Sharon McNight
Surviving Cabaret
The Green Room 42, NYC, April 15, 2023
Reviewed by Geoff Stoner
In Surviving Cabaret —and fortunately for us she has survived—Sharon McNight came across as a trouper to her bones. With a lifetime of performing under her belt, she has become the doyenne of her genre in the cabaret world. At her show at The Green Room 42, she used her skills as a seasoned raconteur, comedienne, and singer. As the title foretold, she regaled us with stories of her long-ago move to New York City and her years of performing at long-gone venues such as The Mansion, Fanny’s, Eighty-Eight’s, and others.
She introduced us to many of the souls she met along the way—some gone, some still present. She seemed matter of fact, but given her show’s title, we could presuppose she’s seen it all and has been there, done that. As with anyone of her generation who has performed in cabaret circles (and in McNight’s case because of her well-known history of activism), we might assume she’s experienced considerable loss, especially during the AIDS epidemic. She knew several of the songwriters of the songs she performed, knew a lot of the people in the business, worked with the musicians, and probably had scores of fans, friends, and colleagues who died young.
McNight’s opening song, “I’m Still Standing” (Janis Ian), was a perfect choice. When she sang “I want to risk my soul, here where it can grow without fear” at the top of the song, we felt her utter authenticity, and she was met with enthusiastic applause when she belted out the song’s title. She told a delightful story of how Fran Landesman came to write “Small Day Tomorrow.” Her rendition of the song turned out to be surprisingly cutting and funny. In McNight’s version, the song lyric made perfect sense, as illustrated by her story of the two wealthy Brits who insisted on going home early after dinner because they have a “big day tomorrow.” Landesman’s lyric: “you big wheels with your big deals you’re gonna need your sleep” made perfect sense in the context of the song’s opening line: “I don’t have to go to bed, I’ve got a small day tomorrow.”
When McNight sang a Hank Williams medley of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Half as Much,” and ” Lovesick Blues,” she displayed an impressive vocal mastery of the genre, right down to her country-western yodel. One of her great lines of the night was: “If you can’t do your show in front of the headlights of a ’56 Chevy, you don’t belong in show business.” Her philosophy rings utterly true to her nature; she has pluck and guts and a fun, kick-ass attitude that is reminiscent of Joan Rivers and she is willing to go wherever she’s required to perform.
A good part of her material was tried and true. She offered her Mae West version of “Everybody’s Girl” from Steel Pier that “every drag queen she knew wished they’d thought of.” Liz MacNamara’s “Bacon” was a complete showstopper, McNight tried in vain to stick to vegan/vegetarian food choices and failed miserably. (Spoiler alert: it was delightful to see how she finagled her way back to choosing the demon meat by needing a topper for a spinach salad.) She added more comedy with the staging—a kind of ’60’s dance party rhumba; she wound up with her back to the audience, asked her accompanist if “we were still there,” and apologized to us for her voraciousness.
The crowning glory of the evening was her stunning tour-de-force interpretation of the first technicolor moments in The Wizard of Oz after Dorothy steps out of her house in Munchkin Land. It took about 20 minutes for her to cover that moment in the film, and it was worth every second. McNight portrayed the characters involved—Dorothy, Glinda, The Lullaby League, The Mayor of Munchkin City, The Lollipop Guild, and the Wicked Witch of the West, among others. She gave fully realized, jaw-dropping impersonations of the characters as though we were watching the movie. An added benefit was that McNight plumbed the meaning in every word she sang; it was a sheer delight to hear each Yip Harburg lyric.
McNight closed with “Your Sweet and Shiny Eyes” by Bonnie Raitt. She took Raitt’s slow ballad “twang” out of the song, made it a full-fledged story, and included some Hawaiian hand gestures. She invited us to sing along, and suddenly the room was filled with four-part harmony from those with years of choral harmonizing, accompanied by those Hawaiian hand gestures, à la The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We went along willingly; some members of the audience were intimately aware of their roles while others were neophytes and required instruction.
McNight has got a loyal following—from Provincetown to New York City to San Francisco to Palm Springs—of people who laugh out loud at her ribald jokes. She was dealing with a nasty cold the night of her performance and quipped, as she hiked up her bosom (in her superb Miss Mae West imitation), “These ain’t all mine; it’s my bra stuffed with Kleenex!”
We’re lucky Sharon McNight is still making her considerable contribution to cabaret. She’s Lady Liberty with her arms outstretched to all of humanity—especially its fringes—and dammit, the world’s a better place because of her. A fifth bust on Mount Rushmore could be hers—stuffed with Kleenex.
Sharon was accompanied by her longtime music director, the talented James Followell.
