By Trish Crawford
Toronto Star
Music
Mon., Nov. 14, 2016
She still gets the stories told but in three minutes rather than 10. Referring to this economy of words as a “stripped-down” routine, Matthews decided to call her latest show Naked.
It also hints at the “out there” character of the tall redhead, who performs at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Tuesday to Thursday as part of a tour taking her to B.C. next.
The last show here is being filmed with the $7,000 she raised through crowd funding site Indiegogo and will be used to audition for international festivals that rely on high-quality video when picking talent.
“Naked also refers to paring down of the music from high production of recordings with multiple instruments to just me and a piano. It is illuminating,” Matthews says. “Also it refers to how I have been working on some of these pieces for years and they have been worked down to their purest version.”
Her song list includes popular tunes from the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to Britney Spears’ “. . . Baby One More Time” and Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” There’s a six-minute disco medley.
“I choose any and all of my songs that I love and take them out of context and bend them to my will,” says Matthews. “Not in a power-tripping kind of way but in musical theatre you play a part and you sing the song. I choose songs based around my life’s own stories and I have so much more to choose from.”
Although she isn’t doing it in this show, Matthews has turned the Eagles’ “Hotel California” into a horror story. If she leaves out Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (in which she sings all of the parts) the audience gets raucous and demands she perform them, she says.
She began her career in theatre when she was cast in Hal Prince’s Show Boat at the age of 24. Her movie career took her to the set of Tina Fey’s Mean Girls in which she played a demure school secretary.
Matthews was thrilled to pieces last week when Zooey Deschanel’s Hello Giggles blog posted a photo of Matthews from the 2004 movie with the caption, “It turns out Joan the secretary is an incredibly glam cabaret singer.”
Matthews’ own website deals with the ups and downs of being in show business when you are not rail thin, including the time a man said she looked like Mama Cass of the Mamas and Papas. She notes that he meant it rudely, although she thinks Cass was beautiful, as are people of all sizes and shapes.
“Stop saying crappy stuff to other people,” she says.
Interviewed at Young People’s Theatre where she was leading a cabaret workshop for young performers focused on anti-bullying, body positivity, anxiety and being kind to others, she talked about taking on body shamers in her show.
She usually gets the audience involved quickly by asking if they remember high school.
“There are so many common themes: heartbreak, not feeling good in your skin, being left out, body shaming. High school is make or break for a lot of people.”
After dabbling in cabaret in the 1990s, Matthews threw herself into it full-time in 2005 with the encouragement of her husband, singer George Masswohl, to whom she has been married for 24 years.
She was inspired by comedians Eddie Izzard and Barry Humphries (Dame Edna) as well as musicians Heart, Michael Jackson and Prince — “singular performers and entertainers” — to “trust my own creative voice.”
Cabaret is her love, she says. “If it is going well I am connected to the audience and the music and storytelling. It is like stepping into a river and letting it carry me along.
“If it is a more challenging night, I feel like a detective in search of their key, which can be equally rewarding.”
Intimate venues where the audience and performer are nose to nose provide the best experiences, she says.
“The audience is such an important part of the shows for me. It changes with every new group of people so it is very fluid. I like the challenge and stimulation.”
Sharron Matthews’ Naked is at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Nov. 15, 16 and 17 at 8 p.m. See buddiesinbadtimes.com for tickets.