'Ladies Who Brunch' Returns to Boston's Club Café Featuring Brand New Cast

On Sunday, October 13, at the Club Café's Napoleon Room, John O'Neil will present the first installment of his popular "Ladies Who Brunch" series, now in its third season, this time featuring Eden Casteel, Valerie Sneade-Roy and Michelle Currie. Their sets will offer a wide variety of styles and genres appealing to a broad spectrum of musical tastes.

Eden Casteel

MAC Award winner Eden Casteel may not yet be a household name, but she's working on it, and it's going to happen. "I am the definition of a late bloomer," asserts the. Columbus Ohio native. "I was classically trained as an opera singer, with a degree in opera from University of Cincinnati. But she soon discovered that opera wasn't panning out. "Some people will find it hard to believe that it is hard to make a living singing opera," quips Casteel.

Getting married, having a son, moving from Virginia to Michigan, getting divorced, and then meeting her now husband of 14 years through Facebook, Casteel's performing was low-key, teaching music in private schools. "I did my first cabaret in Michigan as a goodbye gesture, before moving to Rhode Island, where my then boyfriend, now husband, was living," recalls Casteel. This show showed her another way to feature her high soprano voice without doing opera, making her realize that her real love was musical theater, and not opera after all.

But when she moved to Rhode Island, she fell back into opera and teaching. Then something happened that changed the course of her musical life. "Out of the blue, I got a call from Ida Zecco, who was booking shows in her new cabaret series at the Arctic Playhouse in West Warwick, RI," reveals Casteel. "I had done a couple of small roles with a Rhode Island theater company, and Ida had heard of me. She thought I would be a good act for her cabaret series."

In December 2016, Casteel performed her second cabaret show, accompanied by Jim Rice, who also assisted Casteel on "Phantom of the Opera," where he shouted, "Sing my lady, sing!!!" with Casteel then hitting those iconic operatic high notes as her show's finale. Casteel had such a good reception that Zecco booked her again at the Arctic Playhouse, and Casteel now had the cabaret bug.

"I heard about the St. Louis Cabaret Conference, which they were doing online at the time. I was one of eight singers, and we met every Saturday for 8 weeks," remembers Casteel. "I played the piano for myself. It was wonderful to get coaching in real time and get comments on both my singing and playing." Tony Award-winner and Broadway leading lady Faith Prince was one of the coaches and she pulled Casteel aside saying, "Who are you?" She further bonding with Casteel when they discovered they had both gone to University of Cincinnati. "I told her I went into opera but belonged in musical theater, and she agreed," recounts Casteel, "Faith then helped me with my next cabaret show, 'Kahn Artist: a Tribute to Madeline Kahn,' which premiered in July 2022 at Arctic Cabaret.'

Things took off from there. Casteel performed "Kahn Artist" in Boston, Then on the advice and encouragement of her 2023 O'Neil Cabaret Conference coach Lennie Watts she brought "Kahn Artist" to New York in October 2023, where it became a runaway hit. "Just after our 'Ladies Who Brunch,' show, I will perform 'Kahn Artist' for the 11th time in New York this past year," marvels Casteel. "I've done the show in New York 22 times overall."

Because Casteel is one of three performers in the "Ladies Who Lunch" show, each performing small sets alternating with one another, producer John O'Neil carefully curated their sets to give the show a well-paced structure, choosing songs from a longer list given to him by each singer, then arranging their order to create a proper arc to the show. Asked if anything from "Kahn Artist" will appear in one of her small sets, Casteel reveals, "John chose, "Not Getting Married Today," then adds, "I'm also doing a song I wrote about Rosh Hashanah even though I'm Catholic. It won a MAC Award. It's called 'What Are You Doing Rosh Hashanah Eve,' a spoof on the Frank Loesser chestnut, 'What Are You Doing New Year's Eve.'."

As a natural coloratura soprano, Casteel loves singing anything, light, high and fast "I do a lot of high notes in the show, A little Kristen Chenoweth a little Minnie Ripperton. I'm good at," she boasts! But then she also loves Linda Ronstadt. "My whole life I've been vacillating between those two kinds of singing: Mozart and Bach, then singing 'You're No Good.' Cabaret is the place that lets me sing them both. I like singing those high notes but then I want to belt. I love the variety."

For more on Eden Casteel, visit her YouTube page.

Valerie Sneade-Roy

Worcester, Massachusetts native Valerie Sneade Roy was also a late bloomer, not really discovering her singing talent until she was in high school. "My story is sad on many levels. A bit heartbreaking," Sneade-Roy concedes. The sad part is that her elementary school had to cut out the band and let go of music teachers thanks to Proposition 2-1/2, so she never really had the mentoring or even the opportunity to sing. It was her first high school boyfriend, Donald, who heard her humming one day, saw a singing talent there, and encouraged her to sing at parties.

The heartbreaking part was that in her junior year, on graduation day, Donald, a senior, who was graduating that day, died in a motorcycle accident. A year later, on her own graduation day, Sneade-Roy wanted to honor Donald by singing at her graduation ceremony. The band leader said, "You don't sing!" Even her brothers, who both play the guitar, said the same thing. But the younger of her two brothers offered to accompany her, though with great trepidation and skepticism. "Everyone expected me to fold, and my brother's hands were trembling as he played. But I walked out, liked I owned the place, and sang, and it changed the entire trajectory of my life. That's how I became a singer."

Like Casteel, Sneade-Roy started out studying opera, but with different intentions. "You learn the rules so you can break them," retorts Sneade-Roy. When she could, she studied with theatrical coaches and performed in musical theater. To hone her vocal technique, she studied with Phil Hall in New York, taking the bus there and back two-hours each way in the same day for a two-hour lesson, building up a 60-song repertoire in a matter of months, motivated by fierce determination. "I truly feel I was given the gift of song," declares Sneade-Roy. "It is the best gift I was ever given."

The gift seems to have run in the blood of the Sneade family. "My uncle was a very talented guitar player at a level that he probably should have been playing professionally with rock bands in the '70s, like Led Zeppelin," maintains Sneade-Roy." He was a gay man from a big Italian family. He couldn't be out with his family, and he was playing this style of music where women were throwing themselves at him, but he couldn't do anything with that!"

Her uncle taught Sneade-Roy's oldest brother how to play lead guitar, and the younger brother picked it up and taught himself when he was laid up for months with a broken leg. He then learned bass guitar, and the two brothers formed a band when Sneade-Roy was in her late teens. "They worked for decades doing wedding gigs. They never let me sing in their band, because they said I sounded like Judy Garland singing Janice Joplin," laments Sneade-Roy. "Ironically, I'm an Equity Actress and I'm singing professionally. Now they think I'm too good for them, so I've never sung with their band."

Another turning point for Sneade-Roy was meeting her longtime musical director and now close friend, Jim Rice, another Worcester native. When Rice was music director for Worcester Foothills' "HMS Pinafore," in which Sneade-Roy was cast, he approached her and said, "I like you. You need a call list so you could walk in anywhere and sing." He liked Sneade-Roy's high mix and a strong belt, with good technique she had learned from Phil Hall, but Rice thought she needed presentation polish.