Interview: Seth Sikes of SETH SIKES SINGS BARBRA STREISAND at 54 Below

Popular cabaret artist and music video parody creator Seth Sikes will return to his Manhattan artistic homestead, 54 Below, this September 8th at 7 pm with a brand new show Seth Sikes SINGS Barbra Streisand. Mr. Sikes, who has played the Midtown Manhattan Supper Club with sold-out shows about Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Bernadette Peters and the music of the Nineteen-Twenties, has built up a devoted following through his presentation of richly orchestrated renditions of beloved tunes and his enthusiastic imparting of information trivial and otherwise about the people and themes for which he holds such devotion and fascination.

Recently, while performing in Europe and Massachusettes, Seth Sikes took some time out of his schedule to exchange and email q&a with Broadway World to discuss his work as a performer and online content creator, the need for divas in our lives, and The Greatest Star who is currently catching his eye.

Photos by Stephen Mosher. Visit the Stephen Mosher website HERE.

This interview was conducted digitally and is reproduced without edits.

Seth Sikes, welcome to Broadway World!

Always happy to be with you and with Broadway World!

You and I are having to do our interview today by email because you are traveling. In what exotic lands are you adventuring these days?

It's true that I've been on the road a lot this year. I just got to Provincetown, MA, directly from Sitges, Spain, which is just outside of Barcelona. Sitges is a great beach town and a new discovery for me. There's this darling little piano bar/cabaret called El Piano Sitges which hosts fantastic performers, and the entire room goes quiet when the show begins, even though half of them are standing in the bar area. I just loved it there. Earlier this summer I was in Mykonos (so fun and glamorous, by the way) for the first time, as well as in Athens and London. And of course I've spent as much time as possible this summer on Fire Island, as usual.

Are you out in the world enjoying a holiday, or are you singing for your supper?

Both! If there's a venue for me in a fun town that I'm traveling to, I like to throw in a performance (like, in the case of Sitges). Or else I like to build a vacation around a performance schedule. It would be good, however, to take a vacation that's actually a real vacation at some point!

In a mere matter of weeks you are debuting a new musical cabaret at 54 Below. You already have an arsenal of shows that you can present, but you are creating a brand new program for September Eighth. What is the instinct that drives you to always keep creating something new?

Well, for one thing, I don't want audiences to get bored hearing the same material over and over again. But also the truth is that no matter how much I love singing the music that I do (which happens to be some of the greatest songs ever written), one does sometimes think, "Do I really feel like singing Stormy Weather again?" I want to stay fresh. And what a trove of standards there are to dig through. Sometimes audiences tell me after a show that the song they enjoyed the most was one they hadn't heard before, and I really appreciate that. Still, audiences like to hear at least a few songs that are familiar.

Your new show is titled, very straightforwardly enough, Seth Sikes SINGS Barbra Streisand. Tell me about your relationship with Barbra Streisand's canon of work.

There are Judy & /Liza queens, and there are Barbra queens, and I have been a Judy & Liza queen since I was a little boy. I wasn't exposed to Barbra much when I was younger, and her songs on the radio from that nineties period sounded to me, at the time, for a lack of a better word: schmaltzy. Later, I discovered her early work, and I was knocked dead. The voice, the arrangements, the personality, and of course those fabulous standards. I still mostly like the early stuff, but some of the later songs have grown on me, especially during the research I've been doing for this show.

When you do your tributes to these great entertainers like Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli and, now, Barbra Streisand, you are known to do deep dives into the material and the history of the artist. Where does the instinct come from, to make these detailed learning expeditions on the artists and the material?

Well, I wouldn't feel comfortable doing a tribute to someone without doing the research. The thing about Barbra, though, is that she made 36 studio albums, 11 live albums, numerousTV specials... plus, plus, plus... and she's 80 years old!. Because I'm putting this Barbra show together in a rather short period of time, there are still many of her songs that I don't know well and plenty that I haven't heard. But I feel that a healthy obsession can only help a writer when they are exploring a subject, and when I put together a show, I feel somewhat like a writer. Although the show ultimately has to be from my point of view, and not a wikipedia entry. So I look for connective tissue, and it usually appears on its own as I read and watch and listen. Not that I could ever compare to Barbra or Liza or Judy! I try to make that clear when I do these tributes. I think I get away with a little more because I'm male and do not imitate them.

These are women with rich histories and extensive backgrounds. It must be difficult to edit your scripts down to fit into cabaret show length. Put me in the picture of how Seth Sikes the writer creates a club act.

I love this question, so I'm going to take some time to answer it, because it takes a village to make a nightclub act, and I've never really explained it before in any interview.

Step one: watch Youtube performances and interviews endlessly and repetitively. Step two: Make a Spotify playlist of all the artist's songs, and then whittle that one down to a playlist of the ones that move or speak to you the most. Step three: read biographies (but not so much that you waste time rehearsing). Talk to superfans of the artist and ask for recommendations and stories. Other people's passion is catching.

