American Idol, watch your back.  New York's Metropolitan Room is off to a flying start with the Metrostars Talent Challenge, its richly-promising search for the next scintillating cabaret star. If the opening session was a foreshadowing of nights ahead, audience members fortunate enough to have gotten a reservation should be prepared for a potpourri of songsters and styles, from ballads to jazz to country, humorous and serious, and for exuberant expressions of delight from the jam-packed room.

This series of competitions will be no amateur hour. The participants are seasoned pros or arresting new talents who – in order to reach to reach the promised land of the August 11^th and 18^th finals – must prevail through their preliminary round and increasingly demanding quarter- and semi-finals. The big climax will have three remaining of the original near-seventy contestants, competing with individual interpretations of the same song, plus two of the six they will have performed in earlier rounds with integrated patter and anecdotes.

The judges are cabaret cognoscenti, from vocal powerhouse Baby Jane Dexter and the Metropolitan Room's (and Gotham Comedy Club's) owners, Chris and Steven Mazzilli, to longtime columnist and critic Roy Sander.  Each week will also include participating celebrity judges, among them Scott Siegel, the cabaret critic and prodigious producer of cabaret and Broadway shows at Town Hall; Adam Feldman, Time Out NY's man about cabaret; cabaret and Broadway star Karen Mason; plus others, including Cabaret Scenes' own Rob Lester. And in each round, audience members receive ballots to weigh in on the final decisions. 

The first preliminary competition featured twenty-two hopefuls, to be followed on succeeding Mondays by a second and third coterie of twenty-plus participants. All understandably eager to reach the final judging and capture its grand prize: a week-long, prime-time engagement at the room, with the assistance of a stage director, a musical director, pix and publicity, plus a professionally-produced CD of the show-to-be. No wonder the clamor to be a contestant.

Lennie Watts, the room's booking manager, as well as a multi-award wining performer and director, will host each Monday night’s proceedings.  Often cordially irreverent with his wry asides, he kept the program humming along.  With twenty-two acts on the bill, he was a fund of sprightly, personalized intros and managed never to repeat a good line. 

Varied as they were, each contestant presented his or her song with animation and intensity. The audience seemingly couldn’t get enough of the talent; the greetings of the favorites and the ensuing applause were often thunderous.  The first contest's winners, who will now be among the quarter-finalists, were Anne Steele, who sang a forceful “Uninvited,” Robert Fowler, who thrilled the audience with his rich voice and understanding reading of “And the World Goes ‘Round;” Ejaye Tracy, with a moving and dramatic rendition of “Blame It on My Youth,” and Bill Brooks, who kept the audience in appreciative stitches with his gay male version of “Taylor, the Latte Boy.”  While there wasn't a bummer in the lot, the judges’ choices, at least from this writer's point of view, were right on target. 

Additional contests are on July 14^th and 21^st, the quarter-finals on July 28^th, semi-finals on August 4^th, and the double-header finals on August 11^th and August 18^th.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
July 7, 2008
www.cabaretscenes.org