What Good Is Sitting Alone In Your Room
My wife and I used to do improv murder mysteries with a guy named Brent Keast. Brent was a lanky, good lookin’ guy; silvery-haired, quick witted. We lost track of him for a while, then he turned up last night doing his own cabaret show in a bar in Hollywood.
Cabaret, for you people in the flyover cities, is a unique theatrical form. It’s like a musical masquarding as a stand-up act; you got a piano player and you got a singer. You got show tunes and you got patter between the tunes, often about the singer’s life. That’s the whole show.
Brent’s show is called Stages: A Boomer’s Journey. The show tunes he picked are all about getting older, about wistful longing and regret. And they were all really good songs. They were tuneful but emotionally complex. Plus he opened with Rupert Holmes’ SOAP OPERA, which sold me immediately. Holmes is bet known for ESCAPE (THE PINA COLADA SONG) but before that he wrote a lot of really good material and this song is from that period. Even if I hadn’t known Brent, he’d have had me at hello with that one.
This isn’t a review, but I should add that Brent has a knack for cabaret and didn’t embarass himself. Believe me, as an L.A. guy I wind up seeing people’s shows all the time and usually it’s mortifying. This was a nice evening out. At times, it was even moving.
Anyway, after the show as Brent was packing up his mic so Peggy Judy (the next cabaret singer) could go on, I overheard him telling someone that the act is hard because “you’re all alone up there.” He’s right. Cabaret is nerve-wracking. It’s a whole musical on the shoulders of one person. At least in a normal musical you have someone else to take up the slack. And when you’re doing improv, there is always the other person to bounce ideas off of. You’re making it up as you go along, sure, but you don’t have to make ALL of it up. So in cabaret you’re all the characters; you’re responsible for maintaining the emotional roller coaster and turning out a satisfying show, and usually you’re the writer and you have to pick the songs. It would crush lesser performers.
All the more reason, then, to enjoy cabaret. It’s both a show and a tight-wire act.
You know what? It looks like fun.