POV: ​”The COVID-19 Pandemic Ignites Long-Lasting Effects on the Cabaret Industry”

Editor’s Note: Julietta Thron is a journalism student at Northwestern University who recently submitted this story as part of her classwork. She’s kindly given us permission to reprint her essay in its entirety. We present it as written, with thanks to the author. 

By Julietta Thron***Billy Stritch is a tall, middle-aged man, with curly grey hair and talent flowing through every morsel of his being. He is a famed musical director, composer, vocalist, jazz pianist, owner of multiple albums, Broadway actor, and Grammy award winner. At the young age of 12 he began his road to fame playing piano at his local First Prespetarian Church. Before long, Stritch was involved with the cabaret industry. Stritch was on stage multiple nights a week under the burning lights overlooking an audience who craved entertainment and every night he appeased their appetite.

“Struggle, struggle, struggle! … It’s rewarding artistically and… it’s very personally enriching I think,” Stritch said when asked how he would describe the life of a cabaret entertainer

Stritch’s dichotomy regarding what it means to be a cabaret entertainer is at the back of every performer’s mind. The hardship of making a name for oneself, while dealing with the struggle to maintain a steady income, is what can make or break an entertainer. While this fight has always been hard, things have only gotten worse in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cabaret venues have closed, performances have been canceled, and an artist’s means of income have come to a halt. Despite the hardship, performers are working together as a community to overcome these trying times.

Due to the cabaret industry being on the smaller side, Stritch said it’s all about self-promotion, “I remember the days we had to print fliers and do mail-outs,” he said. “The business is not a huge money maker.”

However, even though 90 percent of Stritch’s income has been put on pause due to the lack of live performances during these times, he still designates himself as one of the lucky ones. Throughout his career, Stritch has himself seen multitudes of success and is very well known within the music industry.

Lina Koutrakos, a cabaret performer with big earrings and an even bigger personality, also counts herself lucky, but for a different reason entirely.

After contracting COVID around March 12th of this year, she spent 45 days with the virus stuck to her bed trying to sweat it out.

“It was scary as anything because there weren’t too many people to talk to. I was petrified because no one I knew had gotten it before me,” Koutrakos said.

To cope, Koutrakos began to write long dissertation posts on Facebook every day in order to stay connected with those around her. With time, various people began to reach out and share their stories with her. She soon felt less alone.

Due to her bed ridden state, Koutrakos’s boyfriend was the one to maintain a steady income for the both of them.

However, Koutrakos said she normally takes care of herself. In her early cabaret days, she supported herself waitressing. She, along with other cabaret performers, said that it is common for cabaret performers to have a secondary job to maintain their lifestyle.

Koutrakos would spend hours reading anything she could get her hands on in order to educate herself on the industry. She said she has used the knowledge she taught herself over the past few decades to fuel her teaching career.

“I teach, coach and direct other solo performers. From jazz, to cabaret, to rock and roll artists. I turned what I love into teaching,” she said.

While she normally gets to work hands-on with her students, due to the COVID pandemic, all of Koutrakos’s classes have moved online.

According to the ​CDC​ people are to avoid gathering in groups (no more than 10) and remain six-feet-apart from one another at all times to reduce the risk of contracting the virus. These types of restrictions make performing cabaret almost impossible.

In addition, these restrictions have caused the cabaret community, and its performers, to have to get creative with alternative ways of performing and sharing their shows.

There are other people in the cabaret industry who use their platforms in similar ways to educate and inform. One of those people is Scott Barbarino.

Scott Barbarino is the creator of ​NiteLifeExchange​, a cabaret website that uses its platform to inform, educate, and advertise.

Barbarino said he has worked to make his website a place of solace for struggling performers.

Stritch, a long time follower of NiteLifeExchange said, “The website is a great resource for the people that work in this field. They’re really looking out for a lot of us. It’s a labor of love.”

One way Barbarino has tried to shed light on the struggles of various cabaret performers is through a new column called “​Six Questions​”.

