Micaela Leon impressed us when she first presented Tigers, Muses & Jasmine at Don’t Tell Mama in 2006.  Entering the room and stopping at a gentleman’s table to musically taunt him with Freidrich Hollaender’s “Children, Tonight I’ll Pick Someone,” she quickly conveyed the decadence and recklessness of Berlin of the nineteen-twenties and early thirties.  The show was a collection of songs of the times, in both German and English, and anecdotes of the flamboyant women of the era, done with a verve and sauciness that suited the subject perfectly.

Leon has reprised the show, moving it to the Metropolitan Room, and while it is essentially the same, it has – like good wine – improved with age.  Leon exudes such an air of youth that one is tempted to say that her performance has matured into one more knowing and complex.  The earlier presentation highlighted the gaudiness and ostentation of her eight subjects –from Marlene Dietrich to Rosa Luxemberg and Anita Berber, the so-called “Priestess of Depravity.”  In this incarnation, at least to this viewer, while maintaining the era’s air of excess, Leon communicates more significantly the ominous undercurrent of the years between the wars, of the ruinous inflation, the emergence of Hitler and the anti-Semitism that drove several of her subjects from the country.  Micaela Leon has deepened Tigers, Muses & Jasmine into a more substantial theatrical work of art.

Tigers, Muses & Jasmine can be seen again at The Metropolitan Room, Friday, February 29^th.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
February 22, 2008
www.cabaretscenes.org