Bay Area Cabaret featured on Talkin BroadwayAnn Hampton Callaway Wows the Audience at
Bay Area CabaretRichard Connema
5/26/06Singer, composer, actress and pianist Ann Hampton Callaway wowed the audience on Sunday, May 14th at the opening of the 2006 Bay Area Cabaret show at the Marines Memorial Crystal Ballroom in San Francisco. For over 100 minutes, Ms. Callaway regaled the audience with an interesting potpourri of songs ranging from jazz classics to great standards. This wonderful artist has a voice that falls somewhere between jazz and Broadway. Ms. Callaway is audience friendly and she projects that special talent for deprecation. Not only is she a vibrant singer but a comedienne as well. Her remarks about certain parts of her life come out like little gems.
This was the first time I had seen this amazing talent who has won an unprecedented 14 MAC awards and has appeared around the world at leading jazz and classical venues. She was also nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in Swing. I was knocked out by her performance.
Ms. Callaway came strolling out onto the small stage and, sitting at the piano, she went into a upbeat arrangement of "Swing Away the Blues" with scat singing like the divine Ella Fitzgerald (this song will be on her album Blues in the Night, to be released in August). Ann grew up in Chicago loving the records of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald. She offered great imitations of Ms. Holiday on "God Bless the Child" and Ms. Vaughn on "Misty" before segueing her comical composition, "The I'm-Too-White-To-Sing-The-Blues Blues."
Ms. Callaway changed style and sang a poignant version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Toward the end of the song she belted out the number with assured confidence. She talked about her upcoming film role in Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd. She was only to be in the background singing "Come Rain or Come Shine," when De Niro decided to cast her in the film as a singer. She said she had to wear an upswept hair piece for the role; she told us that "the higher the hair, the closer to God" was said on the set. She then went into an emotional arrangement of the Harold Arlen song with a great piano solo.
The artist also introduced the lovely weighty ballad "Spring Can Hang You Up the Most." She sang several of her compositions, including "The Libra Song," "Hip to be Happy" and "Where Does Love Go?" Also included was the song she composed for the television series "The Nanny." She said the show is now on repeats on the Lifetime Network, which is "for women and gay men."
Ms. Callaway gave a personal tribute to her idol, the first lady of song Ella Fitzgerald, by singing and scatting "Mr. Paganini" and a soul full rendition of the Rodgers and Hart classic "Blue Moon." The singer talked about writing a love song for Barbra Streisand to sing at her wedding to James Brolin. It took five weeks to write the lyrics to the song, titled "I've Dreamed of You," which is stunning. Barbra was so impressed with the song that she told Ann she would use it on her fourth farewell tour. The audience then joined her in a swinging '30s arrangement of "The Glory of Love."
As her signature, Ms. Callaway told the audience she is a songwriter and she wanted them to yell out words or phrases for a Mother Day's song that she would compose immediately. The audience yelled out phrases like "Why didn't you call," "If I ain't happy, no one's happy," "where are the boys now," "shopping in New York" and words like "painful" and "natural." On the spot, she composed a blues arrangement of a new song. The artist closed her set with an affecting version of Johnny Mercer's "Blues in the Night" which she sang in the Broadway production of Swing.
Entertainment
Thursday, May 11, 2006Pat Craig
MARILYN LEVINSON is hardly a veteran of the golden age of cabaret, when no self-respecting hotel lounge or upscale club would be without a singer warbling intimately to the assembled throng.
She has treasured memories of living in New York and getting a high-octane cabaret experience from Karen Mason at the Duplex in the Village. All she really wants, though, is to open up cabaret to people who have traded the small and intimate for grazing in the huge entertainment feed lots that dot the Bay, or electronic replacements for a great night out.
"Cabaret strips people down to who they are; there's no hiding from the audience," says Levinson, founder of Bay Area Cabaret, an organization that presents and promotes cabaret performances. She's also producer of Ann Hampton Callaway's show Sunday at the Marines Memorial Club Crystal Ballroom and of Patricia Racette's performance May 20, in the first public performance in the Fairmont Hotel's Venetian Room. "It's very frustrating to me that most people in my generation don't know what cabaret means."
It focuses on the performer -- usually a solo or perhaps a duo -- accompanied by a piano or small combo, and singing to a crowd of maybe 200 to 400. There are no huge speakers, no giant video monitors; they're not needed, because the performer is right there in the room.
"I'm in my 40s, I have two small children, I live in Marin, and I get depressed when I think about what we do on a date night," she says. "We might go to the multiplex, or out to dinner. But what is there to do after dinner? Cabaret is a wonderful entertainment form that doesn't require a tremendous amount of concentration. Since performances usually run around 90 minutes, it doesn't require a great deal of time, and what you get is a cross between a concert and a party."
What you also get is an opportunity to see some of the classic entertainment opulence of the Bay Area -- showrooms that often glitter as much as the acts playing in them.
