Pasatiempo reached Koutrakos as she walked briskly from a Brooklyn subway stop to a recording studio for a session.

Pasatiempo: You have a major cabaret career, and you've won many awards. Can you explain what separates cabaret from other types of sung poetry or storytelling?

Lina Koutrakos: I think what the difference between pop music or classical -- or even Broadway -- and cabaret is the intimacy of it. Not only the intimacy, perhaps, of the venue -- which is usually smaller than not -- but the intimacy of the absence of the fourth wall. You're right across to the audience. That's the big word, intimacy. No matter what, you're singing, interpreting, and communicating the lyric as well as showing off your Mariah Carey chops or your Pavarotti chops.

Pasa: So it's a bardic kind of communication, really, sharing something intense with your listeners.

Koutrakos: That's sort of what it is. Of course, you can communicate also with the chops, with your voice. I'm also a rock 'n' roll singer, doing clubs like B.B. King's in Manhattan, and I'm not fooling around with that! Singing cabaret with piano in an intimate space has helped me communicate to an audience of a thousand at

B.B. King's with six plugged-in musicians. The connection works wherever it goes.

I've got a lot of friends who are Broadway singer-actors, and some of them cross over and also do cabaret. They are the ones who stand out on the Broadway s tage as well, like Karen Mason, Donna Murphy. It's about sharing yourself. Being authentically who you are. It's not about playing a part.

Once you learn that, you can translate that to the Broadway stage, the pop stage, the arena. You can get big. I've seen Bette Midler. I've seen her at Madison Square Garden, and even looking at her face on video -- 'cause I'm at the back -- it's as intimate as when she played The Duplex and Reno Sweeney's in New York.

Pasa: How do you anchor yourself when performing in such an intimate way?

Koutrakos: First of all, I almost call myself a Method singer -- rock 'n' roll or cabaret. I kind of joke about it, but it's where I come from now -- really feeling it, then communicating it. I also enjoy getting up there and having courage and living it in front of people. If I've had [life] experiences, so have one million other people. People sit in the dark and listen to you, and they want you to let them know it's OK to feel as they do.

Pasa: Chicken or egg -- cabaret or rock?

Koutrakos: I was always a little rocker, the kind of a bad girl who liked the boys who played in the band. That came first. When I came to New York, I put together a band and worked three jobs to keep that going.

I didn't even have cab fare. Then I discovered piano bars. Everybody was standing around piano bars singing Broadway or standards. I sang pop music. Now they all sing pop music in piano bars, and cabaret. It has become part of the American Songbook.

Pasa: I know many singers working in many areas who find that the more mature they get, the more they can do. How is that for you?

Koutrakos: What a blessing that is. I can sing two rock 'n' roll shows and be ready to do a third both vocally and personally. I was never able to do that when I was younger. That's the skill part of this, learning the craft. Your job is to balance the authentic craft of being polished with the courage to let it go -- coupled with raw talent.

I myself was very heavy-handed in an abundance of raw talent and had no craft. Then I got working on craft. And one day somebody said, "I look forward to20the day you let it go." I was mortified. The craft had taken away the whole other place. I'd overworked it.

Pasa: What about teaching? Is it difficult sometimes not to want to do the work for the students?

Koutrakos: As a director, I think I have a little bit of talent and craft and intuition, because I am also a singer who continues to perform. If I wasn't, I might put a little more Lina on them! I have a huge responsibility not to do anything to them that I would not have done to me.

I think there's an entertainment value to everything you do. As a director of cabaret, I keep my eye on that. We want to be moved, we want to feel, we want to laugh. But you know, telling the truth is one thing, but therapy onstage is annoying.

I tell people to sing to the back of the room, but instead of vocal projection, it's seeing the movie in your mind, letting everybody else watch you watch it. Think of a close-up of Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice. You watch her feel. Same way you go to the back of the room in cabaret.

In teaching the craft of it, I have to use a very ethereal kind of language. Everybody's different. It isn't just "play more passionately" or "lay off that word." It's a challenge.

Pasa: There's a delicate balance between

perfection a nd performance, isn't there, though? Being too exact versus being

spontaneous?

Koutrakos: On the one hand, the thing that makes an audience most comfortable is when they know someone knows -- when they're so comfortable they can sit in the dark and let you drive the ship. It's like doing your homework, knowing what you're saying, knowing your notes, and getting it done before you hit the stage. That gives it a sense of ease for the audience. I'm a Greek girl -- I like it when people get all messy, but please, don't stand there and have a voice lesson in front of me! It's like running a marathon. I don't want to see you stretch. Let me watch you run.

Pasa: You have a noted specialty in torch songs. What el se?

