With music direction by Beckie Menzie and percussion by Irwin Berkowitz.

Anita Kallen and Catherine Thomson celebrate the famous, and not-so-famous, women songwriters who have contributed to Tin Pan Alley, the Great American Songbook, the Broadway canon, and contemporary popular music, with songs that span the decades.

Anita and Catherine share songs by composers and lyricists from Carolyn Leigh, Dorothy Fields, and Dana Seusse, to Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Gloria Estefan, among others, and entertain audiences with inspiring stories of how these women became part of the soundtrack of our lives.

This is the 3rd performance in their HERstory series. Audiences will remember their past musical celebrations of the 19th Amendment & Voting Rights (HERstory I) and Trailblazing Women (HERstory II).

Anita Kallen and Catherine Thomson met in the summer of 2010, when they were among 38 students from around the world selected to attend the International Cabaret Conference at Yale University. They worked with Broadway veterans such as Faith Prince and Tovah Feldshuh, as well as cabaret legend Julie Wilson. In 2011, they launched their musical partnership with a successful two-woman show called Dangerous Women, a comic exploration of the many ways in which women can be dangerous. With two other colleagues they formed a quartet and brought a sold-out celebration concert Bernstein at 100: Songs of Love and Longing to the Skokie Theatre in 2018.

Catherine has been reviewed in Cabaret Scenes as “...a cabaret artist to watch. Not only does she sing like a canary and move like a cat, she gets the art of cabaret and thus is, above all, a wonderful story teller.” She’s also performed in several Chicago Cabaret Professionals (CCP) reviews and its annual Gala at the Park West in Chicago. Her theatre credits include Dr. Eve in Sordid Lives, Odette in Southern Baptist Sissies, The Mistress in All Over, Velma in Hairspray, and Penny in Urinetown. Catherine’s passion for the arts extends beyond the stage, and she spent several years as an arts educator, most notably as a gallery educator (docent) at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) and now serves as a docent for the Chicago Architecture Center.

Anita has also been active in theater with leading roles that have included Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, Fiona in Brigadoon, Laurey Williams in Oklahoma, Irene Molloy in Hello Dolly, Joanne in Godspell, Marian Paroo in The Music Man, and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. MadKap audiences will remember her as Mrs. George Bernard Shaw in the 2014 Midwest Premiere of Mark Saltzman’s comedy, “Mr. Shaw Goes to Hollywood” at Chicago’s Greenhouse Theater. ("The grand Anita Kallen....engages the audience with her delightful style of storytelling." -- Chicago TheatreBeat). In January 2021, she was one of ten featured actors in Skokie’s virtual production, Talking With….