Karen Mason knows all about being a diva. As Broadway standby for Glenn Close, Betty Buckley, and Elaine Paige, she got to play demented diva Norma Desmond more than 200 times in Sunset Boulevard. But the fictional Norma didn't make the cut for Secrets of the Ancient Divas, Mason's cabaret show that takes a musical journey through the careers of a half-dozen or so singers who have earned the "diva" sobriquet. Think Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Bassey, Peggy Lee, and you begin to get the idea.
Secrets of the Ancient Divas brings Mason back for another Bay Area Cabaret outing, with a May 18 appearance at the Fairmont Hotel's Venetian Room. (Tickets at bayareacabaret.org.) "It's fun and silly, with really great music that pays tribute to the singers I was influenced by while growing up," said Mason, whose Broadway credits also include Mamma Mia!, Hairspray, and, most recently, the short-lived Wonderland.
The Ancient Divas show was born a couple of years ago after Mason discovered herself with a lot of blank space on her calendar. She had signed a one-year contract to play the sinister Mrs. Danvers, a sort of anti-diva, in a musical adaptation of the gothic novel Rebecca when the Broadway production notoriously collapsed in a sea of lawsuits, acrimonious emails, and phantom angels. "It took me a long time to get over that," Mason said. "I gave myself a little bit of time to be an absolute pathetic human being, eating everything in sight, but there comes a point where you just have to get back in the saddle. I sent out a lot of emails that said, 'Hey, I'm available, unexpectedly.'"
One of the opportunities that came from that outreach was an invitation to recreate Judy Garland's legendary 1961 Carnegie Hall concert with the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. "Then I thought I'd really like to try 'The Man That Got Away' in a cabaret, because I had sort of stayed away from certain signature songs. Then I needed a title for this show, and I remembered a show a friend of mine had written named Secrets of the Ancient Divas, and I thought, I think I will steal that."
Director Barry Kleinbort, who would stage the show, threw a small wrench into the proceedings. "He said, 'Well, that's lovely, Karen, but if you're really going to call it that then you better have some secrets you're going to divulge.' So I became what I call an 'archeocabaretologist,' and we used some bits of reality and also created new secrets that we felt important to share."
While Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger" is somehow turned into a Mayan chant, most of the arrangements that musical director Christopher Denny will play from the piano adhere more closely to popular expectations. "We try to give it a little bit of a personal spin without totally reconstructing something that is already beautifully constructed," she said.
Mason has a few more Secrets of the Ancient Divas dates lined up after San Francisco, but her heart is invested in getting a theatrical run for the story of her relationship with close friend and musical partner Brian Lasser, whom she met when she was auditioning to be a singing waiter in Chicago. For 16 years, they worked together, working their way up the cabaret ladder, until his death in 1992 from AIDS-related complications. Mason recorded an album of his songs in tribute, but it's a relationship she wants to continue to celebrate in a show titled Unfinished Business.
"When Brian passed away, someone said to me that you had such a close relationship and so many things happened to you, good and bad, that you should write down these stories," Mason said. "It's such a lovely story of two young people coming of age and finding themselves through their relationship with each other and through music, and then what to do after one of them dies." The new show uses many of Lasser's songs, and also incorporates one by Mason's songwriter-husband, Paul Rolnick. "It's titled 'We Never Ran Out of Love, We Just Ran Out of Time,' and it perfectly verbalizes what I was feeling at that time."
And always hovering, it seems, is the specter of Rebecca. Lead producer Ben Sprecher recently announced a new set of investors has been found for the dark pop musical, and he hopes to finally land the show on Broadway later this year. "If they ask, you bet I will be there," Mason said. "You know, as you get older and you see time going by, a different pressure begins to build. Rebecca was going to be a lovely feather in my cap, but I am the eternal optimist. I'm always thinking that whatever happens always ends up opening more doors, though not necessarily the doors you expected to be walking through."