Koutrakos: I'm a big fan of monologue in song. "Guess Who I Saw Today?" -- you could do that without music as a speech. Leonard Cohen's "Joan of Arc." Bob Seger's "Night Moves" is another monologue. "I Remember Sky" --

Pasa: From Sondheim's Evening Primrose.

Koutrakos: Right! And "Walking in Memphis" is a monologue. I'm a big fan of taking these songs and making them your own.

Pasa: How will the performance here go?

Koutrakos: Our producer, Tim Schall, he's opening. Then there are a couple of excerpts from Torch, my torch-song show I did here last year, and a handful of pop originals, and a few standards. We mix it up for these out-of-town workshops.

At a certain point, you need a musician and musical director to see what you have and what might enhance you. Now that David is in town here, Santa Fe has that, but in a lot of places, they don't have that kind of arranger available.

Life is just a cabaret

April 6th,2009

By Sarah Feldberg

 

Workshop director Lina Kourtakos sings about lust and a certain movie star crush along with musical director Rick Jensen.

Photo: Sarah Feldberg

 

"20," a man greets me as I walk through the door of Don't Tell Mama piano bar on Fremont Street East on Sunday evening. "You're 20," he repeats, smiling like being 20 is a really good thing.

I introduce myself to the man, who identifies himself as Lloyd, and the petite couple working the door who Lloyd identifies as the new bar's proud owners. They're smiling, too.

"We love you," Lloyd says.

"I love you," I reply, because that's what you say when someone tells you they love you.

So, far the night is off to a good start.

The night, if 6 p.m. qualifies, is dedicated to song. It's a recital - minus the neon chiffon, half-gloved ensembles of my dance class days and plus a dose of adult innuendo and full-grown talent. The hour-long show is the finale performance for a weekend-long intensive cabaret workshop taught by New Yorkers Lina Koutrakos and Rick Jensen, one of those let's-see-how-much-you've-learned gigs.

 

"These are not out of the shower onto the stage types," Koutrakos says, seizing the microphone to welcome the small but attentive audience.

Dressed in black leather pants and with wild black hair, Lina is like a magnet on stage. She is so comfortable, cheeky and alive, that I almost have to watch her as she rifles through jokes and brags on her Las Vegas pupils, eight singers who will perform for the low, corner stage with Rick Jensen accompanying them on a white piano.

Ranging from pros - Scott Watanabe of Phantom: Las Vegas Spectacular, Elly Brown of Jubliee! - to cabaret greenhorns, one by one they take the stage and address the crowd using nothing more than their voice and their expression. Most have a lot of both.

They sing about overstayed welcomes, mail order brides, and love lost and found. Rather than seeming scared of the audience, or above it all, they stare straight into the crowd as if they're singing to that guy at table three, the one with the full glass of red wine.

"Let's talk about lust," Koutrakos says, taking the microphone again as the show nears its close. Pointing to her waist she offers a bit of philosophy: "Love happens from here up. Lust happens from here down."

She launches into a story, which leads to a song, the refrain of "Oh, my, my" repeated again and again but each time with a slightly different cadence and emotion.

"There is no fourth wall," Koutrakos explains of cabaret. Unlike theater, where the actors generally perform as if they don't know the audience exists or imagine the audiences naked to make them less threatening, cabaret allows singers to address their audiences and demands that they interact with them.

"It's not an old fashioned French singer with a boa," she says. "It's not singing Irving Berlin."

Koutrakos knows cabaret well. Her relationship with the genre started when she waited tables in piano bars and cabaret joints in New York City. Also a rock singer, Koutrakos found something she identified with in the earnestness of cabaret and developed into a powerful performer and teacher. She's taught at Yale and now splits time between her home in New York, her rock band and traveling around the country to teach workshops to aspiring cabaret artists. For Koutrakos, rock music and cabaret go together just fine.

"One of my favorite cabaret singers - and you would never call him a cabaret singer - but it's Bruce Springsteen," she says. "He talks to us."

"I always thought of [cabaret] as the cruise ship, tiny girls in big headdresses," laughs Justin Olsen, a singer and the president of SwingBeat Entertainment talent agency who attended the three-day workshop. "Really, it just means a small, intimate venue. Frank Sinatra was really a cabaret singer, a saloon singer, but that's really just a cabaret singer."

As Olsen describes it, cabaret performance is about connecting with the crowd and sharing something genuine. It's less of creating a character, and more about singing as you.

That can be really scary, but when you're at a place like Don't Tell Mama, in front of a crowd springing into applause after every song and with a guy like Lloyd who loves you for no reason at all, maybe singing cabaret makes you feel right at home.