By John Amodeo***From Monday, June 8 through Sunday, June14, Provincetown CabaretFest, with a WWII theme this year, will offer evenings of headliner shows from some of the best in the business—each one of them a storyteller in their own right: Tony winner Fa
ith Prince; Tony-nominated Sally Mayes; and MAC Award winners Carolyn Montgomery, Nicolas King, Mardie Millit and Michael Garin, and Sean Patrick Murtagh. Get to know them here!
“I come from a family of storytellers,” declares Award winner Faith Prince(Guys & Dolls), who will be this year’s well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award honoree. “I’m from the South. We always told stories at the dinner table. My grandfather, mother, father were all storytellers.” Storytelling was, in fact, her way into cabaret from musical theat
er. “Sometimes it is exciting to sing a powerful note, but it has to serve the story,” she adds. Prince advises her students to speak the lyrics first and in that way they understand what the lyrics are conveying. “I love a beautiful voice,” she says, “but it has to be used wisely. The story you are telling is the most powerful thing.”
Prince reflects on the quiet intimate power of cabaret, unlike theatre where you play a character. “It never dawned on me to be my own persona,” she says. “But once I did, I felt empowered, like I could do anything after that. I could fly a plane, be a CEO, be a surgeon.”
Fellow Southerner Sally Mayes debuted her cabaret show The Story Hour in 1999, performi
ng it at CabaretFest a few years later. “Honestly, I’ve always been a storyteller,” she says. “People like it when I tell stories, with my patter and songs that I choose. I still do the big belt numbers, and the jazzy rapid-fire scat is fun every now and then.” Nowadays, her out-of-town shows are more eclectic, “a hodge podge of a lot of different styles,” she describes. “It will be an evening where everybody will hear the truth, and they will be able to find the commonality in what I offer. I want to have a relationship with the audience.”
Crediting her director, Mayes, Carolyn Montgomery performed her MAC Award- winning Rosemary Clooney tribute show, girlSINGER, at CabaretFest last year. Mayes’ good advice: eschew a merely factual account of Clooney’s life to fi
nd common ground. This year she took her show a step farther with the newly-created Clooney and Me. “It’s a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll,” she reports. “I’m going to do a show of songs from the ’30s and ’40s, showing how we came up as women, how we managed our careers, personal lives and children. I had more rights at 25 than women have now. I talk about my being queer, and I do a lot of comedy—what she and I lived through and presented to the world.”
Now a fixture at CabaretFest, Nicolas King returns with a show of thematic relevance: “I chose WWII-era songs from the movies. I don’t want to do all the songs everyone else would do, so I’m choosing to s
ing songs that helped people escape from the war,” adding, “we are in the same place today with our world and our country burning around us.” What’s more, King says, “Ptown is a beautiful town, but it’s the people that bring me joy and I’m honored to be a part of it.”
Modern-day vaudevillians, the returning married duo of Mardie Millit and Michael Garin declare via Millit: “We are getting sillier. Yes, we are doing standards, but we may do them in a weird way. When we heard the ’30s and ’40s I thought it would be so easy. But we want to make it different than other people’s shows.” Garin agrees, adding that in their show Dirty and Dusty, he will highlight the 1930s tragic story of America’s Dust Bowl with bluegrass songs by Jimmy 
Rodgers, while Millit serves up some bawdy material from Broadway and the African American [vaudeville] circuit.
Returning with another gender-fluid show, Sean Patrick Murtagh will this time host a live podcast called Tuff Shift, featuring some of Ptown’s hospitality workers who also perform. “I’ll do a little Jimmy Kimmel opening monologue about how I was a stereotypical actor/waiter to supplement my dream of going to New York, and I’ll do a song,” he explains. “Then I’ll bring on my guests to talk about hospitality, tough rehearsals, tough performances, tough shifts, and give them a chance to share their stories.”
CabaretFest headliner shows are at the Post Office Café and Cabaret, located at 303 Commercial Street, Provincetown. Weekday emerging artists spotlight shows are at the Gifford House, located at 9 Carver Street, Provincetown, For more info and tickets, click here.
Photo key, top to bottom: CabaretFest logo, Mayes, Montgomery, King, Millit andd Garin, Murtagh
