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Los Angeles Times Passing the Torch Songs SPOTLIGHT
cabaret singer Peisha McPhee rehearses a number for her act Peisha McPhee has inherited the rich tradition of cabaret from mentor Julie Wilson, whose own mentor was the tragic Billie Holiday. Indeed, when Lady Day died, Wilson began to wear Holiday's signature gardenia in her hair. Like Rosemary Clooney, Margaret Whiting and the other cabaret singers of legend, McPhee can make you laugh, make you cry and make you feel like she's singing just for you. Cabaret is one-on-one entertainment, intimate, not epic, and McPhee teaches its mysteries to some 70 students each week. Not long ago, a dozen students listened one night as she told them about a recent visit from Wilson, the woman who owns the cabaret in New York's Algonquin Hotel as surely as Bobby Short owns the Carlyle. "I consider her my creative mother," McPhee says of Wilson, now in her 70s. Not long ago, Wilson explained the essence of cabaret to an interviewer in Chicago. "The older one becomes, the more experiences you go through in life, the more love you have and loved ones you lose, the more you can bring to a song," Wilson said. "I always look at a song as a small play, with a beginning, middle and end. And it's the singer who brings the colors, the variety, the spice." "I feel that she's passing the torch to me, and I'm passing the torch" to my students," says McPhee, who begins a five-day run Tuesday at the Cinegrill in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The Roosevelt is a venue with great ghosts; including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who regularly embarrassed himself in the bar. The Cinegrill is the perfect room for a woman who can shamelessly manipulate your emotions, while looking smashing in a low-cut dress. The notion that cabaret is almost exclusively a New York City phenomenon is belied by the number and enthusiasm of McPhee's students.
Aged 14 to 80, male and female, the students come to McPhee and her
teaching partner and musical director, Mel Dangcil, to learn how to keep
an audience rapt with nothing more than their musicality, their acting
skills and a repertoire that is as witty, moving and sexy as people like
Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Stephen Sondheim could make it. Arguably more sophisticated, the cabaret repertoire catalogs dysfunction as thoroughly as the hurtin' music of Nashville. Suffering is what fuels many of these songs, as a McPhee student demonstrates when she announces, "This next one is for all those guys who didn't love me," before launching into "Cry Me a River." Another asks the musical question, in a lovely ballad of her own devising, "My sweet Montana boy, why must you have a wife?" Does your heart have to have been stomped on in order to sing cabaret? After all, McPhee's life is as wholesome as many of her fellow singers' lives were sad and sordid.
Peisha McPhee teaches cabaret singing to some 70 students a week "As an actor, I have to find my loss, I have to find my bitterness," in order to sing certain songs, she says, "I use my pain, I use my suffering, and I use other people's suffering in my work." In this class, many of the students are underemployed actors who know that being able to sell a song is an effective way to sell themselves in an audition.
Their day jobs vary, from schoolteacher to
dog groomer. "I'm in the oldest profession, "one woman quips. "I'm a waitress." Baptized Patricia and renamed Peisha by an older sister, McPhee is a person who says "blessed" a lot and means it. There is a spiritual dimension to her work, she says, a view she shares with a former student, spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson. Early on in the course, students share their personal stories. Often they are tales of psychological and even physical abuse. "A lot of times people have been told when they were children or along the way that they couldn't do something or couldn't believe in their dream," McPhee says. Facing their fears, blocks and insecurities over a Cole Porter score can be the best medicine. The students' courage takes your breath away. A bookkeeper by day, Susan Seal pushes her comfort level by performing Stephen Sondheim's demanding "Losing My Mind" from "Follies." McPhee confides, "We tell them if you're going to do Sondheim, you better know what you're doing because Sondheim is the Bible to us." Seal's singing is rich and moving, but her acting is less sure. McPhee and Dangcil never bully or embarrass a student ("positive energy" is their byword), but they do not hesitate to critique a performance, however kindly. After years of performance, the teachers know secrets about every aspect of singing cabaret. They know that saying you are nervous makes it so, which is why they tell students to say they are excited instead. As for Seal, she needs to work on her diction. They point out that she is singing theenk, instead of think. She also needs to let go of the music stand and adopt a more theatrical stance. "It took me 10 years to get up the nerve," Seal says of singing cabaret. Working with McPhee and Dangcil, she has silenced the interior voice that told her she would never be goad enough to sing anywhere except in church. Now, she says with a laugh, she considers herself a singer first and "fake bookkeeper" second. McPhee says that when she goes to see cabaret, she evaluates it emotionally. The great performers make her laugh or bring tears to her eyes. Before the class is over, I ask her, out of her students' hearing, if she will sing. In the final moments, McPhee again tells the class that she believes she is passing the torch to them, just as it was passed to her. Many of them have never heard her sing, and they have no idea she is about to perform "The Story Goes On," a show-stopper about continuity and its almost sacramental ability to console, when she asks them, "The story goes on, doesn't it?" In an instant, her voice and presence turn her studio into a cabaret. By her own standard, McPhee's ad-hoc performance is a smash. Clapping like crazy, the students jump up from their seats. Most have tears in their eyes.
