Newsweek says cabarets are making a come back
... Nightlife is a cabaret all over the world these days. Clubs, festivals and small concert venues are hosting eclectic performances, often with a distinct international flavor, that are drawing not just old-school fans but introducing a whole new generation to the rich and sometimes risqu? musical genre. Last fall, New York's Carnegie Hall hosted the "Berlin in Lights" festival, which featured eight nights of German-style cabaret, and the Mabel Mercer Foundation's Cabaret Convention lured crowds to Lincoln Center. Last June, some 50,000 fans attended more than 200 performances during the 16-day Adelaide Cabaret Festival in Australia. This month American singer Michael Feinstein is launching a cabaret season at London's Shaw Theatre, where he will join Chita Rivera, Ute Lemper and other cabaret artists for performances throughout the spring. At the Jermyn Street theater across town, stars such as Julie Wilson and Jeff Harner will be performing in "The American Songbook in London" starting in February. And a new production of the 1998 Broadway revival of "Cabaret," directed by Sam Mendes, has been playing to sold-out crowds in Paris and Berlin. "Cabaret clubs come and go, but the genre will never go away," Feinstein says.
The new burst of popularity comes as no surprise to Mark McInnes, an Australia-born, London-based cabaret performer who goes by the stage name Dusty Limits. "It's a reaction to how overly produced, thoroughly edited and fundamentally contrived most popular entertainment is," he says. "We are so sick of the plastic iPod universe that we are forced to inhabit, we are excited to be in a room with a living breathing human being who is opening his heart and soul."
Translated literally from the French as "small room," cabaret is not easy to define. The genre was born in the 19th-century music halls of the bohemian Paris neighborhood Montmartre, where singers, dancers and jugglers entertained audiences in clubs like Le Chat Noir and Moulin Rouge. Historically, Parisian singing-and-burlesque shows were vastly different from the subversively decadent Weimar Berlin cabarets of the 1930s, which thrived after World War I with the rise of such talents as Marlene Dietrich and Trude Hesterberg to help heal the crippled country. American cabarets were less bawdy affairs aimed at wealthy patrons in New York and London who crowded into the Oak Room at the Algonquin or the Ritz in London to hear singers like Bobby Short and Julie Wilson sing Cole Porter and Noel Coward tunes. What they all had in common was a mix of music, theater and comedy—often with political undertones—performed in small, intimate settings....
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The new burst of popularity comes as no surprise to Mark McInnes, an Australia-born, London-based cabaret performer who goes by the stage name Dusty Limits. "It's a reaction to how overly produced, thoroughly edited and fundamentally contrived most popular entertainment is," he says. "We are so sick of the plastic iPod universe that we are forced to inhabit, we are excited to be in a room with a living breathing human being who is opening his heart and soul."
Translated literally from the French as "small room," cabaret is not easy to define. The genre was born in the 19th-century music halls of the bohemian Paris neighborhood Montmartre, where singers, dancers and jugglers entertained audiences in clubs like Le Chat Noir and Moulin Rouge. Historically, Parisian singing-and-burlesque shows were vastly different from the subversively decadent Weimar Berlin cabarets of the 1930s, which thrived after World War I with the rise of such talents as Marlene Dietrich and Trude Hesterberg to help heal the crippled country. American cabarets were less bawdy affairs aimed at wealthy patrons in New York and London who crowded into the Oak Room at the Algonquin or the Ritz in London to hear singers like Bobby Short and Julie Wilson sing Cole Porter and Noel Coward tunes. What they all had in common was a mix of music, theater and comedy—often with political undertones—performed in small, intimate settings....