I think anyone who’s ever met Paul Wilborn sorta wants to be him. Current executive director of The Palladium, former journalist about town and Tampa arts czar, suave piano man married to elegant chanteuse, a great gossip with a great soul — if he weren’t so likable he’d be emininently hatable.
And lately he’s been doing something very dear to my heart: He’s bringing top Broadway and cabaret artists to town, singer/actors who play the kind of nightclubs that don’t seem to exist anywhere but New York, except he gets them to perform in downtown St. Petersburg at The Palladium. Their names may not be household except in households occupied by Smash-obsessed teenagers and gay men of a certain age, and the thought of such evenings may fill the un-obsessed among you with fearful visions of self-absorbed razzmatazz and excessive use of jazz hands. But Paul, being a consummate performer himself, knows who’s good.
Marc Kudisch, the first artist in the series, was extremely good; the musical autobiography he shared in January was hilarious, heartfelt and impeccably sung. Susan Egan, who’s next up in the series on Thurs., March 22, says one of the favorite reviews she ever received for a concert performance was that it was like “having an all-night conversation with your best friend.” That’s the distinguishing mark of singers like Kudisch and Egan; they are approachable and intelligent and know how to make a lyric sound like a thought that’s just occurring to them as they sing it, establishing an intimacy with an audience that does make you feel like you’re conversing with a friend.
Egan broke into Broadway stardom as the original Belle in Beauty and the Beast and in the title role in Thoroughly Modern Millie. In a phone conversation this week, she recalled being resistant to the idea of singing as herself.
“I fought it,” she says. “I never got in this to be Susan, I got into this to be other people, to hide behind other personalities.” But after doing a fundraiser concert for the arts school she attended in California, she discovered she liked the process: crafting the narrative, choosing the songs, finding nuances in lyrics that change each time she performs them.
Her concert on Thursday will draw from her Broadway hits and her latest album, The Secret of Happiness — “I call it what Belle would sing at 40.” (Egan is 42, married with two young children.) Included is “Cock-Eyed Optimist” from South Pacific, which is usually delivered with a happy-go-lucky lilt; Egan gives it a wry, wiser twist. “It’s written for a 22-year-old who’s naïve. It works for a 42-year-old who’s no longer naïve, but the thought still holds — that I’m going to look for the good.”
Egan will share some backstage lore in her show (like the very famous role she turned down because she didn’t like the idea of all that green makeup). And like so many of the best cabaret performers, she mixes standards (Gershwin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Mencken) with songs by the new generation of Broadway composers, in which references to Starbucks and the trials of modern motherhood are as likely to pop up as words of love.
But here’s where she — and Paul Wilborn — are brave. Finding an audience for this kind of fare is a challenge. If you are already a fan, support the cabaret series at the Palladium and other venues like New American Theater and American Stage. And if you’re not an aficionado, try it out; the pure, knockout voice that’s not Auto-tuned or Vocodered, employed by a singer who can make every word count — that’s an art.
And speaking of bravery, there’s a lot of it on display in theater circles these days. Take the productions we’re highlighting on this week’s cover. It takes guts to fill half your stage with water and do a world premiere based on African folktales. It takes guts to keep your company going after you’ve lost your longtime performance space and your beloved founder. It takes guts to persevere for almost two decades until you’ve finally built a theater space all your own. freeFall, Gorilla, Stageworks — thank you for hanging in there.
Corrections
In last week’s story about Artbook Tampa Bay, the “digital coffeetable book” that compiles the work of 100 local artists, museums and galleries, the work of Kevin Hohl and Sean Carey of HD Interactive was mischaracterized. They did not develop games for the XBox; they created graphics for Electronic Arts, the company that makes Madden NFL Football. They assisted on design and development of a Web application for Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact, not on the site itself.
In the story on the Tampa StartupBus, the number of buses was incorrect. There were 10 buses involved in the project in addition to Tampa’s, not nine.
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2012.
