Now a prolific NYC cabaret performer, BroadwayWorld.com/MAC Award nominee, early movie memories are on the menu at Pangea for Jeff Macauley as he brings back a show of silver screen favorites. Screen songs from later decades had certainly been on his agenda in recent presentations that focused on film composers Michel Legrand, and Henry Mancini. His other tribute topics have included lyricist Norman Gimbel and Dinah Shore, no strangers to the world of motion pictures. Now comes his celebration of the Golden Age of music in films called Hollywood Party—Movie Songs 1928-1936. The three-date run—with Macauley’s long-time Musical Director Tex Arnold at piano—launches at Pangea, “Downtown’s Alternative Supper-Club,” on October 30 at 7 PM (other dates are November 30 and December 15, also at 7 pm).
Promo for the show sets it up this way: “It’s been 90 years since Al Jolson bragged that ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!,’ and then burst into song in The Jazz Singer, announcing that the Hollywood Party was on and the movie musical was born. From Janet Gaynor charmingly strumming a zither and a bevy of writhing earth-scorching bathing beauties turning up the heat in 1929’s Sunny Side Up, to the sophisticated artistry from Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields in Swing Time, just seven years later, Macauley’s Hollywood Party remembers the first musical film stars and their songs. Macauley will offer up beloved standards and less familiar work from songwriters such as De Sylva, Brown, & Henderson, Herman Hupfeld, Herb Nacio Brown, Richard Rodgers, Yip Harburg, Jay Gorney, Lorenz Hart, Richard Whiting, etc.who wrote for singers like Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Bing Crosby at the beginning of their legendary film careers.
BistroAwards.com cabaret reviewer Mark Dundas Wood once wrote of Jeff Macauley: “His voice is expressive and quite pliable . . . He did an admirable job on the romantic and otherwise tender songs . . . The expressiveness of Macauley’s singing came not just from the colors and contours of his voice, but also from his facial expressions and gestures. He performed the music with his entire body . . .”
Nominated for 2016 and 2017 MAC Awards for “Best Male Vocalist,” Jeff Macauley has been singing in clubs from Los Angeles to New York since 1990. The CD of his BroadwayWorld Award nominated show It Was Me: The Lyrics of Norman Gimbel, is available at cdbaby.com and through iTunes and Amazon.
The cover charge is $20 online, $25 at the door, and there is a $25 food/drink minimum. For reservations, click here or call 212/995-0900. Pangea is located at 178 Second Avenue (between 11th & 12th Streets).
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