Chicago Tribune

CABARET
CACHET

Artists' new venue
gives waning genre
room to breathe,
sing and play

By Howard Reich
Tribune Arts Critic

Though Chicago has plenty of fine jazz  rooms, clubs featuring cabaret singers lately have been in short supply. 

The demise of the Gold Star Sardine Bar and the forthcoming close of Toulouse Cognac Bar have exacerbated the problem, but the phenomenon is hardly local.  In New York, Rainbow and Stars (Manhattan's most glamorous cabaret) and Eighty-Eight's (an important entry pointy for singers on the rise) have gone out of business.  The economics of cabaret never have been more precarious than in the '90s. 

To their great credit, however, several intrepid local singers have banded together to address the problem head-on.  Rather than watch one room after another shut its doors, the newly formed Chicago Cabaret Professionals have fashioned a Monday night concert series in the Royal George.  Judging by the near-capacity crowd and the consistently high level of performance, these determined artists may be on to something. 

By placing several fine singers on a single program, titled "A Midsummer Night's Swing,"  the concert organizers virtually

ensured a large turnout, since each performer would draw her own fans, friends and family.  Sure enough, there was barely an empty seat to be found. 

More important, these performers turned in appealing mini-sets, covering a broad range of styles.  By spotlighting everyone from Chicago's pre-eminent cabaret diva, Audrey Morris, to an emerging singer such as Tammy Forman, the evening pointed to the depth and breadth of cabaret talent in this city. 

Not surprisingly, Morris brought the room to a hush with definitive performances of "Everything Happens to Me" and "Oh, Look at Me Now."  Though the singer-pianist said she was performing this music as a tribute to Frank Sinatra, Morris' versions were of her own making.  The plaintive tone she brought to the first tune and the slyly comic undercurrent she found in the second were pure Morris, her reedy vocal tone and idiosyncratic phrasing more eloquent than speech itself. 

Moreover, these performances demonstrated Morris' ability to wring maximum dramatic

impact from every syllable of lyric, all the while providing a lush piano accompaniment.  She remains the complete cabaret artist and an obvious model for the emerging performers who filled out the evening's program. 

Among the young singers, Forman proved particularly effective, perhaps because her approach to the art of cabaret is so contemporary.  To her, the cabaret repertoire is not some historic library to be revered but a living tradition to be amended, expanded and re-interpreted.  She made the point in several pieces, especially in the beguiling new tune "Ability to Swing" and in a sleek revision of Duke Ellington's It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." 

The evening also included Margie Gibson's poignant reading of "The Very Thought of You," Summer Kwai's luxuriantly slow reworking of "Mood-Indigo," Linda Rios' ebullient account of "Them There Eyes" and Mark Burnell's bluesy reading of "Shiny Stockings." 

If anyone can breathe new life into venerable cabaret forms, it's these artists.