Quince Productions is putting all of its cabaret cards on the table for the latest edition of the Full House series, through Nov. 22.
It’s the seventh year in what has become an annual tradition for the company, for which it gathers well-known and undiscovered cabaret singers for a wide variety of performances that stretches the boundaries of traditional cabaret.
“There’s a great freedom to it,” said Sean Thompson, who is performing his show, “Burnt Turkey,” at this year’s Full House. “Rich Rubin, who runs the company, just lets you do your thing and he takes care of the business side of things. As artists, we’re free to do whatever comes to mind and put on a good show.”
Thompson, who performed in previous editions of the series, said this year his show will be more casual than before.
“I’m doing something a little more simple,” he said. “It’s different music and different stories. The idea is just me and a piano telling stories about the songs that I love to sing every day when I’m at home. You’re sort of walking into my home and letting me entertain you. You’re getting a glimpse inside of me and what it is that I do.”
Another Full House alum, Sarah J. Gafgen, is teaming up with Meredith Beck, who is new to the series, for a cabaret called “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
Gafgen said Quince gives performers the opportunity to put together the kinds of cabarets audiences can’t find anywhere else.
“We don’t really have anything quite like it, when you get a whole evening to yourself to just create something that tells the audience a message you want to get out,” she said. “Rich gives us a lot of freedom to play with themes. He’s doesn’t give us any restrictions on what our message has to be so it’s fun to create that message yourself and [decide] how you want to tell that story.”
Gafgen said their show has a girl-power theme.
“We wanted to see if we could create an entire show using music sung by females that wasn’t about being in love with a man, wanting a man to love us, not being loved back by a man — pretty much anything not focused on being a female pining over a male because so often the material we have to choose from is shaped around a relationship with a male counterpart,” Gafgen said. “So we just wanted to see if we could create a show that was at the heart talking about women and all the things women can do, regardless of the presence or lack of presence of a male counterpart.”
A male duo is getting in on the action too, with best friends Ben Deane and Andrew Dean Laino putting on their show, “Who the Eff Are These Guys?”
“We’re both new to the Philadelphia theater scene and, largely, people don’t know who we are,” Deane said about the show’s title. “The theater community is very small and I think that the two of us together have personalities that are very big. It just seems appropriate to make a big entrance.”
“I like the idea that we’re poking fun at the fact that we’re doing such a nontraditional cabaret,” Laino added. “Like, who do these guys think they are that they can do this?”
As for what they are doing in their show, well, anything can happen.
“Some of our friends saw the poster for the show and asked, ‘What exactly is this?’” Deane said. “And we said, ‘Well, you’ll have to come see and find out.’ It’s something new. We’re not doing this traditional cabaret. We want to play games with the audience as well as sing. We don’t want to have them just sitting in their seats. And they were willing to work around that and trust us, which was really great.”
“I like the carte blanche that you get as a performer,” Laino added. “Ben and I have played around with things. We like the idea of making it fun and bringing the audience into it in ways they are probably not expecting. It’s equal parts songs and storytelling and drinking games and game show and audience participation. It’s this really crazy cluster of stuff that hopefully will blend together and be fun.”
Deane said he wants their performance to be the show that people who don’t usually like cabarets rave about.
“There are some people who don’t like going to these shows and I want those people, if they are dragged along, I want them to walk out having had a really good time,” he said. “I want people to have fun and do something a little different from any of the shows they may have seen before.”
Closing out the series is a staged reading of “My Favorite Husbands,” as a benefit for I’m From Driftwood. Written by playwright Andrew Marvel, “My Favorite Husbands” follows the story of Mark, whose ex-lover is getting married to a rising Republican assemblyman. With numerous GOP bigwigs on the guest list, Mark feels compelled to crash the wedding in drag.
With the GOP presidential debates making headlines of late, Marvel said the play takes on some current hot-button issues.
“I think it continues to be timely,” Marvel said. “It was timely when it first started in 2013. At the time, the big marriage-equality push hadn’t happened yet, so I think it was timely then. But now, what we’re seeing as a backlash, it becomes relevant from different angles. I’ve also seen things from within the gay community, which I didn’t expect, which is kind of nice. Back in the ‘good ol’ days,’ back before we had to be like everybody else and when we didn’t have to put up with all the mainstream trappings, I’ve actually seen some articles coming out about that. One of the main characters in the play, that’s where his head is at.”
Marvel said that, while the play is a comedy with Republican characters, they’re not trying to make fun of the GOP.
“I think it does poke fun of the politicizing of events and jumping on a bandwagon to garner votes because you’re pandering to a partisan electorate that you aren’t sincerely concerned about. The character in the play who is a Republican politician, hopefully what you see in the play is it’s not where his head is at; he’s fighting his battles on the front lines of where he is. Hopefully the humor allows us to look at these issues without getting too polarized or feeling attacked or defensive. My hope is that people from both sides of the fence will come in ready to feel that the story at its base is a love story. It’s about friendship in the gay community and sometimes our friends become family. It’s different. It’s not like in the heterosexual community a little bit. I think that the play is trying to show us that we have the opportunity as gay people to re-look at relationships and you can be faithful or not faithful in a friendship as well as in a marriage.”
Quince Productions present the Full House cabaret series through Nov. 22 at the Skybox at Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St. For more information on the performances or to purchase tickets, visit www.quinceproductions.com/fullhouse.html.