by Sean Taylor

Kat Robichaud just put company holiday parties to shame. On December 16th and 17th Chinatown’s Great Star Theater hosted the winter installment of her seasonal variety show, “Misfit Cabaret,” this time around titled Wilde Women. It was something salacious, it was sometimes reckless, and it rang in the year with this astounding truth: artists do it better.

Opening the show, our ever ebullient host Kat and her sidekick Brenden kicked the crowd warm and awake with a melee of classic rock snippets. Swinging the energy between Christmas ballads and karaoke standards seemed to ready the full auditorium for both the cheesy holiday tradition and the fun in rebelling against it. We were then treated to a hilarious rendition of The Pierces ex-excitement song, “Boring,” as enacted by the Real Housewives of Victorian France also known as Rita Dambook and Johnny Rockitt. Their perfectly dead, haunting eyes nailed down the sarcastic skit.

As the massive scarlet curtains closed and the crowd’s laughter slowly expired I realized we were at the complete mercy of Kat and her brash skill to entertain. This is the very heart of her variety shows—we have no idea what we will find when those curtains open again. The show is too busy evolving to slow down; it is too fluid to bore.

The pliant choreography of Courtney Courtney as absinthe’s green fairy played a perfect changeover for an ode to Oscar Wildes “Salome” by Trixxie Carr. Trixxie produced and stared in a one woman glam rock opera rendition of Wilde’s “Salome,” titled “Salome, Dance With Me.”Her voice transcended the high water mark of our eyes as she reached back and sang, “Don’t be afraid of the stars for which you’re made,” a line dedicated to those that were lost in the recent Oakland fire.

After a brief intermission we were welcomed back by an intimate original ballad by Kat, accompanied with the plunging graces of ribbon aerialist Nina Sawant. Nina seemed to climb our heart strings as Kat plucked them.