Michael Garin and Mardie Millit
Dirty & Dusty
Post Office Café & Cabaret, Provincetown, MA, June 8, 2026
Reviewed by John Amodeo
You can be sure that with any Michael Garin and Mardie Millit show, you will be highly entertained, and you will learn something important about the world, about them, and about yourself. This has been true time and again, and it is what makes them stand out among their peers and even many above them. Their recent show, Dirty & Dusty, which they premiered on June 8 at Provincetown CabaretFest, was no exception. They are singular performers who always deliver the unexpected. Even familiar tunes will show up in new clothes, still recognizable but with a whole new sound.
Such was the case with their opener “That Old Black Magic” (Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer), a signature tune from that other husband/wife duo Louis Prima and Keely Smith, sung to Garin’s driving percussion using only the top of the keyboard as a tom tom. Garin and Millit riffed off the Prima/Smith vocal arrangement but with hilarious scat provided by Garin that would have had Prima doubled over with laughter. In another familiar duet, “Honeysuckle Rose” (Fats Waller/Andy Razaf), Garin and Millit milked the innuendo, as they should, but with a fresh honky-tonk rhythm. Garin made the digital keyboard sound like an upright, not with digital synthesizer tricks but with his own chord-crushing arrangement.
Garin and Millit took the festival theme of songs from the 1930s and ’40s and turned it on its ear. The show’s title, Dirty & Dusty, referred to Millit’s choice of songs from that era that had a slightly naughty edge, a hint of risqué allusion with origins in burlesque and the Apollo night club. Garin more bluntly shared songs that epitomized the economic suffering from the Midwest Dust Bowl, a 1930s era tragedy that killed crops and lives. It is an oft forgotten part of our history. Garin and Millit’s passion for the subject matter and the social oppression or the economic hardship beneath the songs was palpable and made us feel the music more deeply.
The best of Garin’s song choices was a mashup of two songs by Jimmie Rodgers, an obscure songwriter who nonetheless recorded with Louis Armstrong. Garin’s blues mashup of two Rodgers songs—“I’m In the Jailhouse Now” and “Nobody Knows But Me”—gave us a window into that lonely Dust Bowl destitution; it also included Garin replicating Rodgers’ trademark yodeling. Another blues song from the Dust Bowl was “Big Rock Candy Mountain” (Harry McClintock), where Garin waxed wistful in the same way the train-hopping hoboes did as they dreamed of a new life elsewhere. Anyone without a lump in their throat after hearing Garin sing this could not possibly have a heart.
Millit was equally compelling in her solos, first with a show-stopping tour-de-force performance of Noël Coward’s “Time and Again” followed by a mesmerizing, practically visceral “So in Love” (Cole Porter) that was so intimate I very nearly had to look away. Earlier, Millit dipped into the Harlem-style blues with the hilarious “My Man Stands Out” (Yardley Yates).
Garin and Millit also treated us to two original songs from a musical they’ve written, Mary Astor’s Purple Diary, about Astor, who was a prominent actress in the 1930s and ’40s. Garin treated us to “When I Make Hollywood Crawl” about the Hays Code. Millit was comically poignant with the mouthful “Lucile Vasconcellos Lanhanke,” Astor’s real name, which had to be changed because it was too long to fit on a marquee. With these songs, Garin and Millit proved they are not only consummate performers but exemplary storytellers and songwriters as well. Shows as refreshing as this make one realize that “cabaret” covers so many types of performances and thankful that they include those of Garin and Millit.
