Feature: The Days Of Cabaret Gratitude - Day Twenty-One - The Gentleman

The Days Of Cabaret Gratitude

Day Twenty-One: The Gentleman - Jeff Harnar

Years ago, when the world was young and we were even younger, a boy with cheek of tan and a smile brighter than the sun stepped onto a stage and sang a song.  To wit, he sang a set of songs by Comden and Green.  And, as the saying goes, the rest was history.  The reviews for Jeff Harnar’s Comden and Green cabaret were so huge that he left his job waiting tables, became a cabaret star and has been a star, ever since.

The great Nancy LaMott was heard, often, to say that cabaret is the world’s most expensive hobby.  To this day, people pass remarks of this nature regarding the art form of cabaret.  They do this because it is true… mostly.  There are a few people working in cabaret who cracked the code.  They made themselves desirable, they made themselves indispensable, they made themselves a commodity.  Jeff Harnar is an expert, not only in the craft of cabaret but in the marketing of his art form.  Lo, these many years, Jeff has created one show after another that demands that the audience attend.  He isn’t just throwing up a set of songs (which is very nice for some artists) - Jeff is writing cabaret plays.  Even though the industry is now called Cabaret and Concert, there is a format to that which people call “cabaret” and Jeff has mastered it.

Jeff Harnar takes themes, whether based on composers or famous entertainers or anything else that strikes his fancy, and he makes a movie on the stage.  Equal parts song cycle, musical theater opera, and history lesson, Jeff presents programs in which there is a bit of chit at the top, a little chat at the end, and musical storytelling between those two inexorable bookends that provides a story arc, characters, situations, and a complete journey that satisfies to the soul.  Like that Comden and Green show from the mind’s memory, Jeff creates deep dives into the words, the music, and the people who molded them into musical theater.  Of late, he has been focusing on Misters Sondheim and Coleman, and these plays (and their subsequent cast recordings) have garnered praise, sold-out houses, and encores.  Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway, Jeff Harnar eats life and makes art, and the lives of the people in the audience (much of the time, his colleagues and contemporaries) are made so much the better for having bought a ticket.  He is One.  He is Only.  He is Harnar.

Read a Broadway World Cabaret review of Jeff Harnar HERE

Jeff will appear at 54 Below on Tuesday, December 5th, with some high-profile friends in WE LOVE THE WINTER WEATHER - intel and tickets are HERE.

Jeff's next appearance: Wednesday, Dec 13th at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterbury CT at 7 pm 
HOMEWARD BOUND 
Songs of the Season
Music Director Christopher Denny

Info and reservations HERE.

Jeff has a hit CD out this year titled A COLLECTIVE CY: Jeff Harnar SINGS Cy Coleman.  Get a copy HERE.

Jeff’s pronouns are he/him/his.

Jeff can be found online at the following links:

Website:  HERE 

Instagram:  HERE 

Facebook:  HERE  

TikTok:  HERE  

YouTube:  HERE

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