If cabaret continues in a lip-synching century, Marilyn Levinson will have had a hand in it.
Cabaret—live music in an intimate venue where patrons can dine and drink while they listen—is often considered an endangered entertainment, or a stodgy one. "People have visions of an out-of-work, usually older, singer warbling away in a sequined gown," Levinson, '80, JD '86, admits. But the annual six-concert season she curates as producer of Bay Area Cabaret mixes jazz, Broadway, blues and pop. It features performers as varied as tap dancer Tommy Tune, British theater diva Elaine Page, Phantom actress Lisa Vroman, singer/songwriter Nellie McKay and Bay Area Teen Idol winner Robert Conte Thornton.
Three years ago, the fabled Venetian Room in the Fairmont Hotel became the permanent home of the nonprofit Levinson founded in 2004. Showing a visitor around the space where Tony Bennett first sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," Levinson describes a show. Tiers of low tables fill a room decorated in gold and scarlet. There are three cocktail bars, but servers don't interrupt the music. The spotlight is on jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli and Broadway star Jessica Molaskey, husband and wife, who perform a mashup of Antônio Carlos Jobim's "Waters of March" and Joni Mitchell's "Circle Game." These are songs that thrive on "intelligent reimaginings," says Levinson. "It's not all 'Straighten Up and Fly Right.' "
Good cabaret is about audience members feeling the performer is speaking directly to them, as if conversing in a living room. She recalls Gypsy star Laura Benanti playing off a group of girls sitting near the stage. "She pulled out a ukulele, saying that when she was a girl, she thought Marilyn Monroe was so sexy when she played ukulele in Some Like It Hot, then later realized that the ukulele wasn't what made her so sexy!"
A fifth-generation San Franciscan, Levinson's musical roots begin with family: Her mother was executive coordinator for the San Francisco Civic Light Opera and she's also related to Stanford trustee Lloyd Dinkelspiel, '20, and the late Warren Hellman, founder of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.
An English major at Stanford, Marilyn Rosenberg choreographed and helped write Gaieties and started the Jazz Core dance troupe. Upon graduating she went to work for New York City theater producers and then became Yul Brynner's road manager. She made sure that every dressing room on his tour was painted brown and that his housing had blackout drapes and electrical outlets for his sunbeds. Still, Brynner was a kind boss who taught her a lot about fortitude. "He went on for 4,000-plus performances of The King and I."
Her first law job was with Charles D. Silverberg, JD '55, who represented movie stars Jessica Lange and John Candy. Switching to intellectual property law, she represented Apple and wrote the only motion that survived summary judgment in Apple v. Microsoft. She practiced in Silicon Valley, got married and had a baby.
Then came two crippling back surgeries and the deaths of both her parents and the birth of her second son. She had to stop working. She grieved and asked herself, "OK, am I going to spend my 45th birthday in a wheelchair?" Forcing herself to get up and take walks around her Larkspur home, she longed for the witty diversion of cabaret.
In 2004 she emailed legendary soprano Barbara Cook, who replied, yes, she'd love to come to San Francisco for the first season of Diva Evenings (which became Bay Area Cabaret). In October 2010, she landed A Chorus Line composer Marvin Hamlisch to reopen the Venetian Room, which had been shuttered since 1989. The winner of Academy, Grammy, Emmy and Tony awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize, he inserted a medley of his greatest flops amid the playlist of more famous works. Bay Area Cabaret closes its 2013 season with a June 2 tribute to Hamlisch on what would have been his 69th birthday.
Sheila Himmel is a writer in Palo Alto.
