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| Writer, speaker, consultant, administrative professional, Wendy Vickers, has
been an active supporter and encourager of local musicians in the Twin Cities
music community for several years. Her online newsletter on local coffeehouse
performers and other music-related activities can be found on her website at
www.wendyv.com .
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So how do two people, covering a mostly similar event on two evenings, each do a write-up of each night’s show and keep it unique?
That’s been the fun challenge for the past years in covering the two performances of “Cabaret”. This year’s event marks the 5th year in a row that I’ve covered “Cabaret” for the SJA website—I wrote my first Cabaret Saturday review in 2000 ( Jean Jachman was Friday’s reporter that year). For the past three years, I’ve teamed with Michael Reinbold in reporting on Cabaret for the SJA website. Again this year, Michael is Friday night’s reporter and I will report on Saturday.
One advantage is each of us has a unique perspective. Michael, with his background in music and theater, views with an expert and knowledgeable critique along with a gift for wrapping it around scene-setting descriptions. I, on the other hand, being pretty clueless about technical aspects of showbiz, having never done it professionally, write with the view of a fan telling other fans about what I saw and heard. In the last couple of years, I’ve tried to make my report read like a feature. Last year’s “First Reel Cabaret” theme made that easy for me…it opened the door to creating a series of “awards” to the performers.
Over the years, the Cabaret reports from both evenings have been blessed and enhanced by the photography gifts of Rick Spaulding, Peg LaSota, Bill Cameron, Edie Kalweit, Molly Ryan and Bob Brennan.
Neither of us knows what the other is going to do ahead of time in our write-ups...part of the fun is the surprise of reading both reviews, seeing how they are alike and how they differ. But our goal is the same—doing our best to make the readers who weren’t there feel as if they were…and recapturing the memories for those who were.
