Cacophony Daniels

Gerry Geddes
Cacophony Daniels is the drag alter ego of Courter Simmons, a talented actor/singer who recently ended a run in Broadway's Jersey Boys. When Simmons was growing up he felt a special affinity for the songs, the characters, and the stories of lyricist and writer Howard Ashman. In his show "Under the 'C'," he used Cacophony...

Nasty Drew and That Harder Boy

Gerry Geddes
Nasty Drew and That Harder Boy: The Mystery of the Family Jewels is an homage to the childhood-favorite mystery series "Nancy Drew" and "The Hardy Boys" and at the same time the latest in a long line of campy, loose-limbed, enjoyably tasteless, envelope-pushing parodies of pop culture icons and tropes that is perhaps most famously epitomized...

Brian Nash & Nate Buccieri

Gerry Geddes
Brian Nash and Nate Buccieri are two of the best in the piano bar business. If one of them is at the piano, patrons are assured of a good time, great playing, strong vocals, high energy, and raucous humor. Having worked together on a number of, as they put it, "big gay cruises," they began...

Melinda Hughes

Robert Windeler
The somewhat generic title of her recent show at the Metropolitan Room, "An English Girl in New York," doesn't begin to describe the theme of the evening, nor the breadth of Melinda Hughes's talents. If anything, it read as if we might be hearing about a naïve young Dover sole out of water. Far from...

Sally Darling

Robert Windeler
Her current Don't Tell Mama show could be the one Sally Darling was truly born to do. Back in the 1970s she created four revues combining the songs of Noël Coward and Cole Porter. In her more recent cabaret shows, Darling has teased her audiences with generous samplings of Coward's vast body of work. But...

Matt DiPasquale

Mark Dundas Wood
"Neither Here nor There," Matt DiPasquale's engaging show at the Duplex, is a solo act, but for some reason he uses three separate microphones, spread evenly across the front of the stage. Is he working some metaphor—perhaps suggesting that he's not sure of where he stands? Or maybe that he has three times as much...

The Kinsey Sicks

Gerry Geddes
Back in the day, the great Charles Ludlam formed the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and brought drag to a new and unique plateau—not using cross-dressing for just fun and camp, but to comment on theatre, on society, on gender expectations. If he had expanded into cabaret, he might well have come up with something like The...

Christopher Timson

Gerry Geddes
Sometimes, not often enough, the stars align and the gods of cabaret look down on a show and everything that can go right, miraculously, does and everything that can go wrong, even more miraculously, does not. That is what happened in Christoper Timson's show "#TBT: A Chubby Boy's Guide to Growing Up Normal" at Feinstein's/54...

Chita Rivera

Mark Dundas Wood
At one point during the opening night of her Café Carlyle debut show, "An Evening of My Favorite Songs," Chita Rivera noted that she has been running around for years just being her 35-year-old self, without noticing exactly how much time has elapsed. If this show is any indication, the Rivera approach to aging is...

The Quentin Tarantino Songbook

Gerry Geddes
It is a well-known fact that in addition to being an accomplished director, Quentin Tarantino is a lover of movies. His films are filled with homages and "quotes" from classic and pulp movies. Anyone who has seen his work also quickly realizes that he loves "old" music—often songs and themes from earlier films and generations....