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Peter Yawitz '76 is 2005 Nightlife Award Winner for his Cabaret Comedy

Former HM Theater Company star returns to stage

Horace Mann alumni from the mid 1970s will surely remember Peter Yawitz '76 as one of the most prominent presences in productions of the Horace Mann Theater Company. On January 31, 2005 Yawitz was introduced to a packed audience at Manhattan's Town Hall as the New York cabaret world's funniest singer/songwriter/performer of the year.

The occasion was the annual Nightlife Awards ceremony, which celebrates the best in New York cabaret, jazz and comedy performance. When producer Scott Siegel announced the awards on December 29, 2004, Yawitz had captured the award for Outstanding Cabaret Muscial Comedy/Characterization Performance for A New Man, the one-man show he premiered last summer.

Those attending the January 31 award ceremony got a taste of Yawitz' wit and dazzling performance style: At this event, honorees offer the audience bits of their performances, rather than acceptance speeches, and on this night the audience saw why a superstar like Keely Smith, who was honored, along with Karen Akers, as Outstanding Cabaret Female Vocalist in a Major Engagement, has held center stage for over half a century, why the unique lyrical interpretations of Mark Murphy won him the title of Jazz Legend, and why HM's own Yawitz is poised to join the ranks of song and comedy stardom.

According to Siegel, who created the Nightlife awards, their purpose is to "give New York City's nightlife--its clubs and performers--the same importance in the public mindset as Broadway." According to Siegel the award has "immediate credibility and importance because it is given by the broadest possible spectrum of this city's most influential authorities on cabaret, jazz, and comedy from those who see acts in the big rooms to those who cover the nightlife waterfront" - the reviewers, including Rex Reed of The New York Observer, Steve Futterman of The New Yorker, and Naomi Steinberg, of Comedy Central, and others who served as judges.

A star among stars

Other 2005 award winners, along with Akers, the legendary Smith, the late Cy Coleman who was celebrated with a performance of a medley of his songs, were sister songstresses Liz and Ann Hampton Callaway, Bill Charlap, and spectacular saxophonist Joe Lovano, and the hilarious rising star Patrice O'Neal among others. Host Bruce Vilanch, who is currently starring in Hairspray on Broadway, kept the audience laughing as he introduced guest presenters, including Tony Danza, and Andrea McArdle, who introduced the winners.

From the moment he stepped onto the stage dressed sharply in business attire, to the second Yawitz completed his rendition of his own Talk Like a Guy, the singer had the audience mesmerized. Many must have wondered - who was this Lehman Brothers-looking executive belting out, in a range of octaves, his hysterical parody of social interaction between uncomfortable strangers. And when Yawitz added, at the end, that even women can "talk like a guy" he had the crowd of nightlife aficionados rolling, and singing along with the refrain.

It was in that very magnetic stage presence--the one that takes audiences from their first impression of Yawitz as an Ivy League business school grad to a side-splittingly funny stage presence--that gave Yawitz his impeccably-timed comic pizzazz. For, in this case, the first impression is true. Yawitz is all that: an Ivy grad with a business degree, and what one reviewer called "a dazzling triple threat" showman whose career is currently catapulting through the cabaret scene.

By day, or by weekends, or whenever his clients need him, Peter Yawitz is president of Clear Communication, a company that helps corporations and their executives effectively convey their business' message. By night, Yawitz' hilarious observations on business and social relationships, offered to audiences in song and riveting monologues on modern life, have earned him an avid following on the nightclub scene. Oh, and in between, Yawitz is a devoted family man--husband and father of two. But, this balancing act--between advising business clients, and also writing material about the business world, between being able to "be there" for his children, attend their school and sports events, and spending numerous nights out of the house performing, is what fuels Yawitz' act. Yawitz admits that more and more his observations of his daily life, from the board room to parent teacher conferences, could end up in his routine. No doubt, that's what has brought him followers among people of a certain age.

"Not many people were writing songs about married dads in their 40's who are balancing family, work, and friends," Yawitz says.

A stage-presence developed at Horace Mann

Yawitz attributes his ease in going between his different worlds in large part to the theater experience he gained at Horace Mann. As a self-proclaimed "major theater jock at HM" Yawitz recalled "performing in about 10 plays from eighth to twelfth grades, or 2nd-6th form as we said then." He calls on that experience in front of audiences in both his cabaret work and as a business communications consultant.

"I run my business communication seminars and I know where I'm going to get laughs each time. I'm just very comfortable in front of a lot of people either on stage or at the podium," Yawitz said. As a performer whose A New Man plays to sell-out audiences, Yawitz has been called "a singer, songwriter, and comedian" who "never met an audience he didn't like."

"Theater was a major part of my experience at HM. I was in a landmark class, in the class of 1976: we were the last all boys' class, and were privileged to be part of the HM Theater in transition. I was part of the group that named it the Horace Mann Theater Company. I even had t-shirts made! I had the pleasure of working with long-time theater teacher Fred Little in acting classes ("Upstage, Downstage, Upstage, Turn, Upstage, Downstage, Upstage, Turn"--a favorite exercise), and in one of the last plays he directed in his final year, The Time of Your Life, in 1972. I also was in the first play Barry Siebelt directed at HM--our eighth grade production of an original story theater, and worked with him many other times Finally, I was in the first play Anne MacKay directed--him by ee cummings, in 1973, and again in many other plays.

