StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: St. Louis Cabaret Festival

Today, let's take a look at some video clips featuring the stars of next week's St. Louis Cabaret Festival. The festival is produced by Cabaret Project of St. Louis, and takes place in conjunction with their annual St. Louis Cabaret Conference, a week-long event offering educational programs, professional development, networking, and so on for cabaret performers, both established and aspiring.

In the first video up above, Marilyn Maye, the Kansas native whose show business career spans parts of seven decades, performs a medley of songs by Johnny Mercer with Ted Firth (piano) and Steve Doyle (bass), recorded in June 2009 at Birdland in NYC.

Maye will co-headline a concert with pianist and singer Billy Stritch on Friday, August 1 at the Sheldon Concert Hall's upstairs ballroom.After the jump, you can see her, backed by Stritch on piano, in an undated but fairly recent clip singing "My Man."

Next, while online videos featuring Stritch as a solo performer do not seem to be in plentiful supply, we were able to find one of him singing and playing "I've Got the World on a String" and "I've Got Rhythm" at an awards show way back in 1999.

(You also can see a full hour of Maye and Stritch together right here in St. Louis courtesy of HEC-TV's I Love Jazz, which devoted a whole episode to them in September 2013 that, alas, cannot be embedded.)

Below that, there's a video tribute filmed at Birdland on the occasion of Maye's 85th birthday. Depending on your interest in the minutiae of NYC's cabaret and theater scenes, you may or may not want to watch the whole thing, but definitely check out the first part featuring a brief improvised blues duet between Maye and another of the festival's performers, longtime St. Louis favorite Ann Hampton Callaway.

Callaway has been a regular visitor here over the last decade and a half, and she'll be back at the Sheldon next Thursday, July 31, performing an evening of songs associated with Barbra Streisand.

You can see Callaway in the fifth clip teaming up with Maye again for an impromptu version of "It Had to be You" recorded in 2010 at a benefit gala for the Heartland Men's Chorus in Kansas City, and below that, there's a video compiling some highlights of her Streisand show.

The festival's final headliner, singer and actress Faith Prince, is represented by the final two clips. Although Prince is a well-known regular on Broadway thanks to starring roles in shows like Guys and Dolls, Bells Are Ringing and Annie, there seems to be essentially no online video of her performing in a cabaret setting.

So instead, we close out today with a clip of Prince singing "Adelaide's Lament" from Guys and Dolls on a 2001 TV special; and an interview she recorded for the program "Show People With Paul Wontorek."

For more about the St. Louis Cabaret Festival, you can hear Callaway and Cabaret Project of St. Louis' Tim Schall in this interview recorded Friday for the "Cityscape" program on KWMU (90.7 FM).

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...