“20,” a man greets me as I walk through the door of Don’t Tell Mama piano bar on Fremont Street East on Sunday evening. “You’re 20,” he repeats, smiling like being 20 is a really good thing.
I introduce myself to the man, who identifies himself as Lloyd, and the petite couple working the door who Lloyd identifies as the new bar’s proud owners. They’re smiling, too.
“We love you,” Lloyd says.
“I love you,” I reply, because that’s what you say when someone tells you they love you.
So, far the night is off to a good start.
The night, if 6 p.m. qualifies, is dedicated to song. It’s a recital – minus the neon chiffon, half-gloved ensembles of my dance class days and plus a dose of adult innuendo and full-grown talent. The hour-long show is the finale performance for a weekend-long intensive cabaret workshop taught by New Yorkers Lina Koutrakos and Rick Jensen, one of those let’s-see-how-much-you’ve-learned gigs.
“These are not out of the shower onto the stage types,” Koutrakos says, seizing the microphone to welcome the small but attentive audience.
Dressed in black leather pants and with wild black hair, Lina is like a magnet on stage. She is so comfortable, cheeky and alive, that I almost have to watch her as she rifles through jokes and brags on her Las Vegas pupils, eight singers who will perform for the low, corner stage with Rick Jensen accompanying them on a white piano.
Ranging from pros – Scott Watanabe of Phantom: Las Vegas Spectacular, Elly Brown of Jubliee! - to cabaret greenhorns, one by one they take the stage and address the crowd using nothing more than their voice and their expression. Most have a lot of both.
They sing about overstayed welcomes, mail order brides, and love lost and found. Rather than seeming scared of the audience, or above it all, they stare straight into the crowd as if they’re singing to that guy at table three, the one with the full glass of red wine.
“Let’s talk about lust,” Koutrakos says, taking the microphone again as the show nears its close. Pointing to her waist she offers a bit of philosophy: “Love happens from here up. Lust happens from here down.”
She launches into a story, which leads to a song, the refrain of “Oh, my, my” repeated again and again but each time with a slightly different cadence and emotion.
“There is no fourth wall,” Koutrakos explains of cabaret. Unlike theater, where the actors generally perform as if they don’t know the audience exists or imagine the audiences naked to make them less threatening, cabaret allows singers to address their audiences and demands that they interact with them.
“It’s not an old fashioned French singer with a boa,” she says. “It’s not singing Irving Berlin.”
Koutrakos knows cabaret well. Her relationship with the genre started when she waited tables in piano bars and cabaret joints in New York City. Also a rock singer, Koutrakos found something she identified with in the earnestness of cabaret and developed into a powerful performer and teacher. She’s taught at Yale and now splits time between her home in New York, her rock band and traveling around the country to teach workshops to aspiring cabaret artists. For Koutrakos, rock music and cabaret go together just fine.
“One of my favorite cabaret singers – and you would never call him a cabaret singer – but it’s Bruce Springsteen,” she says. “He talks to us.”
“I always thought of [cabaret] as the cruise ship, tiny girls in big headdresses,” laughs Justin Olsen, a singer and the president of SwingBeat Entertainment talent agency who attended the three-day workshop. “Really, it just means a small, intimate venue. Frank Sinatra was really a cabaret singer, a saloon singer, but that’s really just a cabaret singer.”
As Olsen describes it, cabaret performance is about connecting with the crowd and sharing something genuine. It’s less of creating a character, and more about singing as you.
That can be really scary, but when you’re at a place like Don’t Tell Mama, in front of a crowd springing into applause after every song and with a guy like Lloyd who loves you for no reason at all, maybe singing cabaret makes you feel right at home.
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