THE ART OF CABARET

SOME THOUGHTS AFTER SEEING LUCIE ARNAZ AT 54 BELOW

(Above: Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill and I on 54th Street last night after her brilliant show at 54 Below. Photo by Rob Dauber.)

I have been an aficionado of cabaret artists since I wandered into Reno Sweeney one night on West 13th Street and sat at the bar and watched through the opened door leading into "the room" someone named Barbara Cook and didn't just watch her capture the audience in the palm of her pudgy hand but felt her deeply capture my heart. She'd swing her blond locks as her pianist Wally Harper swung the rhythms on the keyboard and then they'd slow it all down and the purity of her voice didn't belt out a ballad but unbelted it, let it breathe, and made me catch my breath through my tears she made me unashamed to shed sitting there as the bar quieted along with that room inside. I couldn't afford to sit there inside with the proper audience but I could nurse a vodka or two as she served up solace and joy and sophistication, and came back over and over and over whenever she was doing her act there. I saw her innumerable times from my perch at the bar. Sitting there on her own stool that looked like it once belonged at the bar where I was sitting feeling for the first time a real sense of belonging myself within her voice, she also taught me about stillness and stoicism and owning one's own worth and one's own talent and even one's own body.

I thought a lot about that as I sat next to the stage at 54 Below last night and watched Lucie Arnaz with her long gorgeous legs and beauty and her own lessons learned and taught to us through her singing talent and show biz bonhomie and acting chops about perseverance and commitment and tenacity and joy and love along with her musical director and pianist, Ron Abel. She wears her own show biz heritage with such grace and lightness and yet had the innate keenness of self - not just the innate talent with which she was imbued - to set out on a course of her own and brilliantly carve out a career on the musical stage where she could surpass her parents while showing them how much she loved them and honored them by doing so. It was and is a balancing act and it took a lot of grit and that singular grace of hers to do it.

I was at knee-level last night and I also kept staring at her gorgeous legs on which she was quite literally balancing and thinking about the knee surgery that she had to recover from to get back into cabaret condition. She was an inspiration to me in that regard as well, not just the artistic one. She too was owning her own body and teaching me to own mine. She was showing me not only through her choice of songs but her body before me that healing, emotionally and, yes, physically, is possible. Her big closing number was from Pippin in which she played the role of Berthe, Pippin’s grandmother, in a 2014 national tour and delivered the anthem about keep-on-living no matter how old you are, “No Time At All,” which left me in tears I was unashamed to shed.

Lucie was raised by a beloved clown who spelled her name differently. I thought too about that last night and the Vanity Fair cover story I wrote about Emma Thompson. In it Emma expounded on the term "clown" in a way I had never thought about - and thought about it again as I sat there watching Lucie's wondrous fuck-woe artistry. "I did a very interesting course in Paris once," Emma told me, then paused and laughed at the sound of her own voice. "Now, that's a sentence. ... I did this French course with this clown, Philippe Gaulier. ... I learned the notion about three very particular disciplines that he'd invented, which were Tragedians, Clowns, and Buffoons. His notion was that the Tragedians play to the gods. The Buffoons were sort of the subhumans—sort of the people from the swamps or the leper colonies who were brought in to amuse la jeunesse doree and who had nothing to lose and, therefore, whose gift was parody. They always trod a very fine line because they were brought in to be grotesque, but if they went over the line, they would lose their lives. . . . Then there were the Clowns. Clowns are between the two. They play to the heart. That made so much sense to me. If you take it out of that specific context and you think about artists—a writer or a painter or a composer or a poet in some ways you can absolutely associate that with playing to the gods, whatever that might mean. There is a sense of the sublime there. We don't really do the grotesques anymore, the sort of freak shows. It's very ancient, but it's still a part of our nature. Maybe it's rock 'n' roll. Maybe it's the tabloid press. Maybe it's daytime talk shows. Maybe that's what it is, but there is something necessary about it. That middle ground—this clowning—is very interesting. It's very . . . humane. The really good clown comes on and fails miserably. Just by coming on, a clown makes people laugh, because you're saying, 'I shouldn't be here at all. I can't do this.' It's about failing. It's wonderful, because laughter is a celebration of all our failings—that recognition that we are not gods, that we are human. That's what clowns are for. That's why they are important. And that's definitely what I am."

