CABARET LIFE NYC: It's Time for Cabaret Baby Lorinda Lisitza to Emerge Triumphant in Musical Theater

BroadwayWorld.com is pleased to announce the launch of Stephen Hanks’ new column—Cabaret Life NYC—about the world of New York cabaret. A veteran magazine writer/editor, Stephen began writing cabaret reviews in late 2010 for Cabaret Scenes Magazine and in March 2012 for BroadwayWorld.com. In addition to his reviews, this column—which will appear once or twice a month—will include features about and interviews with people in the New York cabaret scene, as well as his opinions and observations on this exciting entertainment art form. His initial piece is a profile of musical theater actress and Award-winning cabaret performer, Lorinda Lisitza.

By Stephen Hanks

There are more than eight million stories in the city that never sleeps and hundreds, if not thousands, are narratives about incredibly talented actors, singers, and dancers slogging away in low-paying service jobs when they aren’t auditioning for their big break. The cliché has been played out most recently—and unrealistically—through the Katherine McPhee character on the TV show Smash. No doubt that lurking inside many of those waitresses taking your drink order at a diner or the bellhops carrying your hotel bags are potential stars that haven’t met the right people or haven’t been in the right place at the right time.

Lorinda Lisitza is one of those “budding stars,” only she has been in that category for 21 years—working as a waitress for every one of those years since coming to New York in 1991 to pursue her acting dreams. And while most women performers might obsess about the difficulty of getting parts when in their 30s, let alone their 40s, Lisitza, who unabashedly admits to being 42, believes that her acting career would finally take off if only she were older.

“I don’t think my age is working against me because I’ve never been the ingénue or the pretty young thing,” Lisitza says matter-of-factly, her big expressive blue eyes and fluffy mane of red hair belying her self-deprecating assessment of her looks. “I’ve been waiting my whole adult life to be old enough for the character-based parts that fit me. And makeup wouldn’t really help because in New York you can find people the right age to play those roles. I probably need to be 55.”

She shouldn’t have to wait that long and if the right people—including casting directors and producers and insightful critics—catch one of the six upcoming presentations of her cabaret show Triumphant Baby (opening May 8 at the Metropolitan Room at 7pm), she may not have to. Featuring 13 songs written by composer Joe Iconis and lyricist Robert Maddock, Triumphant Baby has been Lisitza’s signature show since she first introduced it at the Metropolitan Room in early 2007, earning a New York Nightlife Award for "Outstanding Musical Comedy Performance" (Iconis and Maddock earned a Backstage Bistro for "Special Material" for one of the songs). She subsequently performed it a few times at the York Theater in the summer of 2007, and again at Urban Stages in late 2010. The Met Room gig (where Lorinda has worked as a waitress for six years) will be the show’s first extended run.

I started writing cabaret critiques about a year and a half ago and Lisitza’s Urban Stages show was one of my first reviews. Since then I’ve witnessed about 100 productions and Triumphant Baby still ranks as one of the most compelling performances I’ve seen in cabaret, although it was more like a one-woman mini-concert. Lisitza’s acting and singing skills had already made an impression earlier in 2010 when I saw her do a wonderful job as a French madam in a Musical Mondays Theatre Lab staged reading of the musical revue Café Puttanesca. Her performance in Triumphant Baby only reinforced my belief that she was an exceptional talent flying way under the New York entertainment radar. (Click Page 2 below to continue.)

Like what Mary Martin was for Rogers and Hammerstein, Lisitza is the ideal vehicle to convey Iconis (photo left) and Maddock’s quirky, intelligent, fun, and accessible songs about ditzy hillbillies, desperate housewives, doomed startlets, and other assorted nut jobs. But Lisitza doesn’t simply deliver the songs with her strong mezzo soprano and the soul of a down-to-earth chanteuse. With solid direction from Brad Oscar, who starred in The Producers and Jekyll and Hyde (he first worked with Lisitza in 2006 while directing Scott Siegel’s Broadway Musicals of 1968 at Town Hall), Lisitza so totally inhabits the characters of these lovable losers that she makes us root for them to emerge triumphant in the end. The copy on her promotional show cards isn't an overstatement: She will coax you . . . she will captivate you . . . she will kill you.

In the song “Eddie Got a Color TV,” Lisitza is an ignored and frustrated trailer park wife. In “Camden County Penitentiary,” a song that would be a hit for any contemporary country singer, she’s a desperate woman waiting for her man who’s been sentenced to life in prison. In the dramatic ballad “The Kind That Falls,” she’s Peg Entwistle, the young actress who in 1932 committed suicide at 24 by jumping off the Hollywood sign. (“It’s not that hard to feel like a failed actress in New York City so acting that song wasn’t that much of a stretch,” Lorinda jokes.) In “One Step Closer to Crazy,” a song Iconis and Maddock wrote specifically for—and about—their singing muse, Lisitza becomes a homeless woman you might find panhandling in a New York subway car. But her signature song may well be the Eastern European accented and hilarious “Yolanda at the Bottom of the Stairs,” sung from the point of view of a vengeful female getting even with a love rival. The show is an hour-long tour de force from start to finish.

“I already knew Joe and Robert very well from performing in their 20-minute and 90-minute musicals when they were at NYU about 10 years ago,” says Lisitza, who has been a cast member in two Iconis musicals, ReWrite and The Plant that Ate Dirty Socks, and the Iconis/Maddock musical Plastic, which is still in development. “So after they built up a larger catalog, I wanted to do a cabaret show of their songs. I decided on a set order that I call ‘emotionally linear.’ When I put together a show, I try to create an arc that doesn’t have to tell a linear story, but the audience somehow feels emotionally satisfied.”

