The History and Evolution of the Provincetown CabaretFest: Part 1 -

By Kati Neiheisel***From Monday, June 8, through Sunday, June 14, the 2026 annual Provincetown CabaretFest takes place, celebrating its 1999 launch and 2014 relaunch, and now the inaugural year for Producing Artistic Director David Rhodes, a New York-based performer, actor, playwright and cabaret artist. Presiding over this year’s theme, A Sentimental Journey, featuring the American Songbook of the ‘30s and ‘40s, the festival will honor Patricia Fitzpatrick, Cape Cod resident, performer and producer of CabaretFest for the past twelve years. Boston-based cabaret artist and director John O’Neil, who helped Fitzpatrick relaunch the festival originally founded the earlier iteration of CabaretFest with Fitzpatrick’s assistance.

The coastal town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, an art colony and gay mecca for over a century, has a long history and appreciation of the performing arts, making this summer favorite an ideal place to host a festival in its several prime venues. The Central House Hotel, built in 1836 as a public hall for entertainment, has been known as the Crown & Anchor since 1962. For most of six decades of summers, the Crown & Anchor has been home to piano bar icon Bobby Wetherbee.

The Pilgrim House, built in 1781, opened as a hotel in 1810, and became a popular venue for live entertainment a century later. In 1966, Lynne Carter appeared at the Pilgrim House’s Madeira Club in his impersonation of Bette Davis, then he bought the place. Lily Tomlin performed there in 1967, and Waylon Flowers and Madame headlined the Madeira Club in the ’70s. The owner of the Pilgrim House from 1979-87 was Phyllis Schlosberg, who owned Post Office Cafe and Cabaret for fifty years.

In 1980, Carol O’Shaughnessy, Boston’s “First Lady of Cabaret,” made her way to Provincetown via The Male Box, a gay bar and lounge in Worcester, MA, when she accepted a friend’s invitation to sing in his cabaret show. She was a hit, which led to an invitation to perform at Post Office Cafe and Cabaret with her first music director Don Hill. She then played the Pilgrim House, followed by the Pied Piper, Tin Pan Alley, the Cape Inn and the Crown & Anchor. She says, “I was there in the Sharon McNight days, with Richard Weinstock, Michael Greer and Tiffany Jones (Ken Whitehead).”

Cabaret legend and Tony Award-nominated actress Sharon McNight began her career in San Francisco in the late ’70s. She played Provincetown for the first time in 1980 at the Pilgrim House. She’s returned often since, performing at Post Office Cafe and Cabaret and many other venues. McNight says, “My piano player Richard Weinstock bought a club called Rick’s and I worked there for several summers until he died.” [Weinstock died of AIDS in 1993.] “I played the Red Room and the Crown & Anchor before it burned down.” [On February 10, 1998, a fire destroyed a former theater known as Whaler’s Wharf and most of the Crown & Anchor.] “I never worked on Bradford Street, only up and down Commercial Street. Pick any club that had a piano—I worked it.”

“In the ’80s, you could walk up and down Commercial Street, the main drag, and every four or five clubs there’d be somebody with a guitar, somebody with a piano, there’d be a pair of singers, a solo singer,” says John O’Neil. “At some point in the ’90s, the cost of live entertainment became too expensive. At the same time, you saw an increase in drag performances, but they were mostly lip syncing. The audience grew and grew, partly because the audience that understood live music was being replaced by younger people who had no understanding of what live performance was like. So, the music was blaring, the drag queens were gorgeous, and it became far more profitable to have drag performances.

“One night, I said to my friend Steve Melamed, ‘It’s really too bad there aren’t more live acts coming down here.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m a member of the Provincetown Visitor Services Board.’ He was also a member of the PBG (Provincetown Business Guild) which would promote and seed events that took place in the shoulder seasons of the year: April-May, and October. He said, ‘I got some money this year and I know someone who could help you.’ That someone was Patricia Fitzpatrick, the Director of Tourism. She was instrumental in getting the cabaret festival off the ground. I was the young man with the blonde hair flapping in the wind, but I was able to walk into places and say, ‘Hi, Patricia Fitzpatrick said I should talk to you about this crazy idea.’ So, it was born!

At the time, my vision for CabaretFest was to create performance, networking, and educational opportunities for cabaret performers in the Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island area. We started with the Crown & Anchor as our home base, but I was able to bring cabaret into places where live music was not available, like guest houses. I would ask, ‘do you have a piano? I’ll introduce people to your place of business.’ We would have a Sunday night show at the U. U. church (Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown), and we would do shows at the art museum. There could be a dozen shows going on around town on what is normally a dark weekend in May. Each year, I looked for headliners that would make an attractive show for the entire Cape. We had Brett Summers, Carol O’Shaughnessy, Sally Mayes, Eileen Fulton.”