In the same way that we worry where the next generation of theater composers and lyricists are coming from, there is a similar concern over the future crop of cabaret performers.
It is not a genre that young vocalists are drawn to. Nor, with the upward spiraling prices for an evening of cabaret, will you find many young people in the audience. Still, this month at the Colony Hotel’s Royal Room is a pleasant aberration — 23-year-old Ariana Savalas, who not only interprets standards from the American Songbook with flirty authority, but she also writes songs that makes one sit up, lean in and listen.
I have come a bit late to the Savalas bandwagon, since her current gig is her third booking at Palm Beach’s prime night club, a room she inhabits with confidence and ease.
She is, as you would suspect, the daughter of Telly Savalas (Kojak, etc.), but much better-looking. Wearing a short black dress, she sashays through the crowd to the microphone and turns up the ambient temperature vamping her way through Dave Frishberg’s Peel Me a Grape. She follows that up with The Beatles’ The Night Before and by that time, the audience is in her pocket.
Savalas does not have a big voice, but she knows how to use it. More of a stylist than a belter, and she more than compensates with personality. If many of her song choices are about being lovelorn, her radiance has a way of counteracting the gloom.
At one point in her set, she took over the piano — quite capably — to deliver a few of her own compositions. Most notable was a number with a country-western twang called Too Late, which Salavas introduced with only a little exaggeration as “one of the most depressing songs you’ll ever hear.” Kurt Weill has nothing to worry about from her, but she does know how to turn heartbreak into art.
Reaching back to the Ellington era, Savalas did a haunting, smoky rendition of the Duke’s Sophisticated Lady and demonstrated yet another of her varied talents as a whistler. She ended with a gutsy medley of Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again, begging comparison to Garland and Streisand. Now that is the very definition of confidence.
ARIANA SAVALAS, Colony Hotel Royal Room, 155 Hammon Ave., Palm Beach. Through Saturday, June 29. $100, for dinner and show. Call: (561) 659-8100.