I spent the better part of a decade co-writing a travel guide to Las Vegas, but I’ve barely been to Sin City since the COVID pandemic started. That is, until late last month, when one of my favorite local vocal duos brought the glitz and glitter of the Strip practically to my own backyard, just off Conway Road. On a recent Saturday afternoon, award-winning singers Natalie Cordone and Shawn Kilgore previewed their new musical celebration, Vegas, Baby! Hits of the Headliners (vegasbabyshow.com) in front of an appreciative audience of parishioners at Blessed Trinity Catholic Church. Afterward, I interviewed the pair — who perform as Cordone & Kilgore — about the 12-year road to their new self-produced production, which they’ll perform twice at Enzo’s on the Lake in Longwood on Oct. 13, before taking it on tour in 2025.
Although they were strangers when cast as a husband and wife trying to get pregnant in the play Baby at Winter Park Playhouse back in spring 2012, Kilgore recalls, “We became very close, very fast; all of our scenes were in a bed, we couldn’t help but become close friends super quickly.” Later that summer, Cordone invited him to join her onstage during a cabaret, and the concept of their first show was soon spawned. “We just received so many compliments on our natural onstage chemistry, and we thought maybe we should try to do something with that.”
Bonding over a shared love of vintage vocalists and encouraged by repeated comparisons to mid-century superstars Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, they created a tribute concert that successfully toured for seven years. “We love singing music that is driven by an emotional connection, and we love connecting with an audience,” says Cordone in praise of popular songs from a half-century ago, while also admitting that they weren’t huge fans of the crooning couple beforehand. “The music of that era is so impactful and uses our voices in a way that some of the other eras don’t allow us to do.”
That Steve & Eydie show took them from Don’t Tell Mama in Manhattan to the Grand Oshkosh in Wisconsin with a two-week residency in Las Vegas along the way, which led directly to this latest effort. “All of our idols, the people that we really want to hear their music, they all had residencies in Las Vegas, [so] to be able to pay homage to them is really pretty incredible,” says Cordone, who adds that she can go to Las Vegas for weeks on end and “never pull a slot machine, [but] that bygone era of Las Vegas, the Rat Pack and all of those guys, that’s the Vegas that I want to experience.”
Rat Packers like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra certainly make appearances on Vegas, Baby‘s setlist — which celebrates iconic casino headliners from the early 1960s all the way through the late 1990s — but so do Dolly Parton and Bette Midler, as well as Barry Manilow and Billy Joel. Acknowledging that audiences who recall Lawrence and Gormé are aging out, Kilgore calls their new show’s more diverse repertoire — which climaxes with an emotional Celine Dion classic — “an effort to reach a broader audience [and] to reach a bit of a younger audience.”
The audience for the fundraiser at Blessed Trinity (where Cordone and her family are longtime parishioners) might have been on the elderly side, but I’d expect a livelier demographic when Vegas, Baby! makes its outdoor debut at Enzo’s on the Lake, with light bites and multiple bars available during the al fresco shows at 5 and 8 p.m. Plus, there’s a chance you might hear a hit or two that I didn’t; as Cordone says, “Every time we’ve done the show, we’ve added new songs in, because it’s such an expansive range of artists that we have to choose from — we have this huge bank of songs.”
While many other tribute shows use prerecorded instrumental tracks, Vegas, Baby! is backed by a live four-piece band led by orchestrator John Olearchick, Jr., whom Kilgore calls “an incredibly talented person [who] turned out to be a great friend, and he’s really personally invested in what we’re doing. He believes in us, which is a very nice thing to have in the music director and arranger.”
Supported by Olearchick and others — including Cordone’s mother, Linda, the costumer who curates the closets full of Bob Mackie-esque sequin-spangled gowns she goes through, Cher-style — Cordone & Kilgore have recently taken the reins of their own careers, with Cordone handling the booking and administrative side of things, and Kilgore handling the production and technical side. “Nobody will manage us like we’ll manage ourselves, or sell us like we will sell ourselves,” says Kilgore. “It’s been a journey … this past 12 years, we’ve gone from being self-represented to having an agent to being self-represented, [and] I feel like we’re in a really good place now with it all.”
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This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2024.