“We needed to give people an opportunity to… put in words and have a chance to answer questions and talk about what they were doing to deal with the current circumstance,” Barbarino said. “Then that knowledge they put out there, other people could then learn from.”

On May 24th of this year, NiteLifeExchange interviewed Nicholas King for the column who explained that this was the first time he has been unemployed in 25 years.

However, King said that during this pandemic he has decided to make the best use of his time and has since enrolled himself in online psychology classes at Yale University. In addition, King has also finished an album project that had been on his mind for a while.

The ability for King, and other cabaret performers to have their voice be heard through NiteLifeExchange and be given a platform to express their struggles on is the kind of thing Barbarino is trying to create with his website.

King also mentioned that he has started performing in his living room remotely since the pandemic began. Alternative methods such as Facebook live, Instagram live, Zoom and even YouTube are being used to display a plethora of performances during these times.

Michael McAssey is a cabaret and Broadway performer, a winner and three-time nominee for the MAC award, and a vocal coach at Pace University in the school of Performing Arts. He said as a whole the cabaret industry does not exist as we once knew it.

“It’s [cabaret] is a very personal medium and it doesn’t really exist at all right now. All of a sudden people are singing in their living rooms,” McAssey said. “I started doing my own shows on Sundays. I’m at the piano for an hour and since no one has money, hardly people can tip, but we appreciate anything people give us, especially now.”

In addition to McAssey, Stritch is using his virtual platform to continue ​his​ cabaret lifestyle and puts on shows every Wednesday with actress and singe Linda Laven and every Thursday by himself.

Stritch’s personal show on Thursdays is around 75 minutes long and consists of about 15 to 20 songs. Stritch often sits at the piano overlooking his music sheets letting his hands flow effortlessly across the keys as he sings his afternoons away.

“I’m very happy to be at this point in my life and be able to draw on all the experiences I have and the knowledge I have,” he said, “and I’m very grateful for technology. We are all finding new ways and it’s the new norma.”

Unlike Stritch and McAssey, who have been performing virtually, Colette Hawley took her performance to the sky!

In her latest performance in front of Chicago Methodist Senior Services, Hawley placed herself in a ​cherry picker​ and serenaded the seniors inside the nursing home during Memorial Day weekend.

Her light brown hair flowed in the wind as the elderly people inside the home poked their heads out in hopes of catching the melodic tune of “Tooty Fruity” belted out from Hawley.

“I wanted to do something big. I wanted to put the attention on the seniors because they remain locked down, [and] they remain sequestered to their rooms.”

Hawley has had a special relationship with seniors of various nursing homes within the past few years.

At one point during her cabaret career, Hawley lost her singing voice. She went into comedy as an exchange for singing and tried various other methods to take her mind off the fact she could no longer do what she loved.

Eventually, after realizing she no longer wanted to do comedy, she slowly began singing for old people.

“I saw the way the music affected them… So I started going back to these places and the more I went back, the more my singing voice came back, until it came back completely,” she said. “That’s when I knew that this was what I was meant to do.”

Now Hawley plays for nursing homes around Chicago making a small amount of money for each gig. She attributes her ability to sing once more to the seniors she performs for. She said she does it all for them.

In addition to enthusiastic performers creating lively entertainment, there is more than just bad news for the cabaret industry. Funding for the ​National Endowment for the Arts​ researched $162 million in 2020, the highest it has been since 2010.

Even during these hard times, the cabaret community, its performers, and its fans have hope that things will eventually get better.

Michael Barbieri, a writer for NiteLifeExchange, had a strong response to these hard times. “We might not be all together all the time anymore, but we’re still here and we’re still making art and loving each other and supporting each other and boosting each other up.”

Source List:

https://nitelifeexchange.com/​-30-

https://nypost.com/2020/05/24/singer-rents-cherry-picker-to-serenade-seniors-on-memorial-day- weekend/

https://www.arts.gov/open-government/national-endowment-arts-appropriations-history

http://www.billystritch.com/Billy-Stritch-Bio.html