Although Iconis and Maddock may have written a song about Lisitza’s being a tad nutty, there’s one adjective that comes up consistently when her collaborators describe her—fearless.

“Lorinda is fearless and totally uninhibited and she attacks her work on stage with an earnest ferocity,” says Maddock, whose lyrics earned him a 2007 Jonathan Larson Award. “Everyone who works with Lorinda soon realizes that the lady will try absolutely anything; that the emotions of her characters and her comedic sensibilities are off the Richter scale.”

“Lorinda is as fearless an artist as I’ve ever worked with,” adds Iconis, who won the 2007 Ed Kleban Award from BMI and a 2006 Jonathan Larson Award. “I’ve seen her free up other actors because of that fearlessness. Yes she has an amazing voice, is a tremendous comedian, and is clearly a very skilled cabaret performer, but I think first and foremost she’s a completely unique, versatile, and totally electrifying actor. I’ve seen her be funny, scary, sexy, and sad, all in the space of a minute, but I think it all comes from a human place. Most performers are beautiful and talented in a nonthreatening way, but I gravitate towards Lorinda because everything about her is threatening—her talent, her beauty, her comedy. She’s an aggressive and confrontational presence on stage and that’s rare these days.”

“Lorinda is a fearless and passionate musical theatre actress,” says composer Michael Ogborn, who wrote Café Puttenesca. “She possesses that rare combination of honesty, craft and old-school theatricality. She is one of the best kept secrets in New York and her power deserves to be unleashed on the masses.”

Lisitza exhibited her instinct for theatrical fearlessness practically from the time she left the womb. She was born and raised in Porcupine Plain, one of 145 towns in Saskatchewan, Canada, and which boasts a population just a bit higher than the audiences Lorinda will likely get for her six Met Room shows combined. At age 2, at an outdoor auction, she ran up on stage, grabbed the microphone and sang “Delta Dawn.” (“My mother was mortified,” she remembers.) Since the town didn’t have much in the way of radio stations, Lisitza grew up on country music (“I only started getting into ‘70s rock in the past 10 years”) and learned about Broadway musicals from TV movies. She started taking voice lessons at 11 and caught enough of an acting bug to graduate with a degree in Drama from the University of Saskatchewan.

“When I came to New York in ‘91, I started thinking about combining my acting and singing and got into musical theater,” says Lisitza, who recently played Ethel Toffelmier in a three-week run of The Music Man at the Riverside Theater in Vero Beach (photo above). During the ‘90s she performed in various non-equity productions and readings before getting a shot in 1999 to star in a one-woman fictional musical biography called Daddy’s Girl. Critic Roy Sander panned the show but called Lisitza “wonderful from beginning to end.” In 2000, she spent six months in the Off-Broadway show Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill at The Triad and used that experience with the Weill songbook to develop—with director Hal Simons—her first cabaret show, Songs In the Style of Weill (at Don’t Tell Mama). Lisitza’s breakthrough performance earned her a 2003 MAC Award for "Female Debut" and a 2003 Backstage Bistro Award for "Theme Show."

So the lady has three significant awards on her resume and a bunch of rave reviews in her portfolio. Does waiting for that big break get frustrating?

“I actually felt more frustrated when I was 35 to 40 because you feel like you’re almost there but not quite,” Lisitza admits. “These days I feel like I’m always working on some kind of project (she recently staged a well-received new cabaret show with friend and Met Room co-worker Ted Stafford) or working on someone’s new song, or laying the groundwork in a very positive way. And I recently signed with a new agent (Michael W. Rodriguez) who really believes in me.”

Working as a waitress, especially in a venue like the Metropolitan Room, still has its advantages. It’s a place where between the cocktail orders, an actor and cabaret singer can observe and absorb the talent and style of fellow performers.

“I can’t tell you how valuable it is to watch other people on stage,” she admits. “You learn more from the things that don’t work in a show than from the things that do, and you learn something from those moments when someone takes a big risk that isn't successful."

And Lorinda knows a lot about about gambling and risk-taking. As an inveterate poker player, she thinks there are definite correlations between her favorite card game and life in the acting business.

“In poker, you use the info you gather about the people you are playing, their body language, the cards you are given, and you make choices about whether you will put money in the pot or not,” she explains. “You have to think quickly and be in the moment. You can’t be too timid, but you can’t be out of control either. I think I approach my poker game similar to the way I take on a role. I study and work at it. I hope for the best when I sit down at a table, but am aware that there are pitfalls and risks. No matter how well you figure the odds, anything can happen; it’s live! You prepare to do your best, but you don’t really have that much control over the final outcome. But if you work hard and study the game, over the long run you will begin to have success.”

In 2008, Lisitza was cast as a game-show contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (the episode aired in June 2009). She made it to the $16,000 level and was going for $25,000 when she ran out of lifelines and had to gamble on whether a 25-percent chance of picking the right answer was worth risking the whole shebang. After a few seconds showing Meredith Vieira her poker face, she passed and settled for the 16 grand. Hey, Lorinda Lisitza may be one step closer to crazy, but she’s not a total loon.

 

Lorinda Lisitza will perform her show Triumphant Baby: The Songs of Joe Iconis and Robert Maddock at the Metropolitan Room on Tuesday May 8; Friday May 11; Tuesday May 15; Wednesday May 16—all at 7pm; Saturday May 19 at 9:30pm, and Sunday May 20 at 7pm. Joining Lisitza are Iconis (the music director) on piano, Mike Pettry on guitar, and Matt Wigton on bass. MAC Award winner Liz Lark Brown and Tanya Holt (Metropolitan Room Booking Manager) are the back-up vocalists.

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