Drama Queen

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
Ella Fitzgerald once called Marilyn Maye “the greatest white female singer in the world”. I saw her for the first time in her latest club act at Feinstein’s, and I can tell you that’s no exaggeration. There are younger singers who might posses more powerful voices. However, I can think of no [...]

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
On one of the funnier episodes of Will & Grace Lorraine said to Will: “You’re a natty dresser. Are you English?” To which Will responded: “Oh, no, I’m gay.” “Well, it’s the same thing.” Playwright, songwriter and singer Noël Coward, being both English and gay, was very English and very gay.
John Standing, [...]

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
Undiluted pleasure. A major cabaret event, cabaret history, even. So supreme, the very finest entertainment that New York has to offer. Faaaabulous!
All of those would be apt descriptions of Christine Ebersole’s dazzling new show at the Café Carlyle. She has a high mark to live up to: The act that she did [...]

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
It’s no accident that Betty Buckley’s doing a lot of Broadway in her latest cabaret act — “For The Love Of Broadway!” — she says that Feinstein’s got complaints about the jazzier slant of her earlier acts at the club. “We came to see Betty Buckley; we want to hear Broadway, dammit!” [...]

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com. 
In Tyne Daly’s previous nightclub act at Feinstein’s, her cabaret debut, she couldn’t find a theme to connect the songs she wanted to sing, so she simply titled it “Songs.” This time, in a show called “The Second Time Around,” Daly has settled on the theme of the blessings and curses that [...]

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
Broadway legend Elaine Stritch’s latest cabaret show Singin’ Sondheim…One Song at a Time (has anyone ever dared to do two at a time?) finds her doing her very favorite songs by her fellow Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim, including some written with such collaborators as Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers and Jule Styne. With [...]

 Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
Yet another duo cabaret act from Michael Feinstein, after two terrific match-ups with Cheyenne Jackson and Christine Ebersole (the show with Jackson was so successful that it was subsequently made into a terrific studio album). The previous shows were studies in contrasts, with Feinstein playing more or less the straight man to [...]

Jane Krakowski may be making her cabaret debut, but she has all the skills that cabaret requires and needs to be a little less self-deprecating about it.  She knows how to use her “sexuality,” as her 30 Rock character Jenna Maroney puts it, and can sing all kinds of sexy, from silly to femme fatale. [...]

Originally reviewed for GaySocialites.com.
For years before I first heard John Kelly’s drag impersonation — channelling, really — of Joni Mitchell, I had only the vaguest idea of who she was. Judy Collins, though, I had definitely heard of, and her hit version of Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now” had a solid place in my musical memory. After [...]