Fiesta de Cabaret 2024 in Retrospect
By Lynn Timmons Edwards
Take a beautiful seaside town in Mexico, a nightclub with a piano bar, an intimate performance space and proscenium theater, recreate the Eugene O’Neil Center Cabaret Conference held annually in early August, mix in some of the top cabaret faculty from the U.S., plus a couple who have relocated to Mexico. Now add six mostly young, very talented local residents and eight hungry artists from the U.S., and you get the delicious meal that was Fiesta de Cabaret, which ran from November 8 to 16, 2024 at Act2PV in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
David Sabella and Mark Hartman co-produced the 10-day workshop and the series of cabaret shows. Sabella, a Broadway and cabaret veteran and co-author of So You Want to Sing Cabaret is currently a full-time resident in Puerta Vallarta. He has taken on the challenge of creating a cabaret club at Act2PV by convincing the venue’s owners that cabaret can be successful outside of New York City. Not much happens in Puerto Vallarta in the hot, humid summer months, but come November and especially December through May, the “Zona Romantica,” also referred to as the “Gay District of Puerta Vallarta,” is hopping with seasonal residents and tourists.
Sabella asked Hartman to put together this workshop to kick off the 2024-25 season. He booked shows in the Casa Karma Red Room every night with performers that included himself, Natalie Douglas, Sue Matsuki (Sabella’s co-author of So You Want to Sing Cabaret), Perry Ojeda, and faculty members Tracy Stark and Lina Koutrakos. There were also student showcases and nightly open mics in the Ovations Piano Bar. Business was slow to start, but over the week people who had never been to the club were entranced by the voices they could hear from the street and ventured in. Meanwhile, the proscenium theater opened with an annual tradition, The Best of Broadway, that will run on Mondays throughout the season. The theater hosted a popular Mexican band that performed shows in tribute to the Beatles and Queen during the Fiesta week.
Sabella continues to nurture the donors and patrons who believe in what he is doing. I had the pleasure to get to know Georgia Darehshori, an Iowa native who met her husband Gholi at Texas Christian University. They enjoyed a 57-year love story that led them to Puerta Vallarta. Now a widow, Darehshori is the owner of a beautiful beach-front event venue called Casa Karma and is one of PV’s biggest arts patrons. A former dancer, she has a keen appreciation for cabaret and was a big part of our Fiesta family every evening. She sponsors the Red Room, and she also provided Fiesta de Cabaret scholarships for three of the Mexican national students. She is one of several patrons who believe in what Sabella is building at Act2PV.
Master teacher Koutrakos worked daily with each singer. She helped them dig into the emotional nucleus of a song’s story and emphasized that less is always more. She reduced the “hula hands” and “pussy dancing” that some singers are prone to do. The older we are, the more habits we need to unlearn to improve as cabaret artists. Every student could sing, but sometimes the “big” voices needed to be toned down so that they could really connect with the audience. One student was a singer/songwriter who often accompanied himself on guitar. During the week, he had mostly overcome his tendency to get lost in his own lyrics so that by the showcase, pianist Tracy Stark accompanied him on a song in which every lyric could be clearly understood.
Bravery ruled as singers took on new material and songs they could grow into. We learned about how to connect brain and heart to communicate with the audience. As one student observed, “A meets B to produce C.” We were reminded not to self-judge, not to apologize, to sing every word as though it was occurring at that moment; not to sustain every note, and to have a conversation with the audience. Make eye contact with the audience, but just for one thought and with one person. Don’t linger too long in one place, which can make that one person uncomfortable. One of my biggest take-aways was to understand that the audience members are having their own experience with your story, so stay out of the way.
We talked about knowing who our scene partner is and about scripting our patter. On great piece of advice was don’t talk about anything that you are going to tell the audience in your song. If you choose an iconic Broadway or pop tune that everyone can identify, make sure you find your own take on it. One of my favorite moments was listening to “Strangers in the Night” and being enthralled with the singer’s story of how she met her husband. I never gave a thought to Frank Sinatra. Koutrakos coached “The Impossible Dream” by asking the singer to imagine that they had just woken up and they sat on the side of the bed. What was your dream? It became a different song, and now the performer had somewhere to go with his big, beautiful baritone voice. Sabella gave everyone varying amounts of time for voice lessons. Many of the local students have been offered solo shows at Act2PV, and they were able to work on their material during the Fiesta.
Much practical information was conveyed, which included how to adjust and move the microphone on stage and what it can cost to produce a professional cabaret show. On the first day, Hartman joked that “If you want to know how to make $1,000 doing cabaret, start with $2,000.” I sat in the dressing room the night of our showcase with some New York City-based women my age and learned that between arrangements, music directors, venues, and sometimes professional marketing and hair/make-up, a gig at Don’t Tell Mama can cost $800-$1,000. The payback, even if you fill the house, is often only a few hundred dollars. My friends profess that a cabaret show is a labor of love and an investment in joy. A couple of the students have found a niche so that they can take their cabarets on tour. One, a retired rabbi, books into synagogues, and another, a mental-health therapist, wants to take her shows to therapy conventions. Our New York-based faculty are mostly professionals who direct and arrange material and pay for their own shows by recycling that money to other artists. One helpful memorization technique came from Natalie Douglas. She suggested we write out every lyric. First say one word, then two, then three, etc., until we’ve worked our way through the entire song. My song sister, Sue Matsuki, who is four years younger than I am, admitted in a recent Sue’s Muse article that learning lyrics gets harder the older we get! She also taught us to cup the mic when we are scatting along with the instrumental. Who knew? It sounded great.
Hopefully, there will be a Fiesta de Cabaret in 2025. Was an eight-day schedule intense? Yes! We did have one day off but, in my opinion, we did not get enough time to process the direction we received, to work with our assigned music director, and to memorize the material. That said, some of my fellow singers wanted more class time with more days off in between. We had little to no time to be tourists.
Sabella is developing relationships with hotel properties close to the theater that offer ambiance, and several of my classmates rented Air B&Bs; one was from a resident fellow student and his husband that provided an instant friendship as a bonus. The entire class bonded with each other as well as with the faculty. One student remarked, “I found my tribe.” I have many new Facebook friends and feel more involved in the NYC cabaret scene from my home in Arizona. I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to invest in myself (tuition was $2,250 plus travel, housing, and food). I was grateful also for what I learned; it has made me a better singer, director, and reviewer/writer. Singing with pianist David Maiocco at an open mic was a gift from the gods.
If you love cabaret, think about visiting Puerta Vallarta and supporting Act2PV. The quality of the shows that entertainment director Sabella has booked is outstanding. It’s still fairly hot and humid in Puerta Vallarta in November, but as the weather in the states turns to snow and ice, Puerta Vallarta becomes an attractive place to get away to. You might even pick up a shorter master class with Koutrakos or Matsuki; both promise to be back during the full season. Stay tuned at ACT2PV | The Largest Entertainment Venue In Puerto Vallarta.
