Class Acts

Back when I first started writing about the St. Louis cabaret scene around ten years ago, doing so meant covering the out of town stars who played the Grandel Theatre. You could count the local cabaret performers on the fingers of one hand and still have room left to hold your glass of Zinfandel.

Today the international stars still shine locally, largely via the Cabaret St. Louis season, but the number of local cabaret artists has increased exponentially.  If the showcase this past  Sunday (April 25, 2010) at the Jazz Bistro in any indication, that growth shows no signs of stopping.

Credit goes, in part, to producer Jim Dolan's tireless efforts in promoting local talent under his Presenters Dolan umbrella, but to my mind the single biggest contributor to the St. Louis cabaret explosion has been the St. Louis Cabaret Conference (the fourth edition of which takes place August 12 through 15) and its organizer, Tim Schall (pictured).

Now honesty forces me to point out that Mr. Schall is the director of my own solo show, Just a Song at Twilight (an encore of which is planned for mid-July), as well as my voice coach. Even so, there's no denying that his impact on the growth of local cabaret talent has been significant. In addition to the Conference, Mr. Schall also teaches a recurring Cabaret 101 course for performers who want to get their feet wet but aren't yet ready for the full immersion of the conference. Meeting every Saturday for seven weeks, the course culminates in a showcase in which each student performs a set of four songs that he or she has developed during the class. As Sunday's performance demonstrated, Cabaret 101 has become a major incubator of talent in this town.

The show featured eight performers with a wide range of styles and abilities. They were, in order of appearance, Julie Delaney Flanagan, Charlene Reimann, Shirley Aschinger, Steve Brammeier, Donna Rothenberg, Carolyn Lester, Debbie Schuster and Doug Erwin. Musical direction was provided by the redoubtable Al Fisher.

Some were veteran concert and/or musical theatre performers while others had little or no stage experience. Some were Broadway belters while others were more in the Marianne Faithful or Melanie range. Some exuded confidence while others were modestly self-effacing. All of them, however, connected with their audience and were quite clearly having the time of their lives. Those of us in the house showed our appreciation with warm applause throughout the evening and a standing ovation at the end.

And that connection is, ultimately, what cabaret is all about. It's not easy to achieve, especially for those of us coming to it from a theatre background where breaking through the "fourth wall" is generally the exact opposite of good performance practice. But it's magical when it happens in cabaret, and it was certainly happening Sunday night.

The St. Louis cabaret community is expanding and, better yet, the audience appears to be as well. It's exciting to be covering it and participating in it.