Next: call Michael Lavine and ask for sheet music for the songs you want to explore. Sing through material with your Musical Director (Phil Reno in this case, and often Mark Hartman), and/or sing along at home to tracks to see if the songs work on your voice. Many - actually most - songs simply do not sit well on my voice, so they go in the "maybe later" pile.

I am most creative very late at night with wine. That's when the muse-juice starts to flow and when my creative team starts to get a multitide of emails from me. As you know, I like to take the music and respectfully and tastefully make it my own. My idols were great doing this, and we call it special material. I particularly enjoy writing it. An idea will come to me and I will make a draft and then another, and then I'll call my dear friend Lisa Lambert (who won a Tony for writing the lyrics for The Drowsy Chaperone) and she polishes the lyric, or suggests a much better concept. I'm so lucky to have her in my back pocket!

Then I write down everything that comes to mind and I get together with Eric Gililland (who was the showrunner on Roseanne and many other TV shows) and he helps direct the material, punches up my jokes, says to cut this or add that, and gives much directorial guidance.

Then I have a large team of musicians who do music prep: they transcribe arrangements from recordings, input music into Finale music software transpose it, rework it. And then I've got a separate team of orchestrators (mainly Matt Aument, Neil Douglas Reilly, Fred Barton, Macy Schmidt, Jessse Varagas, Ryan Shirard, and others), who take what we've scratched together and work absolute magic by turning them into orchestrations for a seven-or-eight-piece band.

And my impresario publicist, Scott Gorenstein, does everything he can to get the word out about the show so that people come to see it. I'm so very lucky to have so many talented and loyal friends who help me pull together what amounts to only about an hour of show business. There's not a lot of money in nightclub acts, so the people who are involved do it because they have a love for the music.

The worst part is that you don't really get a dress rehearsal. You get a rehearsal with the band, and (hopefully) a run-through at sound check, and then you just pray you don't forget the seventeen songs you've just learned. It gets so much easier after doing it a few times. But by then, you feel that your audience would like to see something new altogether!

Barbra Streisand is a Mistress of Reinvention who changed her musical styles with each decade. Do you have a favorite decade of Streisand music, and has it informed the structure of your show?

It's her early stuff, the first few albums, and her return to Broadway music that I most respond to. Which makes sense, though, because I don't really like a lot of music written after Sondheim, who I'm so glad she got to collaborate so closely with later. I know that some of my audience will want to hear the later stuff, and I'm working hard on including it, but it's really not my kind of music and I don't sing that kind of music well anyway.

You've had a little help putting your Streisand show together, by way of some guidance from Streisand aficionado Nicolas King. You are two of the most popular and in-demand boy singers in the business. What are the chances we might be lucky enough to see you and Nico work on something together some day?

The chances are very good! We're actually collaborating on a project now (to be announced soon!), and he and another guest will appear in the Barbra tribute. He's a font of knowledge when it comes to showbiz music, and we're cut from the same cloth, so it's been so good to have his input.

Your Fire Island parody music videos have made you an internet sensation. If you were going to do a parody of a Barbra Streisand song, what would it look like?

"Internet sensation" is a rather a big stretch, I must say. But I'm happy that they are popular. At any rate, to answer your question: one arrives at Fire Island on a boat, so Don't Rain on My Parade always comes to mind as a Barbra Parody (me running through Penn Station and arriving in the harbor with a drone shot on the bow of the ferry). But it would need to have a clever context and I haven't come up with the right angle yet. Someone suggested doing it as a character who wants to party and who doesn't want monkey pox to rain on his parade, but that messaging seems a bit wrong, doesn't it? I'm always straddling the line between naughty and buttoned-up. Everyone seems to have their own opinion of which way I should go. I'm leaning toward buttoned-up the older I get, but who doesn't like a bit of mischief?

(See Seth's newest parody video at the bottom of this interview.)

Seth, what is it about the divas? Why are they so important to the lives of gay men? What do they bring to your life that makes them so essential?

I am asked about this all the time! The best I can come up with is that when you are a young, closeted gay boy and you hear or see someone as fabulous as Judy, Liza, or Barbra singing, "Oh, my man I love him so...", or "How can I ignore the boy next door?", or "Maybe this time he'll stay...", something in your heart relates - more deeply than you realize it in the moment - but it sticks, and it grows and at some point you start to channel all your heartache into those "man-that-got-away" songs. And then, of course, you buck up and start to strut around singing Don't Rain on My Parade, or Cabaret, and you feel the opposite: totally fierce and totally fabulous. And you're suddenly hooked on those ladies for life.

Seth Sikes, thank you for chatting with Broadway World today, travel safely and I will see you on September Eighth!

I can't wait! I hope I can learn all this new material by then!

For information and reservations to Seth Sikes SINGS Barbra Streisand visit the 54 Below website HERE. There is a discount for the main dining room using the code SETH5

Visit the Seth Sikes website HERE, the Seth Sikes YouTube channel Here, the Seth Sikes Facebook page HERE, the Seth Sikes Instagram page HERE, and the Seth Sikes Twitter page Here.

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