Cabaret is a genre I return to regularly here, or at least as regularly as I can find it in London – there may be plenty of new variety and burlesque about, but “traditional” cabaret (by which I mean a singer and a song, heard in an intimate setting) is in desperately short and inconsistent supply. We’ve lately, however, had a bit of a feast here: only the other day I reported on three shows I’d seen in the preceding week, and last night I went to one more entry in Jermyn Street Theatre’s current American Songbook in London season.
Cabaret, of course, has a past – both in the rich seams of material it draws off, and also in the ranks of performers like Barbara Cook, still going strong at 80 (and about to open another season at New York’s Café Carlyle from March 4), and Julie Wilson, now 83, whom we saw here last week; but does cabaret have a future?
Watching a singer like Alison Jiear at Jermyn Street on Sunday, who brings such passion and vivacity (and a repertoire that stretches from pop songs and showtunes to even the ditty to a Tampax commercial) to the stage that you know it will survive: as long as there are songs and singers with personality who want to sing them, it will live on.
But I spoke to Ali yesterday, and while she has other priorities right now – in particular, a seven-month-old son – she’s understandably depressed at the lack of outlets in which to do it, at least over here. In New York, the scene may range from the desperately overpriced (the Carlyle for Barbara Cook will set you back a cover of up to $125, plus dinner which is required for 8.45pm shows that will set you back at least the same again) to the rather rudimentary, but at least there are the outlets. And its out of that sort of environment that a smart, sassy lass like Maude Maggart – who looks a bit like Sex and the City’s Charlotte but also has Miranda’s quirky observational humour – can actually develop a career.
She is the older sister of American pop singer Fiona Apple (about whom I can only wish that someone would sign her up to play nurse Fay Apple in Sondheim’s 1964 musical Anyone Can Whistle), and is in town this week as part of the Jermyn Street season. Her skills are the kind you can only hone in the cabaret clubs, combining a fast and ready wit that is unafraid of emotional and — with a low-cut dress offering plenty of cleavage and even a spot of lower back — physical exposure.
She has also carefully crafted a very theatrical programme that is built around a theme – the portrayal of women in song as either good girls or bad girls, with few shades in between. Her grandmother, who is now 97, has a similarly polarised colour palette: a good girl was worn on the outside, with dresses that stretched from peach to lilac; but a bad girl lurked underneath, with her collection of black lingerie. That kind of distillation of personal information to illustrate a point is also what is so revelatory of the best kind of cabaret.
With her literate, witty linking repartee, she strikes me, too, as a natural inheritor of Andrea Marcovicci’s informative anecdotal performance style. (She also has Marcovicci’s sometimes grating, metallic vibrato). But ably supported by pianist Lanny Meyers – who makes the show seem even more of a throwback to another era, resembling as he does a cross between Andy Warhol and Rod Stewart – this was both a gift and a gas of a show.
Gas? No, I’m not trying to be retro. Barb Jungr has passed on to me the acronym “gas” for Great American Songbook. But Barb, who resolutely resists the obvious and specialises instead in deep investigations of particular singers and writers from Brel and Bob Dylan to her current show (and imminent album) on Nina Simone, proves there’s another way to go to keep cabaret alive – and not merely kicking, but kicking ass. While Maude Maggart’s show draws on songs from 1926 to 1987 (with a late entry for a song from Sondheim’s Into the Woods from the latter year), its tradition is entirely “gas”. But we need different kinds of fuel, too, to reinvigorate cabaret, and Jungr is a prime exponent of stretching its parameters.
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