Sally Olson

Robert Windeler
Creating a cabaret tribute show can start with a performer's simple, perhaps youthful, admiration for the chosen subject. Internet searches may provide at least the bare bones of a biographical narrative. Memorizing the key numbers in an honoree's song list is a must, of course. But there is so much more that's needed beyond a...

Carol Shedlin

Mark Dundas Wood
"I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," Carol Shedlin declares emphatically in the opening number of her current Don't Tell Mama show, Serenade in Blue (directed by Linda Amiel Burns). While there are, of course, no legal restrictions on blues singing, there's long been disagreement about who has and who lacks the credentials to do...

Antonia Bennett

Gerry Geddes
Antonia Bennett arrives on the stage of the venerable Café Carlyle having grown up around giants of the Great American Songbook, including Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra, and having been the opening act for her legendary father, Tony, for over ten years. She has an obvious affection for the standards with which she has filled...

Those Girls

Gerry Geddes
With Those Girls, currently at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, four talented solo cabaret performers (Eve Eaton, Rachel Hanser, Karen Mack, and Wendy Russell) join forces and voices to apply their rich, exciting harmonies as a modern-day, "hair salon quartet" answer to the barbershop quartets of old. Even when each gets to lead, the other three...

Lady Bunny

Gerry Geddes
The immense, swirling, platinum wig atop her head is but one of the many things about Lady Bunny that are larger than life. She revels in them all in her show Trans-Jester!, currently enjoying a run at the historic Stonewall Inn. She is raunchy, tasteless, hilarious, fearless, political, angry, and knowing, while at the same...

Wendy Scherl

Mark Dundas Wood
In her current Metropolitan Room show, New Scherl in Town (directed by Barry Kleinbort), Wendy Scherl reveals herself to be an assured (and reassuring) singer who envelops you in a protective bubble of good will. She opens with a song whose lyrics embody her optimistic bent: Irving Berlin's "I Got the Sun in the Morning."...

Matt Doyle

Mark Dundas Wood
Actor/singer Matt Doyle recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday with a single-night engagement at The Green Room 42, a commodious, spanking-new showroom on the fourth floor of the Yotel on West 42nd Street. Known mostly for his theatrical appearances in such shows as Spring Awakening, War Horse, and The Book of Mormon, Doyle began a side...

Jazz in the City: The New York Connection

Mark Dundas Wood
At the Duplex, Jazz in the City: The New York Connection combines narrative by historian and music aficionado Charles R. Hale with song selections by the David Raleigh Trio (which is really a quartet if you count pianist-singer Raleigh himself). Raleigh's fellow musicians at the performance I saw were saxophonist/clarinetist Tony Carfora, bassist Evan Gregor,...

Polly Gibbons

Robert Windeler
Though her label, Resonance Records, and her New York club of choice for this engagement, Iridium, are both bastions of mainstream jazz, her London home base, Ronnie Scott's, can be quite a bit broader in its booking charter than that. But even that fact and her wide touring schedule and home country following hadn't prepared...

D’Vorah Bailey

Gerry Geddes
D'Vorah Bailey is a charming, talented singer who shines on stage when she doesn't get in her own way. Unfortunately, that happens only part of the time in her heavily autobiographical cabaret show Wishful Thinking, which recently had a return engagement at the Metropolitan Room. If you attend New York cabaret at all, you have...