[This article appears in the January/February 2022 issue of Boston Spirit magazine. Subscribe for free today.]
[NOTE: Show postponed to Saturday, Feb. 26, at 8 p.m. due to snowstorm.]
While other budding show queens born in the 1980s were lip synching to Madonna and Whitney Houston, Seth Sikes was devouring a steady diet of Judy Garland movies and learning the lyrics to Liza Minnelli’s iconic “Liza With a Z.”
Sikes’s love for the divas of a previous generation provide the inspiration for his cabaret act but they’re channeled through Sikes’s own ebullience, boyish charm and ability to belt out a tune. His show is modeled on the joys of singing torch songs and Broadway favorites with friends in New York City piano bars such as the Townhouse uptown and the Duplex downtown. In His popular YouTube videos, Sikes has fun with playful parodies of the songs he’s loved since his childhood in Paris—Texas, that is.
“My aunt Stacy loved MGM musicals; she showed me ‘Summer Stock’ and ‘Wizard of Oz.’ And she loved Liza,” says Sikes from New York City where he’s lived for nearly two decades. “I was obsessed with Judy Garland movies and watched them all the time.”
The rest of his family was just as supportive and encouraged Sikes’s passion for performing. He sang in the choir, played trumpet in band and in high school appeared in musicals such as “Once Upon a Mattress” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” Two weeks after graduation, in true musical fashion, he was off to the big city and Circle in the Square Conservatory.
After graduation, Sikes decided that although he could sing well, he “wasn’t a very good actor so I didn’t want to pursue that.” He got hired as a production assistant on Broadway’s “Young Frankenstein” and worked his way up to assistant director on “The Nance” and, most recently, the Tony Award-winner “The Band’s Visit.”
“But I missed singing so much I found myself at piano bars five or six nights a week,” he says. “I thought, ‘I want to do a one-night-only show about my lifelong obsession with Judy Garland where I sing her songs.” When Sikes performed his show at Feinstein’s 54 Below, backed by a big band, he was such a hit that his one-night “stunt” turned into a second career. A star was born. “Suddenly I’m a singer,” he laughs.
Sikes makes his Boston debut at Club Café (postponed from January due to a snowstorm) on Saturday, Feb. 26, at 8 p.m. with “Seth Sikes Sings Judy and Liza and Barbra, etc.” Audiences can expect faithful renditions of songs in Sides’ crystal-clear voice but lots of humor and camp, too.
“I love these ladies because of the old songs I respond to. When I try to sing contemporary pop, it sounds really weird, but old-fashioned songs work with my voice and personality,” he says, citing his New Year’s Eve 2020 show at 54 Below where his repertoire was made up entirely of music from the 1920s.
Sikes might have reminded a fixture on New York cabaret scene but COVID changed everything. After a few months holed up in his Manhattan studio in early 2020, Sikes got the chance to spend his COVID summer in style at a friend’s place on Fire Island.
“I could not perform live shows and had idle time so I decided to make a video parody song,” he says. His “Mask of Many Colors,” a tweak of Joseph’s famous coat, became a YouTube hit. Sikes followed up with increasingly sophisticated music videos such as “Howdy Neighbor,” a parody Garland’s famous tune in “Summer Stock” and “The Atchison Topeka and the Santa Fe,” from Garland’s 1946 musical “The Harvey Girls” but set aboard the Fire Island Ferry instead of a train. The high energy “Ring Them Bells,” shot along a beach in Mexico, was selected to close the globally watched Liza Minnelli 75th birthday tribute.
By May 2021 Sikes was in Provincetown to shoot one of his most inspired video productions: “The Trolley Song,” made famous by Judy Garland in the 1944 film “Meet Me in St. Louis.” He belts out the upbeat song from a seat aboard the trolley as it ambles along Commercial Street complete with a cameo from Provincetown Town Manager Alex Morse. “My publicist thought it would be fun to have the love interest be a person of interest,” says Sikes.
His contemporary influences range from Stephen Sondheim who gave Sikes career advice to skip graduate school if he wanted to direct theater and instead work alongside and learn from the best directors to one of those directors, David Cromer of “The Band’s Visit.” Sikes also credits his friend Lisa Lambert, the Tony Award-winning composer of “The Drowsy Chaperone,” for cowriting parody lyrics. “Her sensibility has always inspired me. We had fun writing the lyrics,” he says. He also cites legendary cabaret artist Marilyn Maye, a perennial Provincetown favorite, as “an inspiration for sure.”
Club Cafe audiences can expect to see “a lot of Judy,” says Sikes. “I’ll tell my story. ‘A Star is Born’ has ‘I was born in a trunk in the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho.’ I sing, ‘I was born outside in a truck in Paris, Texas.’ Silly stuff. But my bread and butter is signing torch songs like ‘Maybe This Time’ and ‘The Man That Got Away.’ So you get a bit of both.”
More: clubcafe.com
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