A passing thought…

OK, you may be watching too much Food Network when you find yourself narrating your moves whild cooking dinner.  (“… remember after that little swish to LIFT the arugula out of the water bath so the grit stays at the bottom…”)  But you know you’re watching too much when you refuse to make a souffle because you only have three cameras in your kitchen.*

*With apologies to Sue Ann Nivens

Julie and Julia

I finally went to see the movie Julie and Julia tonight.  A movie I enjoyed as both a blogger, cook, and someone who once went to a Halloween party as Julia Child.

The film tells contrasting tales of the newly-married Julia Child discovering herself as a cook and Julie Powell, who finds herself while writing a blog about her attempt to make all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Volume 1) in the space of one year.

The criticisms I’ve read of the movie generally adored Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci as Julia and Paul Child and were (I thought) a bit harsh on the modern story.  Maybe it’s because so many of the elements of the bloggers life hit home, but I found the modern story more involving than expected.  And I think I’ve figured out why Streep has suddenly become more appealing over the last few years — she seems to be letting the audience in on how much she enjoys performing.  Even when she’s playing someone as frosty as the heroine in The Devil Wears Prada, she seems to be having a great time up there.

It was fun to see Helen Carey, who I remember as the glamorous Phyllis when Signature last did Follies as Louisette Betholle.  And Margaret Whiting fans — you’ll hear a lot of her singing Time After Time in the movie.  Could they only afford to license that one song?

Thoughts on music marketing

My office neighbor, Mike Gruenberg, has some thoughts on music marketing on his terrific blog on the Jambands site this month: “Sending out the latest advance copies of the newest songs to the radio station is a tried and true method of attempting to get air play. The problem is that the volume of new releases is staggering which makes it incumbent upon the marketing folks to devise even more creative ways for the radio stations and MTV networks to pick up on and listen to their company’s bands and not someone else’s.”

Jennifer Pade on Water Bottles

The lovely, ridiculously talented,  Jennifer Pade offers an opinion:

Hi Michael, 
 
Just had to send you this note after attending a cabaret performance at the Duplex in NYC tonight. I would love to see you do a column/post on the current ubiquitousness of plastic water bottles on stage in live performances. From Maureen McGovern to the girl next door, I’m amazed at how many singers swig out of those bottles onstage, as though they’re standing on the street rather than onstage and dressed to the nines. What ever happened to an elegant setting? 
Or maybe a posting about this kind of casualness that has crept into performing in general (and I’m not talking about being salacious or naughty — but rather the same kind of casualness you see everywhere today.) Maybe I’m just getting older, but it seems to me it has no place onstage. 
 
Just had to get that off my chest. Hope you and Ron are well. And I’m thoroughly enjoying the blog! 
 
Down with plastic water bottles! 
 
best, 
Jennifer Pade 

A celebrity spokesperson offers a rebuttal.

Kind words from a producer…

Dear Michael,

I meant to write you a few weeks ago.  I was doing a “google” search of Philip’s new CD, WHEN THE WIND BLOWS SOUTH, and came upon your Cabaret Update post.  I just wanted to tell you how much I loved what you wrote.  Every time Philip and I start a new album, we always have an image or a metaphor that guides us.  In this case, it was the notion of distances — between places and between hearts: exactly as you surmised.  I just wanted to say how pleased I was that our underlying “theme” came through!

Best,

Tommy

Lonny Smith’s Open Mic Experience

Lonny Smith generously shares his learnings from the 2008 DC Cabaret Network Open Mics.  If he inspired you, remember, the next one is Monday at the Warehouse Theatre…

It Takes the Time it Takes

Last year, emboldened in a moment of idealistic grandiosity, I made a New Year’s resolution to attend every DC Cabaret Network Open Mic during 2008. Though I’d never been to an open mic, this seemed like a great way to jump in. Even though my resolution-addled mind cooked up some rosy transformational ideas about what I wanted to achieve, my goal was simply to attend and perform at every Open Mic. If opportunities for fame or fortune intervened, I vowed that I would break my resolution without guilt.

Hollywood didn’t call and Hank Paulson extinguished any hope for fortune, and so I was able to attend every Open Mic last year. There was no moment of transformation – rosy or otherwise – but I made a few humbler observations along the way:

When you meet a bear in the woods, it is just as scared as you are. Last January, as I shivered in a room with twenty people, I saw mostly strangers. Surely, every one of them was a true cabaret artiste and open mic veteran, prepared to ridicule me the moment I stood on stage. Only in retrospect have I realized that we were all playing the same games: ruffling through music, making small talk, having long conversations with the people we did know, and averting the people we did not. By May, there were no shivers, and I knew the crowd a little better. It was room of people simply looking for an opportunity to perform and try out new material. By December, I saw a community of people and new friends who cared as much about each other as they did about their own work.