article: Patricia Ward Biederman |
Los Angeles Times Come to the Cabaret, Oh Chum! Peisha McPhee trains her L.A. City College students in the art of audience romance For vocalist and teacher Peisha McPhee, a good cabaret show means the performer has courted the audience into recapturing that most cherished of all human sensations. "The audience-should feel like they're falling in love," imparted McPhee, 38, who for the last 13 years has taught a cabaret class at Los Angeles City College. "Most people, no matter how young or healthy they might be, feel like it's too late for them. They come to the cabaret to be reminded that it's never too late for romance." McPhee will emcee a show that showcases several of her best students at the Cinegrill in Cafe in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel today through Tuesday, with musical director Mel Dangcil on the keys.
Peisha McPhee, right, instructs her students in the art of cabaret at Los Angeles City College. Highlights will include Broadway show tunes like "Big Spender" from "Sweet Charity" and American standards like "Come Rain or Come Shine' or "Peel Me a Grape" In a society obsessed with irony and jaded detachment, the heart on your sleeve sincerity of cabaret can seem almost revolutionary. Or, depending upon your mood, just plain old fashioned. "I'm a soul whose so blue, bluer than blue can be," crooned student Alice Flory from Hollywood to the class of 12 fellow aspiring cabaret artists, whose ages ranged from mid-20s to their 50s.
Even when directing other performers, McPhee remains a woman whose
open-arms attitude, perky visage and dishy good looks make her a natural
center of attention. Some students take McPhee's class over and over
again, including one woman who has enrolled steadily in the class for
the last 10 years. Leo Lerma; 44, left, sings as teacher Peisha McPhee; right, listens during a cabaret class at Los Angeles City College. "Cabaret is all about health," said Dangcil. "It's all about singing, dancing and life philosophy. There's' no off-color jokes or mean spiritedness." After Flow finishes her blue song Mood Indigo, Rex Rotsko, 36, a writer for the "Hollywood Squares' television show by day, takes the stage for a rendition of the song "Chicago." "Don't ever ask what Chicago is unless you've got an hour, two or three," he belts out. McPhee stops him after a couple of lines: "You must show me more," she says. "I must be able to see 'I love Chicago' in your face." The performance is a good one, and as Rotsko hits the song's final peak, McPhee intones: "Go for the applause! Go for the applause!" It works, and Rotsko gets a round of claps. When the next performer steps up and immediately starts singing, McPhee gently chastises her. "You haven't greeted your audience - that is the first thing the cabaret artist must do," said McPhee, who performs at dubs like the Cinegrill and the Jazz Bakery. "Here's the warm soup, eat, I'm so happy to have you in my room. And always introduce your piano player." Another student takes the stage and automatically says something self-depreciating. McPhee quickly reminds him that in the world of cabaret, a little narcissism goes a long way: "Instead of saying 'I'm going to sing something that I think you may not like,' tutors McPhee. "How about saying: 'I'm going to sing something that I know you will love'." article: Ted Shaffrey / Westside
Weekly
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Tolucan Times Much Ado About Peisha McPhee at Feinstein's It is not often that I meet someone in the entertainment industry and
performing arts that truly impresses me; but I must say that recently,
such good fortune came along when I was asked to interview Peisha
McPhee. From the moment you make her acquaintance, one is charmed by her
elegance, beauty, confidence, and unusual refinement. Without even
hearing her sing one note, I knew that she commanded an impeccable
mezzo-soprano range, and that most assuredly if her performances
mirrored her initial impressions, then her upcoming performance at the
Cinegrill in Hollywood is one that should not be missed.
Some people opt to jump out of planes; while others want to climb Mt.
Everest; and the list goes on for high-risk hobbies to adventures; yet
taking up music and voice is a most rewarding and most fulfilling
experience because you can feed your soul, as you discover this
God-given gift of an instrument, while still safely standing on
terra-firma.
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