By SHARON EBERSON
Update on Saturday, January 18, 2025: The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust website has tickets on sale for a 7 p.m. show only. https://trustarts.org/production/98660/performance/98660/seat_selection
“It’s been an extraordinary experience over the last couple months. It’s good to be home. I missed it so much,” Catherine Kolos was saying with a couple of weeks to go before returning to the stage.
She will perform her cabaret, MOOD FOR LOVE: AN EVENING WITH CATHERINE KOLOS, at the Greer Cabaret on January 31.
That the show is “75%” the same as the first time it was performed a year ago, then in the Greer Lounge, is as impressive as the other 25%.
Far from home on Labor Day Weekend of last year, working as a stage manager in Albuquerque, N.M., Kolos suffered a brain aneurysm.
Performing again wasn’t alway a sure thing.
Friends from the Pittsburgh theater community rushed cross-country, to her side during Kolos’ recovery. On September 22, 2024, when she was sprung from the hospital, Kolos made a list on Meta of what she had experienced:
- 3 weeks in ICU.
- 3 brain surgeries.
- Countless tests, pokes, blood samples, and strength tests.
- A handful of truly terrifying stumbles.
- 12 hours of Doppler brain scanning.
- 34 hours of PT.
- Way too much understanding of blood pressure.
You will hear about some of Kolos’ journey in her cabaret, but mostly, she’s in the Mood for Love – the same title of the cabaret she previously performed at the Greer on January 18, 2024.
“It’s always hard to navigate how much I say, and will people be receptive or interested in hearing that,” Kolos said by phone recently. “I think what inspired me to revise the second act of the show was the experience in recovery. So many people that had been in my circle or friends or colleagues had revealed that they had gone through something similar, whether it was brain surgery, a stroke, an aneurysm, and we just don’t talk about It.
“It is an extremely isolating experience,” she added. “There’s a lot of considering the breadth of your life and a lot of reflection on what it is to make it through.”
Her experiences during that time were chronicled on social media. The joy of achieving her goal in November, of completing a one-mile hike at Petroglyph National Park in Albuquerque, was palpable.
This cabaret represents another leap back into action.
“It is a show that examines how we define love through our lives – very lighthearted, very happy, and how that definition of love changes through the movies we watch, the music we hear, the experiences we have,” Kolos said.
With collaborators Shelby Williams on keyboards and Aaron Basskin on drums, “We have new dating stories because there’s never a short stack of good and bad dating stories when you’re modern dating,” Kolos said. “So we’ve got some new ones in there. And then the second half of the show was always talking about how we love ourselves, and how that changes and how that evolves. And so that’s where my personal story of this last fall and the surgery comes in.”
Known mostly as an accomplished local and regional stage manager, Kolos had been trying to re-assert herself as a performer when she was hired for the role of Mary in the prescient Front Porch Theatricals production of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.
She demonstrated her range and acting chops, and nailed the role of the writer who suffers from unrequited love.
While thinking about creating a cabaret, Kolos listened to “tons” of music when she realized the songs on her playlist all were “looking at the different shades of love, loving yourself, falling in love, falling out of love – both the joy and the heartbreak,”
Another must was that “they tell a great story,” such as .Bonnie Raitt’s Something to Talk About
“All of the songs that I chose had very specific meaning to me or I had grown up with. I do a song that Bob Dylan wrote, because my dad introduced me to Bob Dylan when I was younger and I loved him, but it has been covered over 450 times – Make You Feel My Love. The most popular one I think is Adele‘s cover now.”
You will get to know other musical influences, accompanied by the stories such as Kolos “getting my first kiss in eighth grade and the calamity that it caused during a tech rehearsal.”
The nature of cabaret is to open up and be vulnerable, which can be a cathartic experience. For Kolos, it also was part of her physical therapy, working on breath support, “and just training like an athlete to do this.”
“This” is a two-show night that has Kolos “chomping at the bit, I cannot wait.”
Her health scare behind her, “I feel really ready to be back at it, and back on stage, and so thrilled to come home to Pittsburgh to do so. There’s a part of me that’s like, ‘What is this going to feel like? What’s going to happen?’ But I feel strong. My voice is in a good place. And I mean with a room full of great musicians like that, how can you go wrong?”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Mood for Love: An Evening with Catherine Kolos is presened by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust at the Greer Cabaret Theater on January 31, 2025, a 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Tickets: https://trustarts.org/production/98659/catherine-kolos-mood-for-love or call 412-456-6666.
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