Steppin' Out at 54 Below: ANDREW KOBER
How do you measure the quality of a cabaret? By the caliber of who’s onstage there on a Tuesday night. Last Tuesday night, I wandered into 54 Below with hardly a clue as to who was being served up. To my pleasure (and not necessarily to my surprise) the guy (in this case) was really good.
His name is Andrew Kober. His gimmick (you gotta have a gimmick) seems to be self-effacement. Mr. Kober ambled onstage with a shy kind of befuddlement that suggested: ‘Not sure why I’m up here, folks, but here I am.’ He dissed his suit as a “dad suit.” (It was.) He mentioned that his young son had titled his show: “Do You Like These Songs?”, and was actually present but had left instructions that “nobody should look at me.”
He also sang beautifully, almost as an afterthought. After opening with a strategically “idiotic” song, “I Love Betsy,” from a whimsically “idiotic” show, Honeymoon in Vegas, delivered with such open-hearted conviction and open-throated vocal warmth that it somehow became the perfect calling card, he launched himself into Charles Aznavour’s “For Me, Formidable.” I had to restrain myself from leaping up protectively and shouting: ‘No, dude, don’t do it!’ But he did, with great gusts of fumbling French. And it was charming.
It only got knowingly worse from there — and thereby, implausibly, better and better: “All at Sea,” a ponderous ballad by the British pop/jazz singer/songwriter Jamie Cullum; “Monster Party” from the podcast Bit Parade (“Each episode, we talk about an old video game, and then write a very stupid song about it.”); “Without Me,” from Dog Man the Musical; "Stupid Things,” from Bill Finn’s Make Me A Song. Each was so eloquently rendered, I surrendered to it all. Even Mr. Sondheim’s epic “Finishing the Hat” — which seems to have reached critical mass in cabarets as the song most in need of a moratorium (like “Memory,” before it, “I Am What I Am,” “Defying Gravity” and, yes, “New York, New York”). Mr. Kober gave it the business, including a nice intro about the pandemic teaching him that he was, in fact, in love with singing on a stage and not just a guy who happened to work onstage. What distinguished it, for me, was the fact that — as he informed us — it was a song he’d never gotten to sing when he was in the 2017 Broadway revival of Sunday in the Park with George, but had always wanted to sing. Suddenly, a nice theme emerged for a cabaret act: ‘Songs I Wish I Had Sung’
Mr. Kober ran with it.
“Dust and Ashes,” from Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812; “Is This Not Love?” from the 2018 Shaina Taub musical adaptation of Twelfth Night in Central Park; “Bring Him Home,” from (uh, oh yeah) Les Miz. Two tunes from Beetlejuice.
Some of these shows, Mr. Kober was actually in. These were songs, as he put it, that he’d wished he could sing, listening to them from his dressing room. The fact is, Andrew Kober is one of the endlessly marvelous, semi-faceless masses of vastly talented Broadway background cast steadies. He has worked plenty, and will work more; the 2009 revival of Hair, the 2016 revival of She Loves Me, the 7-millionth revival of Les Miz. He was in School of Rock. He played Malvolio in that Twelfth Night. He worked the past last year of Beetlejuice, for which he deserves combat pay.
It’s a treat to see performers like Andrew Kober in the spotlight, alone. They bring their own flavors to the rote recipes of a nightclub act; in Mr. Kober’s case, a playfully dopey, ingratiating stage presence, a flair for buffing seemingly dim-witted material into demi-gems, with a rich, flexible, beautifully expressive voice that has filled out a ton of Broadway choral numbers.
And make no mistake, diffidence and self-abasement be damned, you gotta be ambitious as hell, determined as hell, disciplined as hell and tough as hell to get where Andrew Kober has gotten. To 54 Below on a Tuesday night. And then some.