Yawitz is still in close touch with Anne MacKay, who traveled from her home in Orient, New York by bus to see his show last summer. "She gave me a book of her poetry and signed it, 'To Peter, my favorite actor.'"

Yawitz returned to Horace Mann last year with his family. "We toured the amazing new theater, and I was surprised to see pictures of me in HM productions from the early '70s."

The fact that Yawitz' HM Theater Company career is still current, at least on the walls of the Alfred Gross Theater's Jordon Roth Lobby, hearkens back to another experience the performer had as a student here.

"Fred, Anne and Barry were all incredibly supportive of me, and encouraged me to pursue a career in performance," said Yawitz. "I remember my telling Barry that I didn't want that kind of life, and didn't think I'd end up in the performing arts. He laughed and said: 'That's what you think.' Those words haunted me through business school and all the jobs I've had since college.

"I performed just a little at Princeton, but didn't start up again until I was in the Wharton Follies in grad school. When I moved back to New York, I joined St. Bart's Players--a wonderful community theater geared for former high school and college theater performers who chose the business life. I was cast as the lead in many musicals there. I can't believe I had the energy to work full time, travel, and still rehearse at night!

"When my employer went belly-up in the late-80's I tried acting full time, joined Actors' Equity and got an agent pretty fast." Among Yawitz' roles was that of the voice of Mumfie The Elephant in the television series The Magic Adventures of Mumfie. But, Yawitz said he "just hated the lifestyle, so I eased myself back into business."

The business, comedy balancing act

No one sees the links, and some of the irony, between the double life Yawitz leads than the businessman/performer himself. A Princeton graduate who earned his MBA at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, Yawitz has taught management communications at Columbia Business School of Management. At Clear Communication his clients include all of Wall Street's heavy hitters, and some branches of government as well. The work Clear Communication does in coaching executive speakers, offering communications seminars, and institutional research and sales advice, receives rave reviews from satisfied customers within this list, who respect Yawitz for the respect he gives their work. But, another set of reviewers--those in the entertainment press--laud Yawitz' out-of-office antics about the business world as being "dead-pan funny" and "instinctively sharp." His wit has been compared to that of Mort Sahl.

Of the interception between business, comedy, and the ethics of using his experience with clients in one area to amuse audiences in another, Yawitz' show is one of the most popular on the corporate private event calendar. "Most business people I encounter love to laugh at business and some of the stupidity and inefficiencies they see," Yawitz said. "I am also extremely discreet. I never say anything about clients or other people I've met."

The ability to say "just the right thing" is why reviewers rave about A New Man. It includes such songs as Talk Like a Guy, with music written by every singer's favorite arranger Dick Gallagher, who passed away in January, and Semi-Demi Intellectual, with music by nightlife great David Friedman. Not Good Enough, Yawitz wrote with his friend, TV and film composer Peter Lurye, has stopped shows cold.

In one of his crowd-pleasing favorites, Cliché Bingo, Yawitz does for business what fellow alum Tom Lehrer '43 did for science. In 1959 Lehrer's immortal song The Elements combined all 102 listing on The Periodic Table of Elements into one anthem In Cliché Bingo Yawitz assembles 85 business buzzwords into one of the richest send-ups of contemporary commerce culture since some of the testimony in the Martha Stewart trial. Show Business Weekly, for one, called the song a "masterpiece of construction and performance."

A masterpiece of construction? Similar words have been used to describe the work of a host of other Horace Mann alums with distinguished writing careers. How does Peter accomplish this in the short-song and comic bit format? How does he manage to say "just the right thing?"

"When I am in any business meeting I jot down every new cliché I hear," Yawitz said. "I'll often tell young business people to cut out the jargon since they're not saying anything specific or original. I remind them that just because they hear other people saying these buzzwords doesn't mean that when they use them they'll seem more with-it. When I show the cliché bingo board at a seminar I always get a collective 'Oh I hate that phrase! My boss uses it all time!'"

"I must admit, I am very meticulous in my writing, and won't settle for crap. I remember Tek Lin saying--and I still life my life by this--is "cut the crap and get to the point."

For those who missed Peter's acceptance "performance" at the Nightlife Awards ceremony, Peter Yawitz and his show A New Mann will be warming the winter weather away at The Hideaway Room at Helen's, a club on 169 Eighth Avenue, between 18th and 19th Streets in New York on Fridays and Sundays in February, with shows at 7 p.m. on February 4 and February 11, and at 4:30 p.m. on Sundays, February 6 and 13, 2004.

It's a show no HM alum will want to miss. As Michael Portantiere wrote on theatermania.com "There's still quite a bit of intelligent, witty fare out there. Example: the hilarious lyrics of performer-songwriter Peter Yawitz, whose show is a winner." For a preview, you can go to www.peteryawitz.com to hear clips of some of the performer's songs.