Lucie is not clownish in her failings - it's that keenness that keeps her successfully on keel - but she is in that she plays so humanely to the heart. And her timing is impeccable - maybe that is just in her genes. No clowns were sent in last night because, at 72, she hasn't lost that at all. If anything, her timing is sharper than ever - even in discovering another layer of her artistry to present to us in the cabaret form which takes equal parts delicacy and endurance and the rhythms of a raconteur and not just a singer with an upper register. I asked her afterward who wrote her act because there is not really patter between songs but a structured narrative, knowing and mindful and even, when needed at just the right moments, rather naughty. She told me she had written it herself. So she can even do that and deliver it all as if she is thinking it up on the spot, like the greatest of actresses convince us they are doing when reciting their lines.

(Above: Mabel Mercer photographed by Carl Van Vechten)

I am old enough to have seen the legendary Mabel Mercer at the St. Regis Room in 1975, where she sat with hands folded in her lap, regal, a kind of diseuse with a voice filled with musical bell tones of meaning, a plaintive parlando that could be playful even as it never dared only to please. The New York Times critic John S. Wilson wrote in a review of her stand at the St. Regis Room in 1972 that her voice “quavers on the edge of an abyss.” Justin Vivian Bond is a singular cabaret artist whose voice is a kind of 21st Century Mabel syrup of its own many meanings, nonbinary, brilliant, filled with both bravado and humility in their own balancing act onstage. Barb Jungr is a great British actress-as-songstress who finds ways into ballads that can startle me with her bravery with a lyric. My landlord and friend in London, Suzanne Noble, has also set out to keep the art form alive with her way around a blues song and the work of Dorothy Fields in a one-woman cabaret show about the librettist and lyricist. Indeed, a part of our friendship is based on our love of cabaret.

But the through-line for me, I realized sitting there at 54 Below last night, is from Mabel Mercer to Barbara Cook to Lucie Arnaz. In the YouTube conversation between Joni Mitchell and Elton John, Mitchell remembers seeing Mabel Mercer herself. “I went uptown to see her,” she told John. “She had on a black dress with silver lace - and a red banner that went across her chest. She sang ‘Both Sides Now’ and it was the best I’d ever heard it. So I went backstage afterward to tell her how much I’d loved the performance of it, but I didn’t tell her that I was the author. So, I said, ‘Y’know, I’ve heard various recordings of that song, but you bring something to it, y’know, that other people haven’t been able to do. Y’know, it’s not a song for an ingenue. You have to bring some age to it.’  Well, she took offense. I insulted her. I called her an old lady, as far as she was concerned. So I got out of there in a hell of a hurry. But I think now that I’ve finally become an old lady, I can sing the song right myself.”

Mitchell is not a cabaret artist - though being a folk singer in coffee houses early on had cabaret aspects to it even if she often rightly bristled at being labeled just a folkie - and yet many of her songs can fit into the cabaret mold because she’s right: it takes a maturity to understand and sing them. And there is something about mature ladies being the ideal purveyors of the cabaret art form, ladies who’ve managed to wear their maturity like silver lace on Mable Mercer’s dress. When I sat at that bar at Reno Sweeney listening to Barbara Cook - or trying so hard to be grown-up at the St. Regis Room in the presence of Mercer’s regality when I was 19 years old in 1975, my first year in New York - I was longing to be older, more mature, to find my own grit and grace to get to the other side of my life where I sensed a sense of self awaited that I didn’t have that last year of being a broken teenager, even one who had the bravery to set out on the pilgrimage of his life in New York City. Last night, witnessing Lucie Arnaz’s artistry I, a pilgrim still and newly broken, was filled with longing yet again but it was for the many younger selves that had gotten me to that point just as hers had gotten her there too. A conflation occurred yet again in a cabaret setting as I was finally old enough to look at life from both sides now. The bar at Reno Sweeney didn’t quiet. I did. I still wasn’t healed. But I had hope that I would be. Y’know, life is more than a lyric - I can hear Joni say in Mabel Mercer’s key, unbelted by Barbara and limned with Lucie. But it is the way you choose to sing it. Cabaret artists have taught me that. I learned it anew last night. Thank you, Lucie. I love you for that.