Chanteuse KT Sullivan Introduces Site-Specific Cabaret

Anyone familiar with theater knows the term "site-specific." For those who don't, it refers to an opus presented not in a traditional theater but in an environment relating to the enterprise's subject matter. But that's theater. As far as I know, there's been no such thing as site-specific cabaret.

Not until now, that is. Intimate-room vet KT Sullivan is changing things. She's appearing at Kathleen Downey's Granite Room in lower Manhattan's City Hall restaurant on Duane Street. The savory piece is called "'Neath the Sidewalks of New York." And that phrase should immediately be recognized as a paraphrase from "Sidewalks of New York," known more familiarly as "East Side, West Side."

Which leads to what makes Sullivan's show site-specific: The Granite Room is situated directly underneath the Duane Street pavement. The venue's ceiling is the underside of those four-foot-thick granite blocks. A stunning ceiling it is, too--spongy, mottled, impressively solid. Also stunning, as a matter of fact, is the entire room, part of which features a vaulted segment. a reminder of the shoe factory that was the space's original purpose.

Sidewalks and the shoes that trod them aren't the only objects germane to the site, however. Its Lower Manhattan address prompts thoughts of the personalities who once traveled those fabled streets--characters like Diamond Jim Brady and his renowned consort, entertainer Lillian Russell. And don't you know Sullivan's hour-glass figure is not unlike Russell's famous chassis -- a visual association Sullivan doesn't discourage by mentioning Russell (and Diamond Jim) and opening with a medley of turn-of-the-19th-century songs Russell may have performed or certainly heard enough. You recognize 'em -- "In the Good Old Summertime," "Let Me Call You Sweetheart," "A Bicycle Built for Two," "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" and on and on like that for nostalgia so thick you could knot it and tie it around your waist.

Advertising the show she produced as "sans mic" (she's also the billed presenter Kathleen Downey), the suave, sexy Sullivan is true -- or mostly true -- to her word. She sings everything without benefit of microphone, although she does step up to it when giving out with patter about the bygone period she's recalling. In her slightly italicized and consequently amusing manner, she relays anecdotes she's researched. Just as often she features items collected from chats over the years with people who knew the songwriters and singers from way back when or knew people who knew them.

Because Sullivan isn't singing on mic, she has no qualms about stepping away from the stage and sashaying through the audience while exploring genres from opera to traditional Irish tear-jerkers to pop. She reprises familiar material up to and through 1929, when, of course, the microphone had begun to change popular singing. Most technology historians will say it was the microphone that introduced a new kind of intimate warbling. But as Sullivan moves from table to table in the comfortably-sized Granite Room, she unquestionably creates her own brand of intimacy.

There was a time when Sullivan, who's naturally droll, had a certain difficulty turning serious -- audiences just expected her somber affect to be upended. She no longer has that problem. She will sing something like Victor Herbert's "Kiss Me Again," which can sound the slightest bit kitschy to contemporary ears, and keep it grand, not comically grandiose. There was also a time when Sullivan had pitch problems. Those days are also past, just like the early 19th-century she's bringing back and refreshing.

When Sullivan wants to be funny, she can be, needless to say. So when following a sincere linking of "Come Back to Erin," "Kathleen Mavourneen" and "I'll Tale You Home Again, Kathleen" with a Betty Boop-ized "I Wanna Be Bad," she easily gets her laughs. What other singers might not find so effortless are the number of songs she's chosen to deliver. Good grief, she does close to 50, 29 of them in a medley of songs she loves from 1929. Keeping right up with her, by the way, is accompanist Jon Weber, who's a stitch on his own. In his pre-show piano-plunking, he manages to have fun slipping in little-heard blasts from the past like "Flat-Foot Floogie (With a Floy-Floy)." When was the last time any of you oldsters heard that oddity?

Sullivan is one of the few cabaret performers these days who actually can count on making a living at it. She shows up at The Oak Room at the Algonquin once or twice a year, appears in other local rooms and travels the country doing various boites and concert halls with programs ranging from Weimar Republic ditties to Jule Styne tributes, But there's something about her "'Neath the Sidewalk..." outing that shows her off as well as she's ever been shown.

To be specific, it's a site to see.