Carolyn Montgomery
Clooney and Me
Post Office Café and Cabaret, Provincetown, MA, June 9, 2026
Reviewed by John Amodeo
Photo by Bill Westmoreland
Last year, Carolyn Montgomery brought her MAC and Bistro Award-winning show girlSINGER–A Celebration of Rosemary Clooney to CabaretFest 2025 in Provincetown, MA where it was well received. What is admirable about Montgomery is that she didn’t stop there. Still curious as to how the show could improve, she worked again with her director, Tony Award nominee Sally Mayes (She Loves Me) to evolve, adapt, and enhance the show so that it would feature not just Clooney but Montgomery herself as well. She tested those waters in Provincetown last year with a few inserted personal anecdotes and took encouragement from the rave response. She added some more personal stories that showed how much she and Clooney had in common and Clooney and Me was born, a show which she premiered on June 9 at CabaretFest 2026 at Provincetown’s Post Office Café and Cabaret. With this show, Montgomery, always a stalwart performer, was at the top of her game, deftly weaving anecdotes in and out of the songs so naturally you didn’t know where a story ended and a song began. This show was as good as cabaret ever gets.
While we got to meet the Clooney we thought we knew but got to know better through Montgomery’s carefully chosen vignettes, we also got to know the many sides of Montgomery herself. First, there was Montgomery the singer—the girl singer—if you will, whom we met straight up in her opening number, “Who Will Buy” (Lionel Bart from Oliver). Here Montgomery moved in and out of ¾ time, showcased her crisp phrasing and astonishing dynamic control, then scatted like nobody’s business, drawing a strong vocal link between Clooney, a scatting pro, and herself. She used this to segue into a fun story of how she played Oliver when she was nine years old. In a lovely pairing of the Clooney signature tunes “I Wish It So” (Mark Blitzstein) and “Hey There” (Richard Adler/Jerry Ross), Montgomery again drew vocal similarities between Clooney and herself, evidenced by her deep alto with warm tones as smooth and rich as ruby port. Her Latin medley filled with Clooney’s “ethnically homeless” hits—“Come on-a My House” (William Saroyan/Ross Bagdasarian), “Mangos” (Dee Libby/Sid Wayne). “Mambo Italiano” (Bob Merrill), “Sway” (Pablo Beltran Luis/Norman Gimbel), and “Bacciame” (R. Morbelli/Eddie Y. Stanley) was a tour-de-force and a theatrical highlight. Here and throughout the show, music director/pianist Tracy Stark, with only one rehearsal, showed she had mastered Tedd Firth’s opulent arrangements.
Then there is Montgomery the raconteur. A mesmerizing storyteller, Montgomery shared stories of her youth, discovering her queerness during her tween years, discovering the rules for women were then (and are still now) not fair, and the messages were mixed. This was illustrated in her medley of “Straighten Up and Fly Right” (Nat King Cole/Irving Mills), “Nice and Easy” (Lew Spence/Alan and Marilyn Bergman), and “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” (Nat Ayer/Seymour Brown) in a buoyant arrangement that contrasted nicely with her more poignant moments. Her stories of growing up the youngest of her sisters and brother led beautifully into Dar Williams’ “The Babysitter,” sung in a childlike voice, that was both adorable and touching. But the dramatic high point of the show arrived when she told stories about her first marriage, this one to a woman; together they raised their son Eli. Montgomery regaled us further with tales of how her childless gay male and female friends would care for Eli as their own, often revealing a hidden yearning, a sentiment found in the moving “I Won’t Mind” (Jeff Blumenkrantz), which she sang with heartbreaking conviction.
We also met Montgomery the songwriter, who had us doubled over with laughter during her original song, “The Lebanese Lament,” about becoming less inhibited after a few cocktails.
The show’s beautifully crafted arc landed softly on a story of how Clooney and she both found true love after failed marriages. This led seamlessly into “Still Crazy After All These Years” (Paul Simon), “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” (George and Ira Gershwin), and “The Second Time Around” (Jimmy Van Heusen/Sammy Cahn). She held us in the palm of her hand, where we had been all along, in a room that was absolutely silent. This is when you know you have seen something utterly and truly extraordinary: a perfect cabaret show.
