One night in 2017, in a neighborhood of Paris I will never find again, a friend and I sat in a tiny cafe, eating duck sausages we’d ordered randomly off a handwritten menu we couldn’t read and listening to an older woman, accordion in hands, sing Édith Piaf songs.
A bit shticky? A smidge touristy? Perhaps. But as this singer chatted with her audience in both French and heavily-accented English, coaxing people to sing songs from their home countries, the feeling of collective joy was delicious.
I’d had a similar feeling not long before, while slow-dancing with a stranger at the end of Taylor Mac’s “Songs of the American Right” at Seattle’s On the Boards, a piece of Mac’s eventual watershed performance “24-Decade History of Popular Music.” After an hour or so laughing out loud at Mac’s personal stories interwoven with cleverly arranged music of the American Revolutionary period, we were all invited into this strange, special onstage moment that I think about to this day.
Though otherwise unalike, both performances made everyone in the room part of an artistic event that wouldn’t exist without us. This, I thought, is the potential of cabaret: to pull you from your solo shell into a collective experience, tell you something true and make sure you have fun along the way.
Cabaret, which has raucous, cross-class origins, shares a root system with forms including drag, burlesque, performance art and musical theater. As much as it can be defined, cabaret’s hallmarks are engaging storytelling, slyly subversive politics and an intimacy that encourages porous boundaries between artist and audience. However you define it, Seattle has an astonishing variety of cabaret on offer this spring. Here’s what you’ll find and where to find it — and most importantly, why you should.
“All about musical storytelling”
For Pacific Northwest Cabaret Association founder and executive director Arnaldo Inocentes, a gloriously talented singer who performs as Arnaldo! Drag Chanteuse, the art form as Inocentes performs and supports it — an evening of songs and patter with the audience, performed in a venue serving food and drinks — is deceptively difficult.
“It's all about musical storytelling,” Inocentes said. “I love the way Whitney sings, and Celine and everybody, but that's really more about the voice as opposed to about the story, right? It takes a lot of skill to be able to tell your story in your own way. Being free is hard to do.”
On April 25, the Seattle Cabaret Festival, presented by the association, kicks off at big-time local cabaret venue The Triple Door, featuring dozens of acts including Seattle band The Love Markets, a cappella trio Bodacious Ladyhood and of course, Arnaldo!
The monthlong festival, which began as a one-night-only performance in 2008, continues through May at Egan’s Ballard Jam House, featuring local artists like Nicole Beerman and Shana Pennington-Baird in their Seattle cabaret debuts, established local talents including Joanne Klein and Julie Cascioppo, and national cabaret artists such as San Francisco’s Linda Kosut and New York-based Craig Pomranz.
“License to be creative”
While the history of underground art isn’t always well documented, modern cabaret is generally accepted to have begun in the cafes of Belle Époque Paris — most specifically, at a venue called Le Chat Noir, opened in 1881 by Rodolphe Salis, who had the novel idea to have artists of all types entertain patrons as they ate and drank.
As this idea spread, it found fertile ground in Germany, particularly the clubs of Berlin, and first made its way to America in the years before the First World War.
Many modern Americans got their understanding of cabaret from the perennially popular 1966 Kander and Ebb musical “Cabaret,” later a 1972 movie starring Liza Minnelli. Set in a fictional Berlin hot spot called the Kit Kat Klub, the story takes place during Germany’s Weimar era, an artistic free-for-all that crested just before the Nazi Party rose to power.
While a certain amount of nostalgia suffuses our popular understanding of cabaret, the cabaret of 2025 Seattle is decidedly modern.
Of course, there’s the Can Can Culinary Cabaret, a slick subterranean-feeling operation near Pike Place Market, known for high production values, energetic song-and-dance numbers and a cheeky, dirty sense of humor.
On Sunday afternoons, in the compact underground performance space at Narwhal bar on Capitol Hill, Mimosas Cabaret brings audiences a drag brunch featuring a variety show, followed by a 30-minute version of a popular musical. I recently saw “MawMa Mia” — campy, delightful — and on April 27, they’ll open "The Wicked Wiz of Oz,” which is “Wicked” with splashes of “The Wiz” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Yes, please.
Intiman Cabaret, a 21+ performance series, with drinks available, launched last fall by the venerable theater company, continues throughout April with three inimitable Northwest artists: Michelle Matlock, Scott Shoemaker and Cherdonna Shinatra.
Matlock’s solo show “The Mammy Project” may not sound like a natural fit for a cabaret, but “in terms of the intimacy of the format, I think the show will work very well,” she said.
Matlock, who spent many years performing with Cirque du Soleil and was the first Black person to create an original clown character for that global operation, first performed “The Mammy Project” some 20 years ago. In it, Matlock “takes a deep dive into why this mammy stereotype has lasted so long in our country” by telling the story of Nancy Green, the first woman hired to play the part of Aunt Jemima in 1893; having fun with famous mammies of the Silver Screen; and telling her own story of encountering this stereotype as an actor in New York City.
For Jody Kuehner, who has performed as her lovable, ludicrous alter ego Cherdonna Shinatra for decades, this Intiman cabaret show, “Cherdonna’s Favorite Things,” has her rethinking her approach to making shows. She’s invited local talents Sari Breznau and Wade Madsen to join her on stage, but Kuehner said she’s still considering how Cherdonna might evolve to meet this cabaret moment. Is she now quiet instead of very loud, Cherdonna’s standard volume? How much of “The Sound of Music” will make its way into the piece?
An element about which there’s no question: Cherdonna’s love of her audience. “One of my favorite things is to be amongst everybody and talk to them and really look in people's eyes and have a real connection during a show,” Kuehner said. “I’m really looking forward to that.”
So is Scott Shoemaker, who brings “:Probed!,” his absurd, song-and-dance filled take on an extraterrestrial TV show, to Intiman Cabaret in mid-April. “We enjoy having a different kind of experience with our audience, and it's not just sitting in a theater and watching the show,” Shoemaker said. “It's more that you're there to experience it with us, and I think that's a hallmark for cabaret.”
He compared cabaret to genre film: A comedy is a comedy above all else, so it wants to make you laugh regardless of the message or story. “With cabaret, the real top priority is entertaining and there's many ways that you can do that. … You're giving an artist or artists license to be creative, and as long as they entertain you, they can really do something wild. That's freeing.”
Breaking the mold
After the death of Denny Triangle venue Re-bar, which for decades fostered the brilliant weirdos of Seattle performance, there are few local places for those artists to try out their wackiest ideas and hone their performance chops.
That’s a real loss. Cabaret values individuality, and voices that are literally and figuratively unique, which feels refreshing as forms like musical theater seem to become more uniform, flooded with similar voices trained to sing similar scores. Seek out artists who defy that.
I’m thinking of international star Meow Meow, with her cumulus cloud of inky hair, getting hoisted into the air by a cadre of middle-aged male audience members at The Triple Door. And local treasure Dina Martina, lipstick impeccably smudged, warbling for audiences at ACT Contemporary Theatre during her annual holiday show. And Shoemaker as Ms. Pak-Man, a pill-popping songstress/arcade game character reliving her 1980s glory days onstage. And any artist sharing their unique talents in a way only they can. Not to get all “keep Seattle weird” on you, but every time these folks perform here, it gives our city artistic flavor that we should be proud of.
Let’s get out there and try them all.
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