Jill Kargman
Stairway to Cabaret
Café Carlyle, NYC, January 17, 2017
Reviewed by Elizabeth Ahlfors for Cabaret Scenes
The winter season at the Café Carlyle takes a turn toward the eclectic, opening with Jill Kargman’s raw brio comedy vignettes accessorized with pop metal songs, performed “cabaret-style.” Stairway to Cabaret treats sold-out audiences to Kargman’s satirizing views of the Upper East Side Manhattan female culture vultures and the head-banging songs that formed their childhood soundtrack.
This includes her own life adventures, and she is multi-talented enough to have used her stories to write novels, TV shows—like Bravo’s Odd Mom Out—and chat on radio talk shows. With Musical Director/pianist Marco Paguia, Kargman adds the music of the ’80s and ’90s to her sardonic observations. Très chic, très thin, très pale, this spiky-tongued 42-year-old mother of three and wife with an understanding husband, was raised on Madison Avenue, attended private schools and accumulated self-deprecating vignettes about growing up around the top one percent.
Definitely a dedicated city girl, he states, “I’d rather be in a fifth floor walk-up than a Round Hill Road mansion.”
Directed by Trip Cullman, Kargman’s anecdotes include the nubile Julliard student houseguest who did not appreciate family appropriateness or co-op rules. Kargman has a sharp ear for dialects, like the Bulgarian make-up artist, a blasé French friend and neighborhood mothers with spoiled children.
The disappointing family trip to Disneyland with her children is a crowd-pleaser, along with her father’s obsession with death and family trips to cemeteries.
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She learned that the best cemeteries have waiting lists.
Yet, like other “children of the ’80s” (many were at this opening performance), Kargman grew up obsessed with MTV and rock messages from Mötley Crüe, Whitesnake, and Alice Cooper. Looking back, even as she sings some deadening rock songs like her opener, “Wanted Dead or Alive” (Jon Bon Jovi/Richie Sambora) with the line, “It’s all the same, only the names will change,” Kargman today clearly finds the irony in life.
Could you say the songs were performed “cabaret-style”? Not really, if interpretation and nuance is considered, but Kargman is in tune, sings with enthusiasm and the seven songs (with one reprise) were part of an era and proved her show’s conceit —which was a love for laughs, family and the Upper East Side.
