Eden Casteel Keeps Madeline Kahn's Memory Alive with Cabaret Homage

It all started with a beer commercial. "I was watching TV one night and watching a commercial where Madeline Kahn was selling Michelob," says cabaret artist, coloratura soprano, comedian, pianist, songwriter, and MAC Award winner Eden Casteel about her early struggle to find her place in the music world. "Kahn was gorgeous, funny, and sang a high note, and I said, 'Who is this person? I want to be like that.' I wanted to be just like her."

This was decades ago, when Casteel, a classically trained but zany soprano, was studying opera at University of Cincinnati's renowned Conservatory of Music. "I thought it would be so easy to be a funny soprano," laments Casteel. "But as I went on with my career, I discovered most directors don't want a funny soprano; they want the soprano to sing pretty and set up the jokes for the alto."

Casteel began to look to where she could combine her skills as a coloratura soprano and a comedian. "The place I was most successful was cabaret," notes Casteel. Cabaret is an art form that is infinitely flexible, where there was plenty of room for a comic soprano. Casteel was immediately embraced. Finding Kahn to be her strongest influence, and someone whose career Casteel knew so well after a lifetime of fandom, Casteel put together her first cabaret show, "Kahn Artist: Madeline and Me," celebrating Kahn's artistry and her influence on Casteel's career, which she premiered at the Arctic Playhouse's Cabaret Club in 2022.

The show has incredible legs: Casteel has already performed it 22 times. In 2023, she performed the show at the Club Café's Napoleon Room in Boston, followed by a long run last summer and fall at Manhattan's Don't Tell Mama. This year, the show has bookings into the spring, summer, and fall from Puerto Vallarta to San Francisco. Casteel returns to the Club Café's Napoleon Room with "Kahn Artist: Madeline and Me" on Saturday, February 22, 2025.

Bart Greenberg of Cabaret Scenes said of her New York run, "Casteel held the stage with her deft acting and her fine singing. It will be exciting to see what Casteel does in the future." Analisa Bell at Broadway World exclaimed, "Eden Casteel has a big voice and a big heart, and both were on display at Don't Tell Mama. Casteel made it her mission to be both funny AND have a brilliant voice (mission accomplished)! Yet, it was the moments when Casteel wasn't exemplifying her vocal abilities but showing us pieces of her heart that really made the show."

Finding her way to cabaret as an outlet for her talents didn't come easily, nor early in Casteel's career. Performing in more conventional pieces for classically trained sopranos, Casteel still harbored a love of screwball comedy combined with legit classical singing, and found it in the work of Madeline Kahn. Before Kahn came to Broadway in 1978 in the role of Lily Garland in "On the 20th Century" (Cy Coleman/Betty Comden and Adolph Green), she had already become a film sensation, particularly in a series of Mel Brooks/Gene Wilder films: "Blazing Saddles" (1974), "Young Frankenstein" (1974), "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother" (1975), and "High Anxiety" (1977). Casteel kept a close eye on Kahn's work in those films, both musically and comedically, and saw quite a bit of herself in them. Casteel also found inspiration in another comic soprano, Kristen Chenoweth, who not surprisingly created the role of Lily Garland in the 2015 Broadway revival of "On the 20th Century." Chenoweth, too, found that it was on Kahn's shoulders that she stands in her career as a comic soprano.

It was during the early days of the pandemic, a difficult time for performers, that Casteel discovered cabaret. "In 2021, when we were still locked down, I participated in the St. Louis Cabaret Symposium," recounts Casteel. "It was eight intensive, consecutive online Sundays over the summer, and one of the coaches was Faith Prince. I sang for her, and she emailed me and said, 'Who Are You?' We discovered we had a lot in common. We both went to University of Cincinnati. She had a similar experience of being told she had to perform a specific way because of her voice, and we realized there was a show there. I asked her to direct it, and she said yes."

As they explored material for Casteel's show, Kahn's name came up right away, and Prince said that Kahn had inspired her, as well. Casteel adds, "Faith said Madeline was ground zero for a comic soprano." Like Casteel, Kahn had started out wanting to be an opera singer. "Her funny came out by accident," Casteel notes. "She would be serious on stage and the audience would be laughing because of her unintentionally funny presentation, and she realized she had a gift."

Like Kahn, Casteel couldn't keep her madcap side under a lid. Working with Prince as her director proved to be fruitful on many levels. Prince felt that they needed a comic writer, but also one with heart, to help tell Casteel's story. "Faith suggested bringing in Rod Ferguson. Rod had already been working with Faith on his own show, 'Man Overboard,'" Casteel recalls. "It was a stroke of genius. I joked they should have their own business, 'Faith and Ferguson.' Faith is expert at knowing the big picture, a story arc, and knowing what songs will help tell the story. Rod knows how to write a story succinctly, and to make sure the story is told in a way that is understandable and entertaining."

Prince and Casteel had fun pulling together songs for the show. Casteel had already been doing a Kahn song from Kahn's first Broadway show, "Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1968," called "Das Chicago Song," written my Michale Cohen, and Prince included it. "It was a spoof of Kurt Weill songs, written expressly for Kahn," Casteel explains. "She sounds a little bit like "Pirate Jenny," but darkly funny. That was an early example of someone writing a song for her, and she used that to audition for 'Blazing Saddles.'"

But Casteel isn't a slave to Kahn's career in this tribute. She includes other material, such as the song "Not Funny" (Heissman/Reid). "If she lived longer, she would have sung it," Casteel quips. "It's about how sopranos never get the joke, and, at the end, we get a high B flat, and I sing it F6; I go as high as I can go, and it astonishes people. And it proves the song, because sometimes when you sing really high, it's also funny."

Casteel maintains that while the show is framed around Kahn's career, the show is really about herself. "A few songs I do in the show are for her, some are for me, and a few are for us. 'Not Funny' is for us," Casteel reveals. "The other I do for us is 'Let Me Grow Old' (Goldrich/Heissler), about experiencing the beauty of life long enough to leave a mark, that people knew you were there. And we know Madeline Kahn was there, and that's why we still miss her. We wish she was still here."

Kahn died in 1999 at the age of 57 from ovarian cancer. "She still had more to do," Casteel muses, "and this show is a way of keeping her legacy alive and appreciating what she did with the time she had."

Casteel comes back to cabaret as a way of accomplishing her career goals, a parallel with Kahn that doesn't go unnoticed. "Cabaret is the place where I can do what I love to do," confesses Casteel. "Madeline Kahn never did a cabaret. She had ideas to do one, and she had some plans for it. She would have been brilliant at it. One of the reasons I do this is because she never got to."

Casteel contemplates why Kahn's work doesn't just resonate for her, but also for her audiences. "There is still so much love for her, and some people come to remember her artistry. Some come because they want to hear some funny songs she did," explains Casteel. "But this show is also my story. Our lives have a lot in common in some weird ways. We are very alike, and yet different. We all have a little Madeline Kahn in us. And when you leave, you realize where that is, and in that way you carry that with you and she lives."

Eden Casteel performs "Kahn Artist: Madeline and Me" on Saturday, February 22, 2025, 4 PM at the Napoleon Room, Club Café, 209 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA 02116. No cover, but donations are recommended. For reservations, visit: https://www.clubcafe.com/club-events/eden-casteel-022225/