Cabaret

Karen Mason will bring a slick and sophisticated cabaret act to the Barrymore Room in the Hotel Atop the Bellevue on Thursday. She will perform May 14 to 16 and again May 21 to 23. Mason has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Oak Room and the Russian Tea Room in New York, and has just completed a year- long run in the Tony Award-winning Jerome Robbins' Broadway. Her cabaret act includes the songs of Stephen Sondheim, Irving Berlin and other composers. Show times are Thursdays at 8 p.m. and Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 and 10 p.m. Tickets are $18.50; $10 for members of the American Music Theater Festival here; $5 drink or food minimum.

The June experiment with cabaret at the Hotel Atop the Bellevue was so successful that a fall lineup of cabaret shows has been booked for the hotel's elegant Barrymore Room. Leading off the series is singer Helen Schneider, whose cabaret act featuring the songs of Stephen Sondheim was called "one of the year's most polished and intelligent cabaret shows" by the New York Times. Her shows are Oct. 3-5 and 10-12. Ann Hampton Callaway appears Nov. 7-9 and 14-16 in a show titled Bring Back Romance and featuring the songs of Cole Porter and Cab Calloway.

Weimar Berlin gets a kicky Hollywood sheen in Bob Fosse's coolly decadent 1972 adaptation of the Broadway musical Cabaret, with Liza Minnelli starring (and winning an Oscar) as club diva Sally Bowles, and Joel Grey, all made up and riveting, as the wild-eyed Master of Ceremonies. With the show-stopping numbers "Money" and "Mein Herr," the film brings musical theater to the screen with a vibrancy that's hard to pull off. Fosse figured out the trick, and he flew with it (and nabbed an Oscar for himself, too)

No other musical form celebrates intimacy as compellingly as the cabaret song, with its most private thoughts, feelings and desires. On Sunday, the husband-and-wife team of soprano Jody-Karin Applebaum and pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin performed several gems they've uncovered from cabaret's European golden age, from the late 1800s to just before World War II. The performance, which took place at the Main Line Unitarian Church in Devon, concluded this...

JEN CHILDS and Tony Braithwaite don't just finish each other sentences. They also have the apparent ability to beam ideas telepathically to each other by barely uttering a sentence. "What do you . . . ," Childs asked, while scrolling through the in-progress script during a rehearsal of their cabaret-vaudeville hybrid, "Let's Pretend We're Famous. " The show runs tomorrow through March 25 at Plays and Players. "Yeah, yeah! There!" Braithwaite excitedly responded before Childs could say more, leading her to insert an idea neither of them had to articulate.

Marc-Andre Hamelin, known for his venturesome solo piano feats, has embarked on an interesting recording project with soprano Jody Karin Applebaum called Masterpieces of the Cabaret. Saturday at the Germantown branch of the Settlement School, the duo shared their forays into the songbooks of Arnold Schonberg and William Bolcom in front of an audience, as recording engineer George Blood toiled away backstage. A visitor to Saturday's concert (to be repeated in other Settlement branches Friday and Sunday)

From its very first image - a beckoning finger caught in a tiny spotlight while protruding from an upstage door - to its last, which can't be revealed here but draws audible gasps from the audience, the lewd, depraved show that opened Thursday at the Kit Kat Klub is Cabaret as it was always meant to be. If you thought the 1966 Kander and Ebb musical was pretty lewd and depraved already, with its sleazily amoral Emcee conducting a cynical tour...

"I don't know what people expect from cabaret anymore," said Karen Akers as she bounded up to the bandstand at Odette's Thursday night. What she meant is that just about anything can pass for cabaret these days - just as long as it's sung in front of a small crowd sipping cocktails or cappuccino. But Akers knows what real cabaret is; she embodies it. Stylish and lanky, she is equal parts actress and singer. Her eyes, her long and elegant hands, her body language - they're all pressed into service to help her voice tell a story.

The big-time production of Cabaret that opens at the Forrest Theater tomorrow is a reunion as well as a revival, bringing together several key figures from the original 1966 Broadway show. The list begins with Joel Grey, reprising his role as the leering master of ceremonies at the tawdry Kit Kat Klub, which epitomizes the moral decadence of the Berlin of the 1930s. (The Kit Kat Klub is so tawdry, in fact, that the star has contracted a bad case of laryngitis. Grey will mime his part when the show opens tomorrow night, and his dialogue and songs will be delivered by his understudy, Michelan Sisti.

In an Overbrook Avenue home on Saturday night, Wynne Alexander plied her trade in a salon setting. The venue was the Psalm, where artists conduct and discuss their work in a seemingly nondenominational spiritual space. The twinkle of burning candles in Depression glass, the scent of sandalwood: It's all here. Alexander, for the uninitiated, is an unsung heroine of the Philadelphia cabaret scene, an electric pianist and quavering vocalist who, along with drummer Robert Lee, turns the form on its ear with its piquant lit-witty lyricism and its low, rhythm-heavy tones.

