On Monday August 30, T. Oliver Reid proved his mettle by winning the exciting finale of the third annual MetroStar Talent Challenge at Metropolitan Room, beating out Cindy Marchionda (first runner-up) and Amy Beth Williams (second runner-up).  Reid, who dazzled throughout the competition with daring vocal choices, earned consistently high marks during the eight-week jury and audience-voted singers' contest.  The two other finalists were Alison Nusbaum and Janice Hall.

In the last twenty years of cabaret, and even in the fifteen or twenty years previous to the beginning of this reviewer's writing career,  actresses best known for television who simply wished to storm New York with what they believe is the most perfect club act of all time, have never been a rarity. There was Cybill Shepherd at the Cookery in 1978, Phylicia Rashad in 1995 at Rainbow and Stars and a steady stream of others, all of whom had varying degrees of success which depended solely on whether or not they truly had the stuff to make it work.

The new season of the Tudor City Greens FREE outdoor concert series continues on Tuesday, September 7^th at 6pm. (Rain date: Wednesday, September 8^th). This event will feature performers from Broadway and the New York City cabaret scene. The concert will be hosted by Tudor City resident, Broadway and cabaret performer Raissa Katona Bennett (Phantom of the Opera, Chess).

The production of a script such as Matt Saldarelli's absurdist comedy Getting Even With Shakespeare, running as part of this summer's Fringe Festival at the Players Theatre, always brings with it a potentially-inherent danger, in making a wrong turn midway through, and becoming too clever for its own good. Mercifully, this is one of those all-too-rare occasions where the playwright and director, Laura Konsin, as well as the stunning ensemble of seven, know exactly where and when to call a halt, and never create a runaway train that courses over the collective head of the audience.

One must not attend Eli Roth’s The Last Exorcism expecting anything like his deliciously decadent and torturous Hostel, or any of the other recent extreme horror films, such as my new fave, the utterly depraved The Human Centipede.  Roth serves as producer here, rather than director ( Daniel Stamm), and while those films freakishly explore what happens to foolish Americans in Europe, Exorcism plays more like a non-alien X-File entry.

The ballot is getting shorter and shorter at the MetroStar Talent Challenge.  We now have our Top 5 finalists: Alison Nusbaum, Amy Beth Williams, Cindy Marchionda, Janice Hall and T. Oliver Reid.  This week their test was to sing three songs, with patter, like a little piece of a show.  One of these songs was to be a selection they had performed in the contest before, one was to be a new song and the last was a common song.  The common song each performer was to arrange and make their own, was the Beatles’ tune "All You Need Is Love." 

Well friends, whether by design or by chance, four of the eight (yes, eight!) Fringe shows I have had the fortune (and misfortune) to witness over the last ten days have been either Gay themed or at least Gay friendly! So, I have decided that it is appropriate to review them all together, sort of like a mini Gay Fringe Festival, and has nothing at all to do with my trying to make this all a bit more manageable! (No comments from the peanut gallery, please.)

In the world of musical theatre, anything can happen, and often does. This is especially true at the New York International Fringe Festival.  Dinosaurs can sing and dance in one show and bring a fresh energy to musical theatre traditions that may seem, um, prehistoric…and the next day, at another show, the genre can seem as extinct as dinosaurs.  I’ve seen musicals with feminist themes, set centuries and worlds apart: one involving an 18-year-old woman who wants to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps and be a grand wizard and the other an assertive woman coming to NYC to program computers and wishing she could de-program the sexist men.