For most of the fifteen years Karen Kohler has graced the cabaret stage, she’s focused on the genre’s European antecedents and many of the great songs that made their way into the American repertoire. In Foreign Currency, Kohler didn’t merely include them, in several cases she notably enhanced them.  One such move, for example, is tellingly ending Rod McKuen's English “If You Go Away” with a brief section of Brel's original “Ne me quitte pas” in French, transforming McKuen’s conditional "if you stay" to Brel's desperate, pleading, "Don't leave me."

Kohler has come a long way since we reviewed her Dietrich show many years ago.  She is more confident and willing to take chances, alternately displaying an assertive seductiveness, a wry irony, a world-weariness, and a strong dramatic talent as she translated songs before she sang them in German. Her voice is a lovely soprano, and a song by Schubert ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel") allowed her to show off her vocal abilities while dramatizing a woman who is either mad or on the brink of madness.  What makes the show particularly striking is the collection of songs themselves.

It was clear why Friedrich Hollaender’s “Kopf bis Fuss” helped make a star out of its singer in the1930 German film The Blue Angel, a favor returned when that actress, Marlene Dietrich, popularized it with Sammy Lerner’s English lyrics as “Falling in Love Again.”  Lesser-known, but equally compelling in Kohler’s hands, were: Mischa Spoilansky’s cynical “Alles Schwindel” (“Its All a Swindle”); Hollaender’s tale of “Die Kleptomanin,” whose obsessive need to steal everything she covets includes another’s man; and the Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht ironic anti-war “Ballad of a [German] Soldier’s Wife,” who was sent a hat from Amsterdam, a gown from Paris, high-heeled shoes from Prague, and from Russia – a widow’s veil.

The usual patter between numbers was replaced by an absorbing near-stream-of-consciousness narrative about the songs and the vocalist herself, occasionally falling to a faint whisper, Foreign Currency becoming as much a theater piece as it was a cabaret show.  Musical Director/pianist Doug Oberhamer, and Gregory Chudzik on bass, provided effective support for Kohler; Andy Brattain adeptly managed the room’s lights and sound.  Where this show was concerned, offering American dollars for Foreign Currency was a satisfying exchange.

Unlike the Regency’s New York hotel supper club brethren this summer (Café Carlyle is dark and The Algonquin’s Oak Room as a limited schedule), Feinstein’s has a chock-full cabaret schedule.  The room’s manager, Jessica Poli, and its Entertainment Director, John Iachetti, view summertime as an opportunity both to introduce new performers to the room’s regular patrons, and to introduce cabaret to new patrons the summer season brings their way.

Barbara & Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
July 11, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org