Reviews
Multitalented Singer Thrives in Latest Stage of Career
By Sarah Rodman
Friday, March 28, 2003
No second acts in American lives? Pshaw.
F. Scott Fitzgerald clearly never met cabaret singer Bobbi Carrey, who’s already deep into the third act of her life and energetic enough to make you believe in a fourth.
The 50something single mom began her professional life as a successful photographer-filmmaker. Then she went to business school thinking she’d end up running some kind of arts organization. That’s not exactly what happened.
“I was at Fidelity for 10 years,” said Carrey with a laugh, of her second life as senior vice president of venture capital.“ By the time I was done, I was head of ethnic marketing and I had launched a bilingual, Hispanic Fidelity in Florida, and we were about to do Chinese in San Francisco.”
Two years ago, however, Carrey chucked her secure position to become a cabaret performer.
“I had been singing my whole life,”said Carrey, who’d been involved in the folk and gospel music scenes. (She also has been an antiques dealer and a tap dancer.) “But I hadn’t really done anything cabaretlike, and essentially the minute I saw some cabaret shows around town, I knew immediately that’s what I was supposed to do.”
In a relatively short time, Carrey has developed an audience - she gives an embarrassed giggle when mentioning her “groupies” - and released a well-received CD,“Between the Wars: Music From 1918-1941.” She has also blazed a trail of unconventional venues that other cabaret performers are starting to follow, including gigs at libraries, universities and business conferences.
Carrey may be an artist, but she’s also a shrewd businesswoman, and now she has the right and left side of her brain working in tandem. “It’s not that I have a really long-term plan, but one of the things that I did at Fidelity was start up new businesses, so I understand what it takes to go basically from nothing to something,”she said.
Suggest that she should probably supplement her music career by teaching business courses to struggling musicians of any genre, and you can see the fourth career glint in her eye.
Since she “jumped off the cliff,”Carrey hasn’t exactly raked in the dough - she jokes that she’s supporting her musical career not the other way around - but she believes she did the right thing.
“I’m not independently wealthy,”she said with a laugh about her financial downsizing,“but life is going to be fine, I just made a decision that I didn’t want to do this on the side.”
Because everyone knows the third act always contains the show-stopping number, Carrey is asked where she imagines belting it out.“I wouldn’t mind Carnegie Hall,”she said with a smile.
© Copyright by the Boston Herald