from her stint as "Madame Delphina" on One Life to Live (is just me or is life in general getting quite surreal?).

So we went to her show.

And it rocked. She is, of course, not only the most foul-mouthed woman to hit the stage since Wendy O. Williams, but also an increasingly interesting jazz singer.

The combo is amazing, if occasionally a little neck-snapping. It's certainly the only show I've seen recently that combined a hilariously graphic routine about fisting and an impassioned rendition of "You Don't Know What Love is." The show features a surprise entrance, a lot of truly funny material, and an incredibly tight trio backing her up.

So it was quite an evening, after quite a day.

As Monday dawns, the GLs have departed, the morning has proven gray and rainy, and Mr. M. and I trying to decide how we can we spend the day most lazily. I suspect that additional buttercream may well be involved.

Life is good.