Award-winning New York cabaret star and actor Kim David Smith’s latest concert album, Mostly Marlene, is released on digital and streaming platforms on Friday, March 21st. To celebrate, Smith will perform a show at New York’s iconic downtown venue Joe’s Pub—where much of the album was recorded live—that same evening. Smith brings charm and wit, not to mention his stunning vocals, to a record filled with delectable interpretations of songs associated with Marlene Dietrich, as well as the other divas in his “holy trinity”, Liza Minnelli and Kylie Minogue. Mostly Marlene boasts a sparkling array of special guests who joined Smith on stage for duets including Bright Light Bright Light and Sidney Myer, plus bonus studio-recorded tracks with Charles Busch, Joey Arias, Ali McGregor, and Smith’s mother Linda Randall.
Ahead of the album launch, Kim David Smith speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about how influential Bob Fosse’s Cabaret has been on his life as a performer, why he thinks of Kylie as family, his secret to forming a rapport with his audience, and his personal queer icons. With exclusive photography for The Queer Review by Steven Menendez.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: taking you back, when did cabaret first capture your interest as an art form?
Kim David Smith: “I grew up in rural Australia and my love for cabaret started to sneak in with little glimpses of it in the films that I was watching as a kid. Like when Judy Garland sings “I Want To Go Back to Michigan” in Easter Parade as a floor show in that restaurant. I was captivated by that and movie musicals in general. Anything that was storytelling with songs. As a teenager I really got into Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. I was like, ‘Oh, my God! This film is incredible.’ I set about investigating what it was representing because I knew that it was a distillation of something and I needed to know what that was. That led me to researching Marlene Dietrich’s early music as well as the people who wrote it for her. While I was getting my BA in Musical Theatre at university I was always hunkering down in the library researching Hanns Eisler. The movie Cabaret began this real curiosity for me that I still to this day haven’t solved and that I think I’m going to be investigating for the rest of my life.”
How did you first come to see the film Cabaret?
“My first CD at five years old was a Judy Garland greatest hits that was given to me by my gay uncle. Because, you know, gay knows gay! I’ll always be incredibly grateful for that gift. Then as Judy begat Liza, so my curiosity about Liza came from my curiosity about Judy. That naturally led me to Liza’s crowning glory and I was immediately drawn in by it. I loved those amazing Kander and Ebb songs and the way that they take you to this place that feels so real. It’s a flawless film. It’s terrifying. It’s satisfying. It’s so sexy. It’s a horror show. It’s just all of these things and fabulousness is chief among them. Cabaret has always vibrated in my body, in my spirit, and I’m constantly excavating that film and the work of Kandor and Ebb and Liza Minnelli’s performance in it and finding myself in all of that.”
You perform a beautiful version of the title song from Cabaret on your new album. What did singing it in German open up for you?
“Liza’s Live at Carnegie Hall album was reissued in 2022 and I was so ensorcelled by this amazing monologue that she does on it as Sally Bowles which leads into her riveting, über-showbiz version of “Cabaret”. That particular version stayed with me and was swimming around in my head and I kept wanting to include it on the album. It’s so cliché, but who am I? I’m a gay person doing cabaret shows. Talk about cliché! So I thought, ‘What am I waiting for?! You’re 41, let’s do this!’ I knew that I had to make it my own and for some reason I thought it’d be the most hysterical thing to do the entire thing in German after starting with, ‘Can I tell you something…?’ In that very Liza way.”
“I think it’s hilarious, but if other people get something else out of it then I celebrate that because that’s what it’s there for. For people to feast in whatever way they want to on that buffet. That’s fine with me. It was such a pleasure to jump in and massage that translation. My favourite thing in the entire world is to be in a shabby Midtown Manhattan rehearsal room with Tracy Stark—one of my best friends and my musical director—and to find our Kimish way into a song. The better known a song is, the more exciting it is to take it apart and find all the nice, slow, little hissing moments; all those Kimish corners in a song. Together, we found an extremely Kimish version of this extremely famous song and I’m really proud of it.”
As you started to discover more about Marlene Dietrich and the music that we associate with her what was it that captured your imagination and got your creative juices flowing?
“My dad gave me a Marlene Dietrich biography when I was 15, so my interest in her began around the same time that I was staying up until 2am rewinding “Mein Herr” over and over again on my Cabaret VHS. I wore that VHS out! Marlene is at the absolute polar opposite end of showbiz to Liza Minnelli. She’s that perfect, staid, graceful goddess. She’s ice cold but has an utterly unlikely voice that is so mellifluous and so inviting. It’s like the most delicious secret sexual invitation and when she purrs—even as über-gay as I am—I’m sexually made so helpless by her Marleneness. In addition to all of that, she’s also hilarious. In all of her grace, she’s also so hilariously graceless. One of my favourite quotes is from a live concert recording where she finishes a song and then says, ‘Who’s talking? Shut up!’ It’s just hysterical to me and I find her utterly delicious.”
“I’m a very committed Marlene fan, but I’m not necessarily a huge fan of the Josef von Sternberg era. It’s a very 1930s way of making films that has less appeal to me than the Billy Wilder work that she did like A Foreign Affair or Tay Garnett’s Seven Sinners. I’m more into the 40s, 50s, and 60s work. All through that time she was working with Friedrich Hollaender, my favourite Weimar-era composer. I absolutely adore “A Little Yearning” which is on my album. Some people describe my show as a tribute to Marlene, but is not a tribute, it’s a séance. She hasn’t visited yet, but she will one day, I know it. If I was a ghost, I wouldn’t visit if someone begged and implored either, I’d just show up in my own time. So I get it, Marlene!”
“As with the show, this album is an absolutely accidental but very heartfelt celebration of Friedrich Hollaender as much as Marlene. Of all of the Marlene tunes on the album, only two of them are not written by Friedrich Hollaender. That was completely accidental when putting my show together over the course of five years as I swapped songs in and out. The show morphs and changes every single time I do it, but Hollaender’s songs have always been a huge part of it. He’s the most marvelous songwriter of the period, and when he moved to the US when things started to get really dicey, he continued to write for her throughout her career in Hollywood. What I didn’t realize initially was that she actually contributed to a lot of these songs because she was uncredited. I find that to be absolutely fascinating because she was a control beast.”
We must talk about Kylie Minogue because you deliver several gorgeous interpretations of her songs on the album. I’ve been a fan since I saw her on Neighbours back in 1986. I can remember being a school trip a couple of years later when her first album came out and everyone kept wanting to borrow my cassette to listen to on their Walkmans!
“Well, the eponymously titled Kylie record is very much a pass-around party piece! I received that album when I was six at my McDonald’s birthday party. Remember when we used to have those?! She’s been part of the family ever since, it’s as simple as that. Whenever a new Kylie album comes out it becomes the sonic backdrop to my mental health. She’s always been there and I’m so inspired by her.”
“In my mind, as a gay you have the option to be like Kylie or to be like Madonna. It’s not really a binary, but that’s how I see it! So I’m like, be like Kylie. Both are fabulous, but be kind, remember people’s names, be an absolute sweetheart and still be fabulous. Rufus Wainwright said, ‘Kylie is the gay shorthand for joy’, and she is. Even though the word Kylie is actually longer than the word joy! But it’s true, she just is. It made sense to me to take “Padam Padam” and commission a French translation to give a nod to the Édith Piaf.”
“It’s just a nonsense onomatopoeic word that the lyricist of Kylie’s “Padam Padam”, Ina Wroldsen, came up with because she’s Norwegian and her mother would say it as a heartbeat sound to her when she was a child. So it found its way into a Kylie Minogue song that happens to relate to an Édith Piaf song from the 1950s, which has long been my favourite Piaf song.”
“I commissioned from my friend Gay Marshall—I like to joke that her middle name is pride, but it’s not—to do the French translation for me, which is truly fabulous, lots of frisson. It’s such a joy to do it. My version opens with the traditional Piaf “Padam, Padam” and then it slinks down into this sultry mode and then the audience begins to click in with what’s happening. As you can hear on the record, which is actually the first time that I performed it. That momentary audience reaction was entirely the reason why I wanted to do a French translation. I will go out of my way to learn an entire song in another language for just a heartbeat of a joke. I go to great lengths for this stuff, I don’t know why!”
Speaking of jokes, I was lucky enough to be at one of your shows and I love your rapport with the audience. It’s a delight to hear that captured on this album as most of it was recorded live.
“That’s what I love about live recordings. My next project will be a studio album, but I love live recordings in that they allow you to relive the moment. For instance, with Bette Midler’s Live at Last, it’s so amazing to dip your toe into the 1970s and hear and feel Bette in her crazy heyday really giving it to them. She’s really funny and holding nothing back. There’s something about live albums that is such a joy to listen to and I was determined to keep as much of the chatter intact on the record as possible. I think it’s really important in terms of conveying the feeling of being in the room.”
What’s your secret to engaging with an audience?
“My approach is that you’ve absolutely got to be yourself. I’m always going to have a bit of a Marlene-borrowed archness, that’s my swan down coat I guess, but you’ve got to be ready to vamp on absolutely nothing at all. If something weird happens in the room, you either need to ignore it completely or dive on in and riff on it and incorporate it into what you’re doing and be like, ‘Me too, honey!’ If you make a mistake on stage, I guarantee that if you can turn it into a joke or make fun of yourself in the moment it will become people’s favourite takeaway from the whole evening. I love cabaret and I’ve seen a lot over the years—the bad along with the good—and you can’t go far wrong if you’re yourself and you enjoy talking with people. It’s like being at a cocktail party, except that everyone has shut up and is listening to you for some reason. You’ve just got to keep going like you’re in a party.”
It’s so true that how a performer handles a mistake or something unexpected happening can make a show really special and memorable. It draws you in doesn’t it? I think it’s partly the reminder that you’re watching something truly live and there’s a thrill in seeing how the person on stage handles whatever is thrown at them.
“Absolutely. You’ve got to take the work seriously, but you can’t take yourself seriously. Here’s where we loop back to Kylie Minogue. I will never forget being in Melbourne at her Showgirl: Homecoming tour the year after her cancelled shows due to her cancer diagnosis. It was an absolutely fabulous evening. She started to sing “Dreams”, one of her best songs from Impossible Princess, and for whatever reason she flubbed a lyric early on in the first verse and started giggling. She got the giggles for the entirety of the song. She was wearing this beautiful gown and she kept walking the stage but she was bent over cackling. The entire stadium was cackling along with her. They just let the track keep going. It’s quite a dramatic song and she walked down to the very end of the catwalk and dramatically disappeared through the stage. As the petals were falling around her, she was shrieking with laughter as tears rolled down her face. We were all the same in the audience too. It was glorious.”
“A performer who was more brittle or more concerned about how she is being perceived would possibly have been like, ‘Start the track again!’ But Kylie just went with it and let it go and it blossomed into this utterly organic moment that nobody else—aside from that group of 30,000 people—has in their heart and their memory. Experiencing that, I was like, ‘Okay, if she can do that in front of 30,000 people, then Kim, the next time 60 people buy tickets to your show it’s completely fine to go with the thing that happens in the moment.”
As a quick Kylie aside, I saw her at G-A-Y in London in 2006. She made a surprise appearance on stage when Dannii was playing the club that night. I was standing at the front with my friend and the room full of gay men cheered and screamed at her for about ten minutes because it was the first public appearance that she’d made since her cancer treatment. It felt really special to be there for that because, as you put it, she feels like family.
“How incredible to be there for that. She understands that she’s special to us. I saw her Vegas show and I can’t wait to see her in Boston and New York in April because there is something about where she is at right now in her career that is just so unrepentantly joyous. I’ve heard her say that she’s inspired by Freddie Mercury and although you might not immediately see that inspiration directly it’s there in her fire. I don’t know that you necessarily go to one of my shows and be like, ‘Look at that Kylie queen queening out being Kylie-ish’. It’s more that she ignites something in me. Sometimes Liza shows up and Marlene is very much there in an organic way for me that comes from ballet and the idea of a strong stillness. But Kylie is very much there too. She’s the only one of my gals who is that golden combination of alive and working. She sits there in this beautiful way as a flame of inspiration that’s been there ever since I was six years old. She’s been there in my domestic life too. The first dance at our wedding was “Dance Floor Darling” and my whole family has always adored her.”
Let’s talk about your special guests. As well as the divas you’re channeling, you have several alive and working singers joining you on the album which makes it really special.
“Yes, my holy trinity of Minnelli, Marlene and Minogue are very much there in that séancey, channeled way, but the people who literally joined me on the record are all people who have bolstered, inspired and brought joy to my life. Sidney Myer, the legendary manager of Don’t Tell Mama in Midtown Manhattan, gave me some of my first gigs in the city. He’s been a cabaret father to me ever since I moved to New York in 2007 and I announce him as such on the record. Having him come on and sing the song that Marlene sang as her audition for The Blue Angel, “You’re the Cream in My Coffee”, was so special. He very sweetly changes one of the lyrics to incorporate my name, which is utterly unnecessary, but incredibly sweet of him. Having him on the record really means a lot.”
“Then there’s Bright Light Bright Light. Oh, boy, what an insanely talented human. So generous and sweet and such an amazing artist. He’s the embodiment of kindness. We first bonded over Kylie. It’s either a hookup or Kylie with me, and you never know which it’ll be. We appear in each other’s shows periodically and have such a good time connecting on stage and off. It was such a delight having him pop in on “All the Lovers”. The structure of that was inspired by Kylie’s World Pride performance in Sydney in 2023 where all of a sudden Dannii joined her on stage for the second verse. That’s what I love about Australia, the two Minogues being on stage together got this seismic response. There was unbridled joy. It was heaven. “All the Lovers” had already been in my show for a decade, but after seeing that, I said to Bright Light Bright Light, ‘Let’s do that and you’re Dannii!’ So that’s why he pops up in the second verse.”
We love Bright Light Bright Light here at The Queer Review. You’re also joined on the album by Charles Busch, Joey Arias, and your mum, aren’t you?
“My mum, Linda Randall, came over from Australia for my 40th birthday and I was like, ‘Look, honey, we’ve got to get you into the studio!’ She was all about it and having her on the album is just the sweetest, dearest thing. She loves that song, “A Little Yearning”, which I’ve been singing in my shows for about 15 years. She even learned the German part for the last chorus. What an absolute trooper. She’s really the brightest light in my life and it means so much to be able to celebrate our relationship in this way. I’m so excited for when the album is out so I can be like, ‘You’re on Spotify. You’re streaming, mum!’ It’s a beautiful thing to show off my moum like this and I love her to bits.”
“Then there are friends who deeply inspire me like Joey Arias and Charles Busch. Talk about pure, unadulterated artistry. I am so inspired by both of them and find such joy in our friendships. Charles and I met at a gay erotic drawing group that I used to pose for in SoHo and we struck up a fabulous and enduring friendship. It means so much to me to have him on the record, on top of which he wrote original dialogue for the song. It’s only two lines, but it’s mine, and I call it the lost Charles Busch play!”
“Joey and I keep showing up in each other’s lives. We communicate almost exclusively through found dick pics on the Internet. That’s entirely what our text chain is. It’s just like, dick, dick, dick! He’s such an amazing human and our friendship is so precious to me so it was a delight to do “Black Market” together which closes out the record. I can’t believe that Charles and Joey both agreed to be on the album and I’m so grateful that they did.”
“Ali McGregor, who is a phenomenal Australian soprano has been making space for me and my work since I started out in her shows at the Melbourne Comedy Festival when she was running the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, which is the biggest cabaret festival in the world. She’s a font of kindness and her version of Radiohead’s “Creep” with her stratospheric, haunting soprano is to die for. She sounds like a theremin. She’s absolutely otherworldly. I was thrilled to have her come in for that Shirley Bassey-inspired version of “Nature Boy” because boy, do I love a hearty soprano and that’s exactly what she’s serving up. So with the special guests it’s about friendships and as an afterthought, professional relationships, that I’m celebrating on the record.”
Finally, what’s your favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture, or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you over the years?
“That’s such a good question because as queer people growing up we don’t always have the gay uncle already there as I was fortunate enough to have. I’ve got a trans sibling and my other sibling is a lesbian, so we are queer as all get out in my family! It’s very much a space of kindness. But, as so many of us do, I found myself in these divas like Marlene, Minnelli and Minogue, because women are expressive, whereas men are not necessarily permitted expressiveness. So that’s often where we start to get in touch with ourselves, our view on on men, and other queer people. Let’s not forget the gateway of Disney villains, these queerish others who are misfits in society. They’re also trying to kill princesses, which I have not yet done!”
“I will say that the most positive and amazing queer influence on my life is Charles Leslie, co-founder of the Leslie Lohman Museum. He’s absolutely one of the sweetest people who thrives on bringing art and artists of all mediums together. For me, this question is about queer elders, and I can say that because he’s in his 90s so he’s not going to get offended! So in that same spirit that my uncle gave this little five year old gay boy a Judy Garland CD, Charles welcomed me into his home, which we all call the Phallus Palace because queer erotic art is everywhere. Him opening those hallowed doors to artists is just heaven and his generosity of spirit knows no bounds.”
By James Kleinmann
Kim David Smith’s new album Mostly Marlene is available on digital and streaming platforms from Friday, March 21st, 2025. Pre-order the album on Apple Music. Smith will celebrate the release with a special New York concert at Joe’s Pub that evening at 9:30pm, tickets are available at PublicTheater.org.
“KIM DAVID SMITH – MOSTLY MARLENE” TRACK LIST
1) “Black Market” — Friedrich Hollaender
2) “Ich Bin die Fesche Lola” — Friedrich Hollaender
3) Band Intro (patter)
4) “In Your Eyes” / “Slow” — Kylie Minogue, Richard Stannard, Julian Gallagher, and Ash Howes 5) Jonny, wenn du Geburtstag hast? — Friedrich Hollaender (with elements of “Erotica” — Madonna Ciccone, Shep Pettibone, Anthony Shimkin)
6) “Padam Padam” (French translation by Gay Marshall) — Ina Wroldsen with British producer Lostboy
7) “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” (Sidney Myer) — Ray Henderson, Buddy G. DeSylva, Lew Brown
8) “Look Me Over Closely” — Terry Gilkyson
9) Queer B(icon) (patter)
10) “The Man’s in the Navy” — Frank Loesser, Friedrich Hollaender
11) Judy Garland (patter)
12) “The Boys in the Back Room” — Frank Loesser, Friedrich Hollaender
13) “Lili Marlene” — Norbert Schultze
14) “Cabaret” — John Kander, Fred Ebb
15) “All the Lovers” (with Bright Light Bright Light) — James Eliot, Jemima Stilwell
16) “Falling in Love Again” — Friedrich Hollaender
17) “Just a Gigolo” — adapted by Irving Caesar from composer Leonello Casucci’s 1928 tango “Schoner Gigoli”
18) “Nature Boy” (with Ali McGreggor) — Eden Ahbez
19) “Illusions” (with Charles Busch) — Friedrich Hollaender
20) “A Little Yearning” (with Linda Randall) — Friedrich Hollaender
21) “Black Market” (with Joey Arias) — Friedrich Hollaender
