You can do a lot worse than spend 90 minutes in the company of four smart, talented, attractive and funny female entertainers. It’s an added bonus when you learn such a group of lovely ladies is also promising to sing a few original tunes and reveal how they came to be songwriters.

I’ve always been fascinated by conversations about the creative process and stories about successful collaborations. So, when I heard that accomplished cabaret performers were putting an interesting twist on an evening of song—intimate, coffeehouse-style “roundtable” interviews with each other about the songwriting craft—it was a must-see.

The idea was conceived by two-time Back Stage Bistro Award winner Meg Flather and relative newcomer to the cabaret scene Jennie Litt (who appeared at the Metropolitan Room earlier this year in a show with her husband, composer David Alpher). Meg and Jennie brought along the wonderful cabaret artists Rosemary Loar (who most recently performed her jazz interpretation of the Sting songbook at the Metropolitan Room) and three-time MAC Award winner Sue Matsuki, and a fantastic foursome of singer-songwriters hit the Don’t Tell Mama stage.

Calling the presentation a “roundtable” is a misnomer as it was actually more of a “round-robin” format. Each woman took a turn singing a three-song set, interspersed by a brief Inside the Actors Studio-style interview conducted by a fellow performer. Rosemary Loar batted leadoff with a love song to her father, “Oh Daddio,” from the score of her first musical Water from the Moon. During her conversation with Matsuki, Loar offered a line that anyone can relate to: “The antidote to depression is creativity.” Loar then delivered an upbeat, lyrically impressive pop song “Look at My Look,” which she wrote for her new musical Spoolie Girl, slated to preview through Musical Mondays Theatre Lab next fall.

After singing her beautiful ballad “Tears on the Table” from her Indigo and Iridescent CD, it was Loar’s turn to interview Jennie Litt, who specializes in songs with quirky, clever and eclectic lyrics. While Litt’s vocals aren’t as strong as those of her fellow singers, she and Alpher write pieces that work well for her range and personality. After her ballad “Thirty-Two Bars,” about a jilted lover pining over drinks in a piano bar, Litt related about starting out as a fiction writer who agonized over a novel for 12 years. She then introduced a clever, if a bit overripe, new song called “The Harper’s Life,” (where Alpher’s piano was joined by renaissance harpist Marcia Young), and ended her set with the poetic “The Cosmic Perspective,” which served as the encore to her cabaret show.

Meg Flather, also known as the “Home Shopping Diva,” was up next and, after admitting that she “struggles with being sexy,” she sang the new composition “What Only We Can Know,” with a decidedly sexy tango beat. During her interview with Litt, Flather bemoaned how opportunities can be limited for women in musical theater, which is why she and Loar were compelled to transition into singer-songwriters. Flather’s Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon influences were apparent in her song “New Dawn,” which she “assigned herself” to write during the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009. To Meg, the new dawn is symbolized by “two little girls playing on the White House lawn.”

Sue Matsuki has been singing and performing in New York for almost 30 years, but as she admitted to Flather, the size of her original songbook hasn’t reached the level of her peers. The quality of her writing, however, shows great promise. Her cool and bluesy MAC Award-winning song, “One-Stop Shopping” (co-written with Gregory Toroian, Dan Page and Michele Page), about finding the perfect guy “built for comfort, not for speed,” was a great lead-in to her equally fun “White Girls Can’t Sing the Blues, Blues (…or can they?),” which she wrote when she was 17. If Matsuki keeps up that level of songwriting, there are definitely more MAC Awards in her future.

What the future is for this particular evening of cabaret remains to be seen. While the songwriting skill of these women was a revelation, the interviews themselves were not very revelatory. The structure of the show—four singers doing three songs each over 90 minutes—didn’t allow the time to get much real insight into how they approach the craft of songwriting and what inspires them. For example, when Litt and Alpher write songs, what comes first—music or lyrics? How does Loar approach writing songs for a book musical as opposed to individual songs for a CD? For this format to work—whether it’s with these women or with other performers—the conversation section has to be less of an in-clubby, mutual admiration society and more in-depth analysis of the craft. Perhaps it can be set up like a real roundtable where all the performers are on the stage together, schmoozing after questions from a musical theater/cabaret journalist. Then the insights, opinions—and the songs—will have more resonance.

Stephen Hanks
Cabaret Scenes
April 22, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org