Forbidden Cabaret
Venue 14 Café Bicyclette at La Cité Francophone
4.5 Stars
Melanie Gall takes her audience to the city that never sleeps and into the back alleys of Broadway where the Perroquet (Parrot) Club circa 1930s was one of New York City's hot spots.
In her storyline, the St. Albert soprano takes us to the apex of the Jazz Age’s nightclub scene where violations of strict licensing laws were routinely broken. Every night, there was a bacchanalian party establishing Perroquet as a boozy destination for the latest craze.
Gall creates a story of a young, naive Alberta soprano who leaves for New York to discover herself. By day, she sings opera, but at night, she truly comes alive, entertaining at Perroquet, ignoring Prohibition and all its restrictions.
Accompanied by a soundtrack, Gall borrows the era’s club material, which was fizzy, sexually provocative and loaded with innuendo. You can practically hear champagne corks popping when she sings Fats Waller and Andy Razaf’s blues hit Anybody Here Want to Try My Cabbage. Or band leader Harry Roy’s ragtime chart My Girl’s Pussy.
But in a testament to her cultivated operatic chops, she also delivers a heartbreaking aria in Italian from La Traviata as well as the lighter O Mio Bambino Caro.
Anyone searching for a show that is breezy and cheeky would be hard-pressed to find a more enjoyable show than Forbidden Cabaret.
