CabaretFest 2026
Friday Night Variety Show: Sing & Swing
Post Office Café and Cabaret, Provincetown, MA, June 12, 2026
Reviewed by John Amodeo
One of the highlights of CabaretFest each year is the Friday Night Variety Show. It’s a treat for Festival attendees, but it’s also an opportunity for people not attending the entire Festival to sample the many morsels of available cabaret talent without committing to a whole week. This year’s CabaretFest variety show, Sing & Swing, celebrated the 1930s and ’40s in keeping with this year’s CabaretFest theme. It was impressive how each performer presented familiar gems as well as some lesser-known ones from that era. The show, which was performed at the Post Office Café and Cabaret, offered a rich program of Festival headliners along with numerous noteworthy cabaret performers from far and wide, many of whom had headlined in past years.
You can’t do better than Broadway’s Anthony Murphy (The Wiz) to jumpstart an evening with “This Joint is Jumpin’” (Thomas “Fats” Waller/Andy Razaf & J.C. Johnson) that fired on all cylinders. Murphy’s bug-eyed expressions and booming baritone did Waller proud and instantly garnered our attention. Among the other headliners performing in the Variety Show were Sean Patrick Murtagh, striking in his black turban, leopard-print silk jacket, and matching heels, who kept things lively with “Moonlight Cocktail (Lucky Roberts/Kim Gannon); duo Michael Garin & Mardie Millit, who injected their trademark eccentric humor into Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”; Jake Oswell, who riveted the audience with a breathtakingly gorgeous “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein II); and Oswell, joined by his partner David Rhodes (CabaretFest’s producing artistic director), with a solid “Happy Days Are Here Again” (Milton Ager/Jack Yellen) and “Get Happy” (Harold Arlen/Ted Koehler).
Traveling furthest to be here was Rachel Hunter from Miami, Florida. She tickled us with “The Let’s Medley,” a clever mashup of songs that included “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” (Porter); “Let’s Misbehave” (Porter); “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (Irving Berlin); “Let’s Fall in Love” (Arlen/Koehler); “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” (George & Ira Gershwin); and “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee” (Berlin). You couldn’t have found a more diverting four-and-a-half minutes anywhere.
Brian De Lorenzo (full disclosure: this writer’s husband) delivered a swinging “Traveling Medley,” reminiscent of the 1940s wartime era when soldiers were missing home and loved ones. It included “(I’ve Got a Gal In) Kalamazoo” (Mack Gordon/Harry Warren), “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” (Porter), and “Chattanooga Choo Choo (Gordon/Warren). Pamela Enders was sultry and sexy with “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” (Duke Ellington/Paul Francis Webster), a scintillating change from the melancholy mood it is often saddled with. Lisa Kantor was snuggly in the pocket with a swinging “Straighten Up and Fly Right” (Nat King Cole/Irving Mills). Wendy Lane Bailey captivated the room with a sweet “So In Love” (Porter), while Francis Garner’s singalong for “Minnie, the Moocher” (Cab Calloway/Irving Mills & Clarence Gaskill) was a good seventh-inning stretch for the audience. Lauren Schultes’ sweet soprano so charmed us with “(There’ll be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover” (Walter Kent/Nat Burton) you could hear a pin drop.
When Rod Ferguson and Sidney Myer are on a variety-show program, you can be sure hilarity will ensue, and they did not disappoint. Ferguson’s flamboyant “I Can’t Say No” (Rodgers & Hammerstein), with his tongue glibly stuck on the word “no,” employed comic timing that caught us all by surprise despite it being a familiar gag. And talk about comic timing, Myer’s slow-walked lyric delivery of “That’s Him” (Kurt Weill/Ogden Nash) was a master class in keeping the audience waiting in suspense, with that mischievous twinkle in his eye for the inevitable punch line often having us roar in laughter before it had arrived.
Dawn Derow, in addition to directing the evening, performed a delightfully buoyant Andrew Sisters medley of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (Don Raye/Hughie Prince), “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” (Lew Brown/Sam H. Step/Charles Tobias), and “The Hut-Sut Song (a Swedish Serenade)” (Leo V. Killion/Ted McMichael and Jack Owens). Derow’s star has been rising, and this slick performance helped secure her a place in the firmament. Another pro, Angela Bacari, who is a perennial favorite at CabaretFest, showed exactly why that is with her solid, straightforward “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (Jimmy McHugh/Dorothy Fields). Rhodes honored past longtime producing artistic director Patricia Fitzpatrick with a surprise moment in the spotlight, where she sang “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” (Arlen/Johnny Mercer) with a conviction that came from a life she has spent laughing in the face of adversity.
This show was seamlessly run by a team of experts who made it look easy. Emcee Warren Schein shepherded the evening with a light hand and treated us to a nightclub-worthy “Come Fly with Me” (Jimmy Van Heusen/Sammy Cahn). Music director Tom LaMark accompanied each singer with care, giving them a musical cushion on which to rest and to fly from. The night moved briskly thanks to Derow’s deft direction. She smartly had each performer introduce the next act, which minimized Schein’s appearances and enhanced the evening’s easy flow. Sing & Swing: The Friday Night Variety Show was one more example in a week of examples that showed CabaretFest is in good hands with new producing artistic director Rhodes.