FOR ALMOST 25 years, the Prince Music Theater was celebrated nationally for its mission of exclusively staging musical-theater world premieres. But that business model proved unsustainable when the Great Recession came knocking, and, in 2008, the curtain rang down on the Prince's three performance spaces, the largest of which seats about 450. But thanks to a dedicated group of local movers and shakers who bought the property at 1412 Chestnut Street,...

Iconic crooners don't get any more comfy than Dean Martin, who ambled through his performing life with supreme ease and deceptive artistry, most apparent when he wasn't making fun of himself. Supposedly, he was so cool that his heart beat only five times a minute. But that's not what you see with Dino! An Evening With Dean Martin at the Latin Casino , now playing to full-ish houses at the Walnut Street Theatre's Independence Studio. The show's conceit is that Martin arrives at Cherry Hill's Latin Casino in 1978 amid a snowstorm and without his band.

On a warm evening in April, a small team of oddly dressed artists stroll into the Trocadero for that Chinatown club's Monday movie screening. On tap is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan from 1982, a fan fave that draws a packed house with but a few folk dressed in old Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and not-new-Spock (Zachary Quinto) gear. Soon enough, those artists take over the small balcony stage and begin to badger the crowd into having its Trek trivia tested. "What Trek episode has the only scene in which the USS Enterprise is seen orbiting a planet from right to left?"

"SEPARATE but equal" may not fly as far as our nation's educational system is concerned, but it's working out fine for Dito van Reigersberg and his alter ego, Martha Graham Cracker. Van Reigersberg, 40, is the co-founder and co-artistic director of Philly's acclaimed Pig Iron Theatre. Martha Graham Cracker is the drag queen he has portrayed, mostly in cabaret shows, for the past eight years. And, it appears, never will the twain meet. "It's different," said van Reigersberg during a recent chat.

William H. Campbell, 97, of Spring Garden, an illustrator, painter, and cofounder of the Main Point, a former cabaret in Bryn Mawr, died Wednesday, Oct. 31, of cancer at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse. Mr. Campbell had 47 solo exhibits and shared space at numerous shows with other artists over a career spanning more than 70 years. In a statement for an exhibit in 2000 at Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill, he said he experimented with "dimension, texture, and color" to create his abstract art. He also exhibited at Woodmere in 2010 and 2011.

IN "BEARDS Are for Shaving: A 007 Cabaret," the Bearded Ladies Cabaret combines comedy, classic James Bond plots, commonwealthclassictheatre.org and the secret-agent films' famous ladies. But this is about more than shaken, not stirred martinis. The experimental cabaret group uses Bond's army of beauties as a fertile foundation to explore gender roles with the guidance of Judith Butler's theories on gender. Butler's ideas concerning power, gender, sexuality and identity have significantly contributed to feminist theory and sexual studies.

BEBE NEUWIRTH doesn't do the fluffy stuff. Neuwirth's stance makes sense to anyone who only knows her as Lilith, the icy, monotone psychiatrist and eventual wife of Kelsey Grammer's Frasier Crane — the iconic role that made Neuwirth famous on the beloved sitcom "Cheers. " But it means something different when it comes to compiling songs for her cabaret-style shows, like the one which Neuwirth will perform tonight at the Prince Music Theater, "Stories with Piano #3. " For those shows, the fluffy stuff means the songs that Neuwirth doesn't deem emotionally hefty enough.

It's a Grand Night for Singing at the Walnut Street Theatre's Independence Studio, and it no doubt will remain so for the run of this cozy Rodgers and Hammerstein revue. Winding through nearly 40 of the legendary team's tunes, this production is fueled by amorous intentions, driven by a quartet featuring three of Philly's favorite performers — Jennie Eisenhower, Fran Prisco, and Michael Philip O'Brien (he's also artistic director of the all-musical 11th Hour Theatre Company) — and Rebecca Robbins, a fine, flame-haired New York import and Walnut regular.

This isn't easy to write, but it must be written: Philadelphia's comedy sweethearts, Jennifer Childs and Tony Braithwaite, with their newest cabaret for 1812 Productions, Let's Pretend We're Famous , may have jumped the shark once and for all. If you have a firsthand recollection of that last reference, you'll get every other reference in the show, and will still wonder if Childs or Braithwaite has turned on a television in the last 30 years....

JEN CHILDS and Tony Braithwaite don't just finish each other sentences. They also have the apparent ability to beam ideas telepathically to each other by barely uttering a sentence. "What do you . . . ," Childs asked, while scrolling through the in-progress script during a rehearsal of their cabaret-vaudeville hybrid, "Let's Pretend We're Famous. " The show runs tomorrow through March 25 at Plays and Players. "Yeah, yeah! There!" Braithwaite excitedly responded before Childs could say more, leading her to insert an idea neither of them had to articulate.