Award-winning cabaret performer and member of the 92NY School of Music Faculty Michael Kirk Lane curates a series of conversations about the art form of cabaret in New York City.
Welcoming performers, directors, and journalists, these conversations will delve into the history and current state of this unique performance style. Each conversation will also include a Q&A session for the participants. These conversations may be purchased individually, or as a package of 3 at a discounted price!
Apr 24, 2023: Ben Rimalower
Ben Rimalower serves as Director of Programming for The Green Room 42 cabaret club in midtown Manhattan. He is the author and star of the long-running solo plays Patti Issues (New York Times Critic’s Pick, M.A.C. and Bistro Awards) and Bad with Money, available everywhere as a double audiobook, as well as host of Broadway Podcast Network’s Cast Offs. He writes the theatre column in Metrosource Magazine and has been a frequent contributor to Vulture, Playbill, Out, Decider, and The Huffington Post. Ben directed Snoopy! (starring Tony winners Sutton Foster and Christian Borle), the Off-Broadway plays Joy and The Fabulous Life of a Size Zero (starring Gillian Jacobs and Anna Chlumsky), and a slew of solo shows, most notably conceiving and directing Leslie Kritzer is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches and subsequently producing Ghostlight Records’ Patti LuPone at Les Mouches. He is recognizable around the world for his four seasons on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York City as the writer-director of Luann de Lesseps’s record-breaking cross-country cabaret sensation, Countess and Friends. He also co-wrote de Lesseps’s single, “Feelin’ Jovani.”
May 15, 2023: Sharon McNight
Sharon McNight began her career in San Francisco, and made her Broadway debut in 1989 in Starmites, creating the role of Diva. She received a Tony nomination as “Best Leading Actress in a Musical” for her performance, and is the recipient of the coveted Theatre World Award for “Outstanding Broadway Debut” and a Hirschfeld drawing of her character. She has six solo recordings to her credit, and has played from Moose Hall to Carnegie Hall, from Los Angeles to Berlin. She has won two Lifetime Achievement awards, a MAC, a Bistro award, a New York Nightlife award, and six San Francisco Cabaret Gold awards. Her eclectic repertory ranges from blues to country to good old fashioned entertainment. The Los Angeles Times called her "one of the great wonders of the musical stage." She is most noted for her movie reenactment of The Wizard of OZ and for being one of the few real women to impersonate Bette Davis. Ms. McNight received her Masters of Arts degree in direction from San Francisco State College and was a master teacher on the faculty of the Cabaret Conference at Yale University. She says the greatest day of her life was the day she quit smoking.
Jun 26, 2023: Steve Ross
Steve Ross has been a fixture of the cabaret community in Manhattan for over forty years. He was born “forty-five minutes from Broadway” in New Rochelle, NY, and was raised in Washington, DC with an opera-loving father and a mother who played on the piano the songs of Gershwin, Porter and Irving Berlin. His first major job in New York was as a successful singer/pianist at the now famous piano bar Ted Hook’s Backstage. In 1981 he re-opened the legendary Oak Room at Manhattan’s famed Hotel Algonquin where he held forth, off and on, for more than fifteen years. He has appeared on Broadway in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter and off-Broadway in his tribute to Fred Astaire entitled I Won’t Dance. Internationally, he has performed in London, Paris, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Melbourne and Sydney as well as cabarets and theatres across America and on the high seas. He’s hosted programs on the BBC and American public radio and was on the lecture/performance roster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for eight years. His last show at the sadly departed Oak Room at the Hotel Algonquin in New York City, Puttin’ on the Ritz – the Songs of Fred Astaire, prompted Stephen Holden of the New York Times to describe Steve as “the personification of the bygone dream world that his music summons.” He continues to tour and has presented, in the last few years, many well-attended shows at Birdland Jazz Club in Manhattan. He enjoys coaching and teaching the International Songbook.