By Raju Mudhar, Staff Reporter
Sun., Oct. 8, 2017
Life might be a cabaret, old chums, but how to make that musical form appealing for young theatregoers? Sharron Matthews knows a little bit of Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars certainly doesn’t hurt.
The well-known local actress and musical thespian is currently staging Unapologetically Me: Sharron’s Cabaret for Kids, a rocking musical show for kids aged 9 to11, in which she tells part of her own life story in an interactive show that touches on anxiety, body shaming and being yourself.
At Thursday morning’s performance, the kids from Withrow Avenue Junior Public School were into it, dancing and singing throughout, especially when they heard some familiar chords.
“Kids are the most challenging audience I’ve ever performed for, because you can’t stop for a second,” says Matthews, a pillar of the local cabaret scene and a 20-year veteran of the form. “What kids know is about a year and a half long, and then it all changes, but luckily with ‘Uptown Funk’ and Taylor Swift, those are evergreen songs for them.
“There has never been (another) audience where as soon as I start Taylor Swift or ‘Uptown Funk,’ where they go ‘What?’ and they just start singing, which is exactly what I’m looking for.”
Matthews, who is backed by musicians Jason Chesworth on guitar and Jamie Drake on percussion, says that this show has been workshopped for three years and went through many iterations before this finished product.
She was approached by the theatre’s artistic director, Allen MacInnis, who was a fan of her more adult-themed cabaret, to try to come up with a show for this audience.
“When he said, ‘What about cabaret for kids?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I just don’t know how it’s going to mix.’ And he said the most important thing you can do is that it’s interactive, it’s malleable in the moment and that the kids are being heard.”
The result is a show where Matthews gets them on side by telling them a story that starts with her first day at school and picking a few students in the audience to get the conversation rolling. She then touches on issues like bullying, body shaming and her own struggle with anxiety. There are some points where she asks for call and responses and, because of that, she knows she just has to go with the flow.
“You have to be ready and that’s the challenge with something like this. You have to be open for just about anything. If you’re going to ask them to be involved, you have to be open to every kind of involved,” she says.
She credits her crack backing band and collaborators, who know from her cues when to slow it down to let a little one be heard, or perhaps vamp away with a drum fill to keep the show moving. That said, there are going to be times when the show gets hijacked by someone who just has to say something.
“For then, you just have to make sure that they feel like they are being heard,” she says. “And then get back on track.”
The show runs until Oct. 21 here and then moves on to Calgary, and after that she plans to stage it concurrently with some of her other upcoming “grown-up” cabaret tours.
And the truth is, she says, when it comes to cabaret, there really isn’t much difference between the old chums and the younger audience.
“The thing is everyone asks me how different it is and the only difference is that I take out the swears,” Matthews says. “I don’t have kids, so I talk to kids like I talk to an adult, mostly. I think that’s what makes it work. I really do just talk to them the way I do to adults — who have been drinking.”