RECEIVED THIS MORNING FROM A MEMBER OF CABARET HOTLINE ONLINE
Hi, I appreciate your faith in the music we do. But, alas, even as I appreciate your extraordinary and generous efforts to promote cabaret, I understand why your levels of donations are dropping. The number of shows is dropping. It is very hard to start singing and try to improve and to make an artistic life in the cabaret world in NYC as it currently exists.
What I don't see here in your words (although I know you know) is the acknowledgment of the huge expense it takes to mount a show. One show. One show with a group of instrumentalists, not "just" a pianist. Additionally, at shows I attend, I am bombarded with printed materials advertising the singer's activities elsewhere (a perfectly reasonable thing to do) as well as a printed program, cards to leave e-mail addresses, etc) - again, perfectly reasonable things to do but very costly. The expense of putting on a show without much in return is a labor of love that I and others have enjoyed doing, but without much of a return, with essentially just breaking even (which is considered a success), we have the world going round with the same people who have the means to put on a show, the same people doing those second tier shows, and the same people going to them.
The expense of making and producing recordings, of publicity, of trying to move your show and the audience to another, more creative level than just the "Songs of Somebody Famous and Dead" - of celebrating the Great American Songbook as something other than dead leaves from the past but as very very alive and real in the present and future - is an expensive and often disheartening and scary proposition in this city, especially when most of us doing this are doing something else to make a living, which also demands our attentions and can often ruin our voices.
And the people who follow us around, even with discounts and all that, spend enormous amounts of money to support us - but again, it's the same people. And it is sad sometimes to watch a very well promoted singer, who is only so so, but who does have the money for putting on shows, making recordings, doing the publicity, and studying with someone who keeps insisting they are good ... and getting nominations and awards ... and singing off pitch ... but even they, with the contacts and the "audience" pulls about half a room on a good night.
The loss of Danny's is huge for those of us who were more or less regulars there. No room has replaced it in quality or congeniality for singers and audience. Also, those of us who take the time to go to open mics find ourselves spending money and waiting through singers who love to sing and have been singing, off key, for dozens of years. Well, who could deny them their fun? It's an open mic, after all. But it's hours lost of precious "free" time, even if it is good experience for a few minutes, not to mention the money spent for the obligatory food and drink.
These are all concerns and fears that most of us have as we wonder "what's the point of all this?". You haven't addressed them. I understand that you think that keeping Cabaret Hotline Online going will help us in some way. I appreciate and admire your efforts, but I think we need something in addition - something of a larger vision of all of us because cabaret for artists at all levels is a stumbling, self-contained, and expensive habit and passion.
Even the big, first tier rooms pull audience members in the single digits. Unless some larger vision takes us to a newer level here, all the banner ads and promotions in the world won't help, and the second tier of cabaret performers will only consist of vanity singers, whose husbands have retired wealthy or those who have made a killing in real estate at a fortuitous moment, only to "discover singing" and who, as Stanislavsky once said, "love themselves in the art, not the art in themselves."
Most of them probably don't know there is a difference.
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