Passion Projects

Creativity as Survival

Mea culpa, faithful Reader. I’ve been scrambling somewhat of late, and it’s been a challenge to nail down an essay for you. Getting The Cornfield Podcast launched and the first few episodes recorded, edited and published has been much more complex than I’d anticipated. I’ve also been getting myself prepared for my first stage role in a year. It’s a dream part: the rascally Fagin in Oliver!.

I won’t lie. Since the covid lockdown of 2020, my acting career has had difficulty recovering. My latest theatre job was last summer’s Buddy, at my hometown venue, North Shore Music Theatre. In the decade before the events of 2020, I was working in regional theatre six to eight months a year—performing as many as five roles each season, and managing to keep my health insurance while piecing together a modest income. I miss it, but…if I am to do only one part this season, I couldn’t ask for a better one than Fagin. I grew up with the original cast album of Oliver! and as a young stagestruck kid, there was nothing I wanted more ardently than to play the title character. That was, until the summer of 1977…

The program from Pittsburgh CLO’s Oliver!, 1977. Clive Revill recreated his role as Fagin, and my Dad (lower right) was featured, discussing his set designs.

I was twelve, and my older brother and I were sent for a few weeks to be with our father, Don Beaman, in Pittsburgh, where he was designing the season for Civic Light Opera. Among the shows he worked on was a superb production of Oliver! starring none other than Clive Revill, reprising the role of Fagin, which he created on Broadway. His presence, his showmanship, his mischievous and mercurial performance all utterly captivated me. It was seeing him, and a year later, George Rose, as Captain Hook in Peter Pan that sparked my lifelong dream of being a great character actor.

I’ve certainly been more blessed than many in getting to play some of my all-time dream parts. Hook. Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. Thénardier in Les Misérables. John Adams in 1776. Albin in La Cage Aux Folles. Twice. So yeah. Blessed. In a moment like this, when we members of SAG-AFTRA are striking in solidarity with Writers Guild of America, and work is scarce for all—I am thrilled to spend five weeks working in a barn with twenty youngsters, creating the vibrant world of Dickensian London. Come see me at Sharon Playhouse, August 4 through 20.

Dream Roles. Clockwise, from upper left: John Adams, 1776; Captain Hook, Peter Pan; Thénardier, Les Misérables; Nathan Detroit, Guys and Dolls (with Charis Leos as Adelaide.

Obviously, I’m not earning my living as an actor these days, what with the one theatre part per season; the occasional film or TV appearance. I’ve been fortunate to be able to expand my coaching business for actors into some very exciting work as a director of solo shows and cabaret acts. In the past year, I’ve had the pleasure to create seven cabarets with a thrillingly diverse group of artists, from my friend of twenty-five years and frequent collaborator Goldie Dver, to actor and monologist David Rhodes, who made a smash success with his Does Anybody Still Finish…a Hat? at Provincetown Cabaret Fest last month. The show, which blends David’s unique and poignant personal story with the songs of the great Stephen Sondheim, will make its New York debut at the Triad Theatre in the fall. I adore crafting these one of a kind pieces, pushing the performers to go deeper, reach higher, and reveal their true brilliance.

So gratifying has this return to cabaret been for me, it’s given me the itch to return to the cabaret stage myself. It is a fascinating full circle for me. My first solo drag act, Bacall: By Herself, an imaginary musical evening with the late, great icon Lauren Bacall, was the vehicle that brought me to New York and caught the attention of the industry here. The creators of the wonderful gay revue, Howard Crabtree’s Whoop-dee-doo! saw my performance and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—to cover all nine guys in this hilarious quick change musical extravaganza. My exploration of drag performance led me to create three successful shows as Marlene Dietrich, which, over an eight year period, took me from top cabaret rooms in New York, to Provincetown and Fire Island, Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans, and even to Berlin, Germany, where I performed as Marlene for the millennium. In 2002, I created a musical revue of the songs of Leslie Bricusse, Crazy World, which won the Manhattan Association of Cabarets and Clubs’ MAC Award for Revue of the Year.

So, there’s history for me in the cabaret world, and I’ve been reminded, as I’ve returned to this art form, how much creative freedom—even on a limited budget—doing one’s own show can give one; how empowering it can be to craft something that says exactly what one wants to say the way one wants to say it. Or sing it. Or dance it!

I’ve presented myself with a series of massive challenges in the next few months as I create and produce my new solo cabaret, Lived Experience, which premieres October 19 and 26 at the beautiful Triad Theatre on the Upper West Side of NYC. I’m sure the title brings a grin to those who read my essays here at The Cornfield! Yes, there will be some tart and smart satiric commentary on our contorted socio-cultural zeitgeist: you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Avenue Q’s “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” as a samba; and my biting new lyrics to the Gilbert and Sullivan patter song “I’ve Got a Little List” are not to be missed.

But that’s just one facet of my Lived Experience that I hope to amuse and move audiences with this fall at the Triad. I will be celebrating my lifetime of singing and dancing—with the expert assistance of my longtime musical director, David Maiocco (who has made a career of his own as an impersonator, dazzling audiences as Liberace), and choreographer, director and former Rockette Ann Cooley. We even have a tap number planned (gulp!). We will be doing a little video look back at my drag career, and explore what it means to mature and grow as an artist in the face of loss, misfortune, and life in general, through the words and music of the likes of Mr. Sondheim, Noël Coward, Cy Coleman, Paul Williams, and others, and we will put our own stamp on two numbers from the effervescent musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.

I have been running an Indiegogo campaign to raise the budget to produce Lived Experience, and we are only a few hundred from our goal. Feel free to check out the pitch, and maybe toss me a few bucks to get across the finish line!

The message in all this self-promotion this week (more mea culpas, gentle Reader), and the work I have planned in the coming months, is simple yet profound. We have to keep going. As long as we have life, and breath, and voice, and stories, we have to use them and share them with others. Will I reclaim a place in the industry that affords me that modest income I need and once had? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

What feels more important to me these days is to be heard—authentically, truthfully— and to say what perhaps another human being needs to hear. Even if I reach just one person with a message that’s in some way transformative for them, then I will have reclaimed a place, if not in my industry, then in the world.

In times of great uncertainty and faltering determination, I often find myself returning to the words of Samuel Beckett:

You must go on.

I can’t go on.

You must go on.

I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)

It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.

You must go on.

I can’t go on.

I’ll go on.

—Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable