This Minneapolis cabaret wants actors to resist typecasting

Video produced by Brittany Shrimpton.

At this cabaret, you can forget about typecasting.

Musical Mondays, a monthly cabaret held at the restaurant Hell’s Kitchen in Minneapolis, wants actors and singers to experiment with work outside their usual range, according to Max Wojtanowicz, one of the show’s hosts.

Performers usually audition with 16 or 32 bars of a song, but do not often get to develop an entire song of their choice in a performance setting. And many of them tend to get cast repeatedly as the same type of role, Wojtanowicz said. “What we like at Musical Mondays is finding people having connect with different material that they might not be cast as,” he said.

One recent performance included a gender-swapped rendition of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from the 1927 musical “Showboat,” Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” and a song from Steven Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.”

The cabaret, which has been running for 31 performances so far, welcomes performers of all different levels of experience, host Sheena Janson Kelly said.

“What makes the Minneapolis theater scene so special is that it is so inclusive and stretches many different levels of experienced artists,” Kelly said. “There will always be new artists to come join us and always new ears to come hear them.”

Local Beat is an ongoing series on Art Beat that features arts and culture stories from PBS member stations around the nation.