The Crystal Ballroom, where Callaway will perform Sunday, is a jewel near the top of the Marines Memorial Club building -- a place that not only includes accommodations but a theater, restaurant and bar with a spectacular high-level view of downtown San Francisco and the Bay. The Venetian Room, where Racette performs, is one of the city's legendary nightspots, where, up to 15 or 20 years ago, headliners ranging from Ella Fitzgerald to Tina Turner would perform on a regular basis. The room hasn't been open to the public for at least a decade, but its golden splendor is intact, and the May 20 concert could be the start of a new life for the showroom in the 1906 hotel at the top of Nob Hill.
"As a native San Franciscan, I have a lot of memories of the various venues, theaters and ballrooms," says Levinson. "That's why we have no one venue; I like moving around a little. And the Venetian Room, well, that's actually a lifetime dream."
Details: Callaway performs 5 p.m. Sunday in the Crystal Ballroom, 609 Sutter St. Tickets cost $40. Racette plays May 20 in the Venetian Room at 950 Mason St. Tickets, which include coffee and dessert, cost $50. Tickets are available at 415-392-4400 or www.bayareacabaret.org.
Bay Area Cabaret featured in Bay Area Reporter
'Sitting in the dark, being sung to'
Bay Area Cabaret series kicks off season this weekendJim VanBuskirk
When Marilyn Levinson told friends that she was producing cabaret in the Bay Area, they assured her "it should do well, the movie did well." Levinson laughs, but the widespread unfamiliarity with cabaret (the art form, not the Broadway musical) obviously rankles.
Levinson is passionately committed to bringing "high-quality Broadway and cabaret performers to intimate and elegant venues." By day a self-described "Marin soccer mom," Levinson's journey to cabaret producer is illuminating. Always interested in music and theater, having worked with producers Joe Papp and Arthur Cantor in New York, and locally for Marine's Memorial, ACT and with Steve Silver, she was encouraged by her father to study law at Stanford. After practicing law for many years, Levinson began experiencing debilitating back-pain, which threatened to end her career. Trying to determine what to do next, she wrote to Barbara Cook's agent inviting the Broadway legend to perform in San Francisco. "I was thinking, hoping, that she wouldn't respond," Levinson admits, but when she did, it led directly to the formation of Bay Area Cabaret, a nonprofit organization which produced a 2004 season of three Diva Evenings: Barbara Cook at Davies Symphony Hall, singer/songwriter Ann Hampton Callaway at Marines Memorial and opera singer Karen Slack at Giorgio's Restaurant in Marin.
"For the first time in my life, I knew I was going in the direction of my heart," says Levinson. She still sounds amazed at the power of cabaret. During the Cook concert, Levinson, having lost her mother to the devastation of Parkinson's disease, was unexpectedly flooded with fond memories of her mother before the disease. "There is nothing quite so emotionally satisfying as sitting in the dark, being sung to." In this world of ever-increasing technology, Levinson believes, there is something human being lost. "I'm trying to build community around cabaret, to reestablish connection."
As the first of this season's Bay Area Cabaret concerts, Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley return to the Bay Area on Oct. 23, following their stellar performances in the SF Symphony's Candide and Of Thee I Sing/Let them Eat Cake . Mazzie has starred in Kiss Me Kate, Passion and Ragtime, while Danieley has been lauded for his roles in The Full Monty, Floyd Collins and Candide. The husband-and-wife team will be performing their cabaret show Opposite You, which first appeared as part of the Lincoln Center American Songbook Series, and is being released as a CD in November. The concert features duets, solos, and medleys from such songwriters as Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens.
When she first heard Karen Mason years ago at the Duplex in New York, Levinson felt like she was in Mason's living room, "experiencing the words, the patter, who she is." A consummate cabaret performer, Mason will debut The Winner Takes it All on Dec. 11. The title of Mason's show comes from an ABBA song, appropriately since she originated the role of Tanya in the Broadway hit Mamma Mia. The show will include material from her brand new CD The Sweetest of Nights, as well as some holiday favorites.
Wonder worldPerhaps the freshest take on cabaret is Darius de Haas performing the Stevie Wonder Songbook. The Obie Award-winning singer, actor and dancer will be making his Bay Area debut on Nov. 20. De Haas performed with Vanessa Williams in the 1994 Kiss of the Spider Woman, and was the special guest on her Everlasting Love tour in 2005. His solid voice, "which he takes all over the place," has been heard on a dozen recordings, including the concert version of Dreamgirls. His 2002 solo album Day Dreams: Variations on Strayhorn has been acclaimed as a "modern masterpiece." De Haas, who, like Billy Strayhorn, is both black and gay, was one of the highlights of this summer's R Family Cruise, conceived by Gregg Kaminsky and Rosie and Kelli O'Donnell to cater to gay families. Levinson anticipates that the de Haas concert will be "the runaway hit of the series, perhaps because the material is fresher, more modern. Darius breathes new life into the art form. Like all this year's performers, he has honesty, authenticity, and blazing talent."
Our season was recently featured on Playbill.com
Mazzie, Danieley, de Haas and Mason Set for
Bay Area Cabaret Season
The Bay Area Cabaret's fall season ? which will be presented at San Francisco's Marines Memorial Club ? has been announced.