Carmen Cusack

Mark Dundas Wood
Singer Carmen Cusack has amassed an extensive collection of vocal riffs and shadings from pop, rock, folk, country, gospel, and R&B genres. Her background is as a musical-theatre performer—which may help explain her chameleonic quality. Though she hails from Denver, she gained much experience in London's West End, where she appeared in Les Misérables and...

David Baida

Roy Sander
  The title of David Baida's debut cabaret show, now on view at the Metropolitan Room, is Unexpected Surprise. Anyone who saw his work during last summer's MetroStar Talent Challenge—which he won—will not be at all surprised that this show (directed by Adolpho Blaire) is clever, funny, inventive, and very entertaining. In addition, he has a robust...

A Mexican Affair

Mark Dundas Wood
It's not every day that a cabaret performer hits on an audience at the top of his set. But on the night I attended, that's essentially what Rafa Reyes did in his Metropolitan Room show A Mexican Affair. "Would you like to have a Mexican affair?" he asked coyly. "Or would you like to have...

Laura Kenyon

Gerry Geddes
Laura Kenyon recently revived her iconic cabaret creation, June Cool, in June Cool...Alive! at Pangea as the final presentation of the second season of the TWEED TheaterWorks series Happy*Cry*Pretty! This was by far the most theatrical evening of this season's program, so in some ways it felt as though the prior evenings had been building...

A Life Behind Bars

Gerry Geddes
The title of Dan Ruth's remarkable show, A Life Behind Bars (currently enjoying a run at the Laurie Beechman Theatre), might lead one to expect an exposé of the prison system, but the bars in question are of a much more common variety—the drinking dens and dives of New York City and environs. In the...

Steve Hayes

Gerry Geddes
As part of TWEED TheaterWorks' Happy*Cry*Pretty! Monday night performance series at Pangea, comedian-writer-actor Steve Hayes recently presented We Only Have Brains On Tuesdays. That wild title only begins to describe this hilarious, off-the-wall evening of "observations, monologues, and old movie talk." Hayes has long been a reliable comic stalwart on the cabaret scene, and over...

Gay Marshall

Robert Windeler
Gay Marshall is the first to admit that feelings about Paris, and groups of songs expressing those feelings, are seriously in danger of evoking narrative and musical clichés. In her current show at Pangea, "Gay's Paree," she confronts this problem head on, and largely avoids it. In her opening number, Dave Frishberg's "Another Song About...

Deborah Stone

Mark Dundas Wood
Early on in her show at Don't Tell Mama, Still Exactly Where I Belong, Deborah Stone sings a pairing of Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer's "I'm Old Fashioned" and Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's "Simple Little Things." The first of these numbers seems to define this performer well. And I don't mean that in a...

Micky Dolenz

Robert Windeler
Those of us who are fans of both the Monkees songbook and Broadway show tunes are twice blessed by the current Micky Dolenz show at Feinstein's/54 Below (co-directed by Van Dean and Dolenz himself). Some fifty years on, Dolenz is still best known as the lead singer of The Monkees, a "Fab Four" group manufactured...

Broadway “Boozy” Brunch

Gerry Geddes
Broadway "Boozy" Brunch is a great idea—a hybrid of Sunday afternoon brunch, late night piano bar, and full-fledged cabaret revue. That's what Don't Tell Mama is offering on Sundays at noon and again at 2:00PM. Patrick DeGennaro oversees the festivities, playing piano with his accustomed mastery and providing vocals, both solo and in tandem with...