What exactly is a cabaret?
Ask veteran performer Jaimie Roberts to describe her show this weekend at Marathon Community Theatre, and she’d probably use that word. Ask her to define it, and the task gets a bit harder.
But whatever it is, she and featured pianist Randy Morris have more than nine decades of combined professional entertainment experience to back it up.
“Cabaret is a difficult thing to pin down. Performances are made up of songs, punctuated by a performer telling stories about their life,” she read from Google when the Weekly caught up with her on July 20. “I’m gonna send this to you, because it’s so good.
“It’s storytelling while singing songs that mean something to the performer. They find those songs so important that they need to share them,” she explained. “There’s a lot of comedy in my show; I’ll make it funny, then hit you with a zinger that will touch your heart when you least expect it.”
Roberts comes from more than 30 years of experience performing at Walt Disney World in Orlando, beginning in the 1980s.
“I auditioned seven times before I got hired,” she said. “And once I got hired, I was all over the place. I did every show you can imagine that was there.”
Roberts’ time as an equity performer included roles as Esmerelda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the evil queen in Snow White, as well as performances in Broadway at the Top, the Voices of Liberty and the Hoop-Dee-Doo Musical Revue.
That all came to an end with the COVID-19 pandemic, as she found herself among the 720 performers on the receiving end of a mass email terminating their employment – just one portion of a layoff totaling more than 11,000 Disney employees.
“It was devastating,” she said. “Part of me is still not over it.”
Moving to the Keys with then-fiance Scott Gearhart, a marine mammal veterinarian, Roberts found herself in an entirely new environment unlike any of the bustling stages she shared at Disney.
“I thought it would be pretty easy to find a piano player and put a jazz group together to perform at local resorts, but that didn’t happen,” she said. “I was dying, and I really needed to find my tribe of theater people, so I volunteered to assist with ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ at MCT. Once I assisted with the audition process, I felt like I had found those people.”
Although Roberts has already promised a more formal role as choreographer for this year’s reprise of “Rocky Horror,” most of the community theater’s performances don’t quite align with the 15-plus years of cabaret performances she and Morris put on, even outside of Disney. But what she found was a perfect venue.
“The more I got involved, the more I wanted to bring Randy down, because I wanted to bring my show to their stage. The first time I walked in there, I was like ‘This. Place. Is. PERFECT for a cabaret.’”
The weekend’s performance will put Roberts and Morris’ 30-plus years of shared stage time on full display. The pair met at Disney’s Diamond Horseshoe and spent the next few decades traveling to jazz festivals around the state and country.
“He’s a genuine musical freak,” Roberts said. “He plays countless instruments. He is the most knowledgeable person I know as far as music history, and he could name-drop like nobody’s business. The people he’s worked with are just beyond me sometimes.”
Above all, Roberts said she hopes the one-night-only performance uses her storytelling to “inspire someone else to feel something for two hours, or laugh for two hours, or just get away from their troubles for two hours.
“For me, different times in my life have brought different cabarets that come out of me,” she said. “I have this emotion of transitioning from what I’ve known my entire adult life to something brand new. That brings out a lot of different songs that I want to sing and tell those stories.”
“An Evening with Jaimie Roberts, Featuring Randy Morris” takes the stage Saturday, July 29 at 8 p.m. Limited tickets are available for $35 at marathontheater.org or by calling 305-743-0994. The show is intended for 18+ audiences.
