INTERVIEW: Ann Kittredge’s ‘Movie Nite’ returns to Birdland
Photo: Ann Kittredge will bring her Movie Nite cabaret show back to Birdland Jazz Club Feb. 27. Photo courtesy of David Perlman / Provided by Richard Hillman PR with permission.
Ann Kittredge, known for her cabaret work, has lately been finding inspiration from the history of Hollywood. The singer has pored over songs from well-known films and pieced together a new cabaret show called Movie Nite, which celebrates the tunes of Tinseltown. She presented the evening of song in 2021 at the Birdland Jazz Club in Midtown Manhattan, and now she’s back at the venue for an encore presentation, set for Sunday, Feb. 27 at 7 p.m.
“It’s thrilling,” Kittredge said in a recent phone interview. “My music director, Alex Rybeck, and I were having a very, very successful run of a tribute we had put together with Andrea Marcovicci of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s music. They did Once on This Island, Ragtime, Seussical, among other things, and it was very well received. I got a call from a small venue here in New York City. It was the Beach Cafe, and they said, ‘We’d like you to come and do your show.’ I was like, ‘My show won’t fit in your venue. My Ahrens and Flaherty show is very theatrical because Ahrens and Flaherty are theatrical. It won’t fit.’ They said, ‘Well, we’d really like you to come.’ So literally Alex and I were like, ‘OK,’ and in seven weeks, we put this show together. I was like, wow, I’ve never worked this fast. We worked with the idea that my first love of music came from movies because as a kid I just sat and watched movies on my TV all the time. That was me. I was that kid, so I said, ‘Let’s do that.’ But on the other side of it, I don’t like to just do period music, so we made the effort to bring songs in from all different generations and genres. So the songs that we chose span over 90 years of movies.”
In some ways, Kittredge could see Movie Nite being performed in a conventional theater setting. She feels the piece could easily be transformed into a theatrical 90-minute show because, although there are many exciting selections in the current version, there are numerous songs that didn’t make the final cut.
“For instance, my idol when I was a child, be embarrassed or not, was Shirley Temple, and we don’t have any Shirley in our show,” she said. “We really tried to focus on my experience of the movies so that it had a personal tone, and in some ways I get to share what the movies were for me. What was interesting in some of the reviews that we got … a lot of them said that the music choices were surprising for a movie night, and I love that they said that because, yeah, it was. We didn’t go into the show and go, ‘OK, let’s do all the songs that won Oscars or all the songs that have become iconic.’ There are certainly iconic songs in the show, but we definitely strayed from that in some areas. It made the show I think more intimate and more personal.”
One of the selections for the evening is the opening number from La La Land, a recent movie musical. Kittredge said it was obvious to choose a song from the beloved film. When she read the lyrics to the tune, she realized there was a real story there, one that could be effectively interpreted on the cabaret stage.
“I think the opening number in that movie is arguably one of the greatest openings of a movie musical ever,” Kittredge said. “You don’t know what the heck they’re saying, but you don’t care because it’s just so visually incredible and musically exciting. And so when I was looking at it and started reading the lyrics, I was like, wow, this song is so rich. It has a really rich story to it, and so my brilliant music director, he’s actually known for his arrangements. So he just went to town on this arrangement, and what we did is we really wanted to get some of the noise out of the song so that I could tell the story. And it’s a lovely story. It’s a romance. It’s a lovely story. That one song is like a movie within a movie, and it’s been received really well.”
Kittredge is a consummate professional with many credits to her name. For example, she’s producer of the online series Virtual Shorts and serves on the executive board of the American Songbook Association. Still, even with an impressive career on stage and behind the scenes, she can still get nervous before a paying crowd.
“I turned to someone just before I had to go on stage, and I said, ‘Do the nerves ever go away?'” Kittredge said with a laugh. “I am nervous. For instance, we froze the show about three days before the performance … [but] there were definitely big questions, like how was it going to work, timing issues and things. Sean Harkness, who is playing guitar for the show, along with Alex, who plays piano, said to me, and I don’t know whether it was intentional for the moment, but Sean said, ‘You have nothing to prove and everything to share.’ That was literally just before we went on stage, and I just looked at my two partners there in crime, and I was like, wow, that was a really great sendoff for me. That’s what I walked onto the stage with, that thought. In my head, I was like, I have to take my time, and we’re going to enjoy this. I’m not pushing us. Let’s just share.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Ann Kittredge will present Movie Nite Sunday, Feb. 27 at 7 p.m. at the Birdland Jazz Club in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
