If you’re looking for “a nice grownup evening” this holiday season, with music not oft heard sung in an intimate and unique space by a troupe of talented local performers, Paul Hope would like to make a suggestion.
On Monday, November 27, Paul Hope Cabarets will open their very first Christmas cabaret, called We Need a Little Christmas, at Ovations Night Club in the Rice Village, and Hope says not only do their shows boast a relaxed, come-as-you-are environment, you also don’t have to deal with the Theater District.
“It’s like you’re coming to a party with some friends who just happen to be good singers,” says the artistic director.
Because their cabarets tend to be Broadway-centric, Hope started planning for their first holiday cabaret by looking towards the Great White Way where he found, well, not much.
“For Broadway, it’s very risky for them to do things that are seasonal, because they want the show to run year-round for as long as audiences are coming,” explains Hope.
Still, they were able to find some songs, like Meredith Willson’s “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” a standalone tune Willson interpolated into the score of his Miracle on 34th Street-based musical Here’s Love; “Lovers on Christmas Eve” by Cy Coleman and Michael Stewart from the 1977 musical I Love My Wife; and the song that lends its name to the program, “We Need a Little Christmas,” from Jerry Herman’s Mame.
In terms of carols, Hope says he tried “as much as possible” to stay away from “carols that are done to death.”
“I figured there are plenty of singalong candidates all over town in other Christmas offerings, so I’ve tried to do a couple of things that were more European,” says Hope.
Carol selections include “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “I Wonder as I Wander,” and a “wonderful French carol” called “Whence Comes this Rush of Wings?” which Hope discovered on an anthology of carols, sung by a British choir, which Hope has had for years.
“I told everybody don’t memorize that,” says Hope. “I want us to actually have our music in front of us like carolers. That’s the only thing they don’t have to memorize the words for.”
Another song Hope is excited for audiences to hear is an arrangement of “Little Drummer Boy” in counterpoint with “Peace on Earth” sung by former Metropolitan Opera baritone Richard Paul Fink and recent Manhattan School of Music graduate Pantelis Karastamatis. If the music sounds familiar, it’s because it was famously performed by Bing Crosby and David Bowie in 1977, in arguably “the strangest Christmas duet ever.”
“Evidently they came up with this arrangement in, like, 15 minutes or something ridiculous right before they shot it, and it’s exquisite,” says Hope.
In addition to serving as artistic director and doing a bit of singing during the show, Hope also serves as party host, typically regaling the audience with information about the songwriters, the songs, and the shows they come from. Though he says this cabaret, by its nature, precludes such patter, he’s spent 40 years doing holiday shows in Houston – including productions of Here’s Love, Mary Poppins, The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, and three different versions of A Christmas Carol at the Alley Theatre – and he’s got some stories to tell.
“I’ve got some anecdotes about colliding sets and a Channel 13 newsman who thought it would be cute to fly with Peter Pan, but didn’t realize you maybe need to wear some athletic wear in order to be hauled aloft if you want to have children,” says Hope with a laugh. “One of the advantages of being been around for as long as I have and [doing] as many Christmas shows as I have is inevitably, by law of averages, some things can go wrong and in a very funny way.”
Looking forward, Paul Hope Cabarets will return to their Broadway repertoire with a second Frank Loesser cabaret in February (focusing on the second half of his career and shows like Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) and a finale celebration of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin’s careers in their spring cabaret.
In addition to their regular “full-strength” cabarets, Hope says they’ve added to their programming after seeing their audience “growing by leaps and bounds” over the past year.
Last summer, after realizing that there were songs from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s from artists like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Peggy Lee – i.e. songs from the Great American Songbook that were not part of Broadway or Hollywood – that they wanted to feature, Paul Hope Cabarets premiered their first Ultra Lounge show. Tickets to the program, called “Mambo Fever” and featuring themed cocktails like daiquiris and the Cuba Libre, “sold like hotcakes” according to Hope, who says the Ultra Lounge will return this summer.
Maybe with a tiki theme.
“I’m sure we’ll have ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as one thing in there, but we won’t serve the drinks in coconut shells, I promise,” says Hope.
Hope is optimistic that this holiday cabaret will become an annual event, too.
“We may have exhausted the Broadway holiday list, but there’s plenty of other holiday stuff that’s a little bit off the beaten path,” says Hope. “If people are tired of hearing ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ and ‘Hark! the Herald Angels Sing’ or if their tolerance level of it is very low, they can hear their annual renditions of those elsewhere and come to us for a new angle on an annual basis.
“Hopefully.”
We Need a Little Christmas is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. November 27, December 4 and December 11 at Ovations Night Club, 2536 Times. For more information, visit paulhopecabarets.org. $20-$35.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
