Laurel has always liked to play with pretense, to the point of getting a BA in theater from the University of Vermont and cranking that up to an MFA from Berkeley. For a few years she worked in some first-rate regional theaters — Louisville Rep and the Goodman, in Chicago — and off-Broadway, falling in love with singing only when she got a role there in Nunsense (“I opened my mouth and that was it. I never shut it again”). Before long she was a Manhattan cabaret singer, playing the Russian Tea Room, performing with a canary in a cage, “to signify my stifled soul.” Joe Papp’s Public Theater turned off the lights on her act when, during a performance piece about conservative women channeling fear into repressed sexuality, she placed “an electric appliance” under her dress. The buzzing in the dark and the audience demanding the lights back on added unexpected dimensions. She’s done a straight-ish nightclub act overseas — social commentary but no characters — on a 100-passenger sailing yacht shuttling between Bangkok and Singapore. But over the years — which in-cluded an unfortunate 10-year marriage and a more fortunate daughter, Channing — she’s come to merge performance art with singing.
Oh, that singing, that voice. Her Mona persona comes across like Grizabella, the faded Glamour Cat warbling “Memories,” but her emotional presence and captivating vocal quality are more like a Vermont-bred Edith Piaf. Hurricane Mona is so extreme she’s entertaining. (“Fuck you!” she barks at the two reviewers present, careful to give each of us individual attention.) But sometimes she lets the mask slip — to reveal the same face. So, late in her act this night, after she makes some brief, dark observations about life , it’s easy to not take in that she’s made a passing reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “Hold onto your seats,” she says, right afterward. “Nothing is going to happen.” Later, she quotes Shakespeare (“sans teeth, sans hair”) and sings her adaptation of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” But at the end, she slowly repeats “And tomorrow” again and again and again and again, as though she’ll never stop. It’s a brilliant and chilling way to wake us to the reality of the question, which until then had seemed just a song.
Laurel gets a few bucks now and then teaching yoga, but she has no day job. Yet a lounge act is a business, so she has a business card to hand out. It reads:
You just met
Laurel Casey
Can I borrow five dollars?
laurelcasey.com
She could make a living as a piano bar chanteuse in New York, at the very least, and not have to complain about living in a basement, where she is now. But then she’d be just another singer, not an artist. Not a specialist in pushing how much she can get away with until she’s fired — which she offers as a token of her seriousness of artful purpose. She mooned Buddy Cianci and some guys he came in with after one of them, as she described it, said, “ ‘Hey, take it off. Show us somethin’. Come on, baby,’ ” she said. That was her last night at the Biltmore. Even more notoriously, soon after 9/11 she wailed her version of the Afghanistan national anthem, wrapped in a tablecloth-burqa. When a listener asked for equal time for the American national anthem, she complied by singing “Money (Makes the World Go ’Round)” from Cabaret. Once more, her last night.
