Corine Cohen: Hi, Donna. I really enjoyed seeing COUGAR at the Westbank Theater. It is hilarious, touching and an inspiring show for women. Tell me how you came up with the concept of the show.
Donna Moore: Thanks, Corine. The goal for Cougar! has always been to uplift and inspire everyone to say YES to their power and beauty no matter what age they are. It all started 21/2 years ago when I was performing my one woman show, “The unbalancing Act” which was a show about my divorce and my philosophy of turning lemons into lemonade. While writing that show, I had been doing a lot of standup comedy and the term “cougar” came to my attention- which I just thought was the funniest term and started riffing about it in my sets. I kept seeing the lyrics, “Inside this peri-menapausal body I do find, a very sexy hottie who’s just waiting to unwind.” A week later, I found myself in a “cougar” situation with the manager of a very popular band. He was 20 years younger and definitely had the hots for me. Although, I never did succumb to his desires, (awwww!) I got the greatest material for the song “Cougar” which was featured in “The unBalancing Act”. There was a producer in the audience who came up to me one night and offered to help me develop a show if I wrote it around the cougar theme. And voila!- we now have “Cougar!, the musical.”
Corine Cohen: That's wonderful! "Grandma was a COUGAR" is my favorite number. Can you tell me how you and Mark wrote that, and is all of it true? Dish the dirt.
Donna Moore: So far, I have collaborated with a composer on every song except two (which I wrote music and lyrics to; “I’m Easy” and “I am Young Again”) so how it seems to work is (and “Grandma was a Cougar” is no exception)- I wrote the lyrics of Grandma and then sent it to Mark Barkan. He wrote the music, I take it back to my musical director and we mix it musically together and come up with a song that is steeped in thematic reality for character and circumstance. In the case of “Grandma” we added a musical riff from the twenties to bridge the verses and lyrics and evoke the sense of being a flapper in the twenties.
The dish on my Grandma is that she was a child in Vaudeville and became a charter Equity member. Her name is Adele Vaughan. She hung with the likes of Lucille Ball and other artists BUT I did stretch the truth because although she was a Bohemian, she married two men who were not younger than she.
“Grandma was a Cougar” really came to life with Leasen Almquist’s choreography. Gives meaning to the old saying, “it’s not the ocean, it’s the motion!”
Corine Cohen: I also loved "Swagger." It is very funny. How did that number get put together.
Donna Moore: I wrote the lyrics for that song one day last summer. I wanted to come up with a song that epitomized what it is like for a young male to make his way in life. I had interviewed a very talented and generous young man by the name of Jimmi Kilduff who sat with me in a Starbucks for five hours and bared his soul. I took notes like I was drinking it in. I asked Jimmi, “if you could encapsulate in one word what a young man needs to derive the confidence to get through life, what would it be?” Jimmi thought a moment and said “swagger” and from there, the divine writing gods started putting it together in my brain so that when I finally sat down to write, it was written in two hours. I had started collaborating with a wonderful female composer named Meryl Leppard, who is an amazing singer/songwriter in her own right. Meryl fiddled with my lyrics, adding 10-15% of her own lyric poetry to fit the music, and “SWAGGER” was born!
What I love about that song is the guys laugh harder than the girls. What we are trying to do with this piece is humanize and love everyone because we are all in this world together. I believe strongly that in order to ‘raise up’ our women , we need to “raise up’ our men. The Swagger song is a funny and compassionate look at the challenges our beautiful men (young and old) have to go through to feel safe. I’m just thrilled it’s so funny because that’s the most effective way to speak truth.
Corine Cohen: It is hysterical and the audiences love it! I know that you are planning to bring the show to Off Broadway and Broadway can you tell me about that?
Donna Moore: Our goal is to open in an off Broadway house later this year with our eye on moving it to Broadway. We are doing a staged reading on May 12 for investors. In this new script,(working title, “Cougar Paws”, for differentiation) I’ve added two more Cougar actresses (Louisa Bradshaw and Mary VanArsdel) and one more young buck. We were encouraged by a Broadway producer to expand my original, 2 person piece, with more production value, ie; more people. This new script delves a little deeper into female cougar bonding (behind every cougar is another cougar, lol), online dating, the young man’s perspective, and because there are more actors’, you’ll see that love and empowerment come in all types of packages. My intention is to retain the inspiration, and uplifting joy and affirmation of life that we have achieved in Cougar! I believe I have!
(On a funny note, I had a session with a psychic (yeah, I admit it!) last Saturday morning and she told me all these great things about my creative future. Six hours later, she called me back and said that she and her husband wanted to invest in my show! Isn’t that hysterical? When I’m rich and famous I can say, “I knew my show was going to be a hit, when my psychic wanted to invest!”) You can’t make this stuff up.
Thank you so much for your support of Cougar! it’s about love, light and Joy!
To get tickets to this hysterical cabaret show:
This show is a Corine's Pick!
Fri, May 23 at 9pm at Don’t Tell Mama 212 757 0788 for reservations
