It's better than the light show at Wanamakers!
The Big Mess Cabaret is a community of performers, never clearly defined enough to be what the young people would call a collective, but retaining enough identity to be remain highly specific. The Big Mess Orchestra was in its 7th year in 1991, when the first Big Mess Cabaret took place. The shows owe more to Weimar-era Berlin entertainment than to the domesticated piano-bar version more familiar nowadays. Big Mess push-started the resurgence of the genre in Philadelphia, and presents performers from some of the area's finest theaters, dance groups, bands, and so on.