Showcase Gives Cabaret Talent a Chance to Shine

For all of you who catch yourselves saying wistfully, “They just don’t write songs like they used to,” ASCAP begs to differ.

ASCAP--the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers--brings its Songwriters’ Showcase to the Alex Theatre on Wednesday, another step toward proving that there is musical life after Cole Porter and Irving Berlin.

“We want to make you aware of the fact that there is talent still coming out, and still around,” said Lucie Arnaz, the showcase’s host.

Three Los Angeles-based songwriters--Michele Brourman, Alan Chapman and Babbie Green--are at the center of ASCAP’s most ambitious local showcase to date. While the intimacy of cabaret may seem incongruous in a 1,450-seat theater like the Alex, such showcases are part of ASCAP’s plan to bring more exposure to cabaret and the people who create it.

“I think it’s interesting,” said Arnaz, who performs her own cabaret-style show in mid-size theaters around the country. “It’s bringing respect back to the word ‘cabaret.’ It’s not just something you do in crowded room filled with smoke and a piano.”

Arnaz, who has hosted previous showcases, said the evening is less formal than a concert. The often unheralded songwriters have a chance to tell the audience a bit about the history of each song and perform some of their own work.

Other numbers will be interpreted by Arnaz and cabaret/theater singers Andrea Marcovicci, Karen Benjamin, Nancy Dussault, Sharon McNight and Tim Stone.

Michael Kerker, who is ASCAP’s director of musical theater and cabaret, started producing the showcases in 1990 in New York. He brought them to Los Angeles in 1991, unsure of the reception he’d find. While cabaret is thriving in Manhattan--Kerker claims you can hit three shows a night--Los Angeles is a very different entertainment nut to crack.

He found that cabaret has its lovers, even in Tinseltown. With hosts and guest performers such as cabaret diva Marcovicci, Kerker found he could bring his show out here about every three months.

With no variety shows left on TV, and Broadway musicals costing millions, cabaret is one of the only places new melody-driven songs can get heard, Kerker said.

“It’s helping to keep that great American songbook a living thing,” he said.

Songwriter Chapman, who teaches music at Occidental College, said he sees the Southern California cabaret scene growing, especially with the help of new organizations such as Cabaret West. “It’s a kind of performing that is appealing--once people discover what it is. It’s intimate and direct and--we all hope--the songs’ material is of substance,” he said.

He performs his own work with his wife, singer Karen Benjamin, in a cabaret show called “Songs of Life, Love & Antelopes.” Brourman has performed at local spots such as the old Tonto & Dietz in Studio City, but has been more influential behind the scenes, helping to create Dixie Carter’s cabaret show and composing the music for a Broadway production of Studs Terkel’s “Working.” Green has been doing her cabaret act since 1990 and is turning it into a theater piece called “(This Isn’t) My Life.”

It seems most of these songwriters have a musical up their sleeves somewhere. Chapman has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera to write “Les Moose,” a children’s opera based on “Rocky & Bullwinkle” for 1997.

Guest performer Dave Frishberg just had his musical, “Quality Time,” produced in Milwaukee. Its theme reflects some of the creative difficulties of being a songwriter: It’s about a songwriter who is on deadline when his muse leaves him to pursue her own career.

As Frishberg and the other performers know, it’s tough to earn a steady living as a songwriter. Frishberg made his way primarily as a jazz pianist and found a niche writing songs for specific events or TV specials. (His best known song is “I’m Just a Bill” for the Schoolhouse Rock series of TV animated shorts.)

There’s a potential jackpot for the songwriter who taps into popular FM-radio taste, but that’s rarely the style chosen by the ASCAP showcase songwriters.

“I’m not interested in spectacle, or emotional performance, or loud or folk music or heavy grooves,” said Frishberg. “I’m not interested in dressing up funny, and I’m not interested in menacing or threatening anyone. So there’s not much in the music industry that interests me.”

And every time he hears someone sigh and say, “They just don’t write songs like they used to,” he knows he’s not alone.

DETAILS

* WHERE: Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesday.

* HOW MUCH: $22.50-$27.50.

* CALL: TeleCharge at (800) 233-3123.