Libby Whittemore is an iconic figure in the world of Atlanta cabaret singers. Once the foremost crooner of a style that dominated the city’s nightclubs in the 1970s and 80s, she now keeps the fire alive and continues to captivate audiences hungry for the scorching torch songs of yesteryear.
Whittemore will sing with the DeKalb Symphony Orchestra on Tuesday at the Marvin Cole Auditorium at Georgia Perimeter College for an evening of classic standards orchestrated by her longtime keyboardist and musical director Robert Strickland. While the combo has performed with the DeKalb Symphony in the past, this will be their first performance with new conductor Paul Bhasin.
Never a trained vocalist, Whittemore found musical inspiration in the singers that would define the cabaret repertoire. “When I was in my early teens, I would come home from school, close myself up in the den and put on Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland albums, and I would sing along with them,” she says. “They’re not aware of it, but those two women were my vocal coaches. A lot of what I know about performing a song comes from them.”
Whittemore fell into cabaret following stints in musical theater in the late 1970s, a time when the Atlanta nightclub scene was awash in clubs catering to the genre. “There were a ton of [clubs] and there were a ton of singers,” she recalls. “Everybody had a place to sing, and it was really great.”
It was a musical scene inextricably linked to the gay nightclubs. Atlanta had emerged as a safe haven for queer culture, and with it came an influx of interest in bombastic female divas. “That’s not to say straight people didn’t come to the shows — they absolutely did,” says Whittemore. “But that was the height of Bette Midler and Liza Minnelli, so there was a real interest from the gay community for that kind of entertainment.”
Whittemore’s first cabaret gig was an Irving Berlin revue at the Manhattan Yellow Pages nightclub. From there, she migrated to Showcase Cabaret in Ansley Mall. Following that, she spent the entire decade of the 1980s at Upstairs at Gene and Gabe’s, a venue in what is now the upstairs portion of Smith’s Olde Bar. “None of these places exist anymore,” she says with a chuckle.
The popularity of cabaret waned in the 1990s, and Whittemore, once a giant of the scene, was relegated to working at a Blockbuster store. The old guard of the gay nightclub scene that had elevated Whittemore to local stardom was eventually replaced by a new generation that preferred DJs, turntables and electronic dance music to the crooning of divas and the interplay of live instrumentation. What began as a boom industry was quickly relegated to the golden oldies circuit, with Whittemore cast as one of the few remaining local lights of a bygone era.
In 2000, Whittemore was presented with the opportunity to open her own venue and launched Libby’s Cabaret. The room held on for roughly six-and-a-half years and saw a steady rotation of national and local performers. “We did musical revues, I did my own one-woman stuff and we brought in singers from New York and gave a lot of local singers a place to perform,” she says.
Once Libby’s closed in 2006, the cabaret scene in Atlanta seemed essentially extinct. Whittemore went back to musical theater and was contacted the following year by Freddie Ashley, the artistic director at Actor’s Express, to host a regular Christmas show in its theater.
Whittemore’s commitment to the preservation of cabaret extended into the modern age. To satiate fans during the Covid-19 lockdown, Whittemore launched a series of performances live streamed from her living room with Robert Strickland accompanying on keyboards. The stripped-down concerts became an instant hit. “I was planning to just do one,” Whittemore says. “Then the feedback was just overwhelming, honestly. People were saying, ‘You need to keep doing this because I think it may the only thing that’s gonna get me through this lockdown!’”
The streaming performances proved to be so popular that Whittemore and Strickland have continued them and just completed episode 119. New installments in the series will resume after Labor Day.
Another major concert that was canceled due to the pandemic was a planned performance with the DeKalb Symphony Orchestra. Whittemore is enthused to be returning with Strickland in tow. Not only will he play piano, but he has also provided the arrangements the symphony will be using. “He’s scary good,” says Whittemore, praising her collaborator.
“It’s old fart music we’ll be doing at the show,” she chuckles. “Lots of standards, some country and Broadway and it’s going to be two acts and 16 songs.”
Among those classics will be Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now.” The song emerged as a closer for Whittemore’s living room broadcasts as a testament to hope in the face of the uncertainty of Covid. Nevertheless, Whittemore is quick to add that it’s difficult to prefer one song over the other. “I’m old as the hills,” she says. “I’ve been doing this since the Earth cooled. So, at this point, it’s really hard to pick a favorite. I love them all or I wouldn’t be doing them.”
::
Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.