Clichéd but true: learning comes from doing. I remember a political professor who insisted that if you couldn’t clearly express an idea, you did not truly understand it. Fair enough. Similarly, with performance, if you can’t express what you know, I don’t think you can truly understand it. Over a year of open mics, I began to sense viscerally what it meant to “get” a song rather than to simply explain its meaning and rhyme scheme. Over time, I learned to see this process develop and reveal itself in others.

Repetition does wonders. Doing something hard over and over makes it less hard, and facing fear over and over teaches you to forget about fear. The butterflies finally fly off to greener pastures.

Know what you are saying, and get out of the way while you’re saying it. If there is a silver bullet for cabaret performance, I think this is it. For me, two of the most electric performances of the year were Emily Leatha Everson’s “She’s Always A Woman” (about her mother) and Eileen Warner’s “Leavin’ on A Jet Plane,” one of her late husband’s favorite songs. Both women are talented performers, but what I remember was the palpable connection between the audience and the song – there was no question what these songs were about and the performers didn’t embellish or shy away.
A lot went through my head over the year, and I’ve tried to make some unified meaning out of it all. I haven’t succeeded. I learned some new songs, pulled out some old songs, and witnessed an amazing variety of performances. At the end of 2008, there was no grand transformation – no new life metaphors, no catharsis. I don’t know that I learned anything in particular from a year of Open Mics, but I do know that I experienced a lot.

What’s My Line

Part of why I’m so TiVo addicted…

The Game Show Network shows reruns of the classic What’s My Line episodes from the 50s & 60s in the middle of the night.  It’s a delight to see these, especially for the celebrity Mystery Guest featured on each episode.  It’s a tribute to the drawing power of the show and the talent of the producers that there have only been a couple of Mystery Guests that I’ve never heard of.  To give an idea of the variety of talent, recent shows have featured Joan Crawford, Sophie Tucker, Xavier Cugat and Abbe Lane, Eva Gabor, Anthony Perkins, Cyril Ritchard, and Irene Dunne. 

I could say that the favorite secondary aspect of the show for me is the notion of class and role breakdown in mid-Twentieth Century America.  The notion that consumer finery being mass distributed makes the panel unaware if they are dealing with a street cleaner, mink rancher, or model (recent professions on the show).  Similarly, the emerging role of women in various occupations shows that a woman could be a judo instructor (twice so far), mayor, or scientist as easily as a hat-check attendant.

I could say that, but I’d be lying.  My second favorite thing is to watch the fashions and gradual style changes of a bygone era.  And part of the greatest pleasure of that is watching panelist Arlene Francis “work the dress” as she makes her entrance in a way that contestants on the newer reality show Top Model could learn from.

Happiness in the present tense

Just another of those life thoughts…

I’ve been having reason to visit someone in the hospital lately.  On a different coast, an aunt of mine has been going through Herculean medical efforts which, if successful, will extend her life by mere weeks.  Both of these moments made me realize how much I (and I suspect most of us) take relatively good health and benign life-expectancy prospects for granted.

In the best role I have ever had the priviledge to play – a piece called Canned Fruit by DC playwright Paul Donnelly — my character had the line “I think one only recognizes happiness in retrospect.” Isn’t that a fascinating quirk of human nature?  That it’s so much easier to pinpoint when we WERE happy than when we ARE happy?

So let’s all take a moment, if applicable, to appreciate happiness and health in the present.

Mini Marcoviccis

Andrea Marcocicci has three notable proteges in cabaret land.  Watching these clips of Marcovicci, Maud Maggart, and Judy Butterfield, one wonders if the proteges were selected for their Marcovicci-ness or if it was drummed into them.

Remember When “Selling Out” Was a Bad Thing ?

There was a really interesting article in USA Today about the current trend of advertisers using new pop music for commercial purposes.  To me, the fascinating notion in the article is that it is DESIRABLE for current artists to have a current song in a commercial, and that it now creates a synergy where the commercial also advertises the song and leads to more downloads.

As someone who was slightly aghast at the first time he heard Light My Fire in an elevator, I recognize this as a fascinating paradigm shift.  In addition to killing the “standard,” one of the interesting changes that the era of the singer/songwriter brought is the notion of “artistic purity” to the commercial realm of pop music.  Other than one Coca-Cola theme,  it was unheard of for a pop song to start as a commercial.

Interestingly, the recordings of our greatest cabaret artists — Karen Mason, Andrea Marcovicci, Julie Wilson, et. al. are on small labels that one suspects are hardly huge commercial money-makers.  Almost all the cabaret recordings are truly very personal labors of art and love rather than commercial gain by people involved (trust me, I know this from household experience).  Could it be that the very retro genre of cabaret is artisticly purer than other modern forms?  

For another fascinating side of the unabashedly commercial side of music, the New Yorker ran a fascinating article about Muzak a while back.