The Actor

I BEGAN MY cabaret-style performing in duet with Tom Savoy, a brilliant singer-composer-pianist whom I met in 1980. We discovered a shared love of some arcane types of music, and soon decided that we should write a musical comedy together. You have to audition a thing like that for producers, so we made the rounds locally and discovered that (A:) they couldn’t have cared less, and (B:) we really enjoyed singing together. We joined forces with Malcolm Kogut around 1984, and put together a cabaret show program featuring material such as you’ll find on my YouTube channel, including several sung with Tom. He and I stopped performing together only because he moved to North Carolina ten years ago, and that’s where he died last November. That first musical he and I wrote together was titled “Presenting Lily Mars,” based on a Booth Tarkington novel. It captured the world of Broadway theater back in the Nineteen Aughts, when Tarkington had success as a playwright – introducing Helen Hayes and Alfred Lunt, among others, to Broadway. Here’s one piece of our juvenalia, a song titled “The Actor.” This was recorded on Dec. 31, 2022, at Steamer 10 Theatre in Albany, NY.