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Independent Singer picks up on Successful Trend

CONTACT: Jerome Salyers

Whether she's in an intimate nightclub or center stage at a sprawling music festival, Kate Michaels wins over audiences with her unique blend of jazz and romance.

A classically-trained vocalist, the American-born artist has a background in opera and musical theater. She also reaches into the big band era and builds celebrating over 100 years from the Great American Songbook and the glamour of Marilyn Monroe, one of Hollywood's brightest stars.

Kate recreates some of Marilyn's best known songs, mixing in some lesser-known gems that help give her shows a fresh, contemporary feel.

More than 30,000 people turned out to see Kate at the Centre Sportif du Bout-du Monde in Geneva where her show included A Fine Romance, Every Baby Needs a Daddy and the Monroe standard Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend.

"I like story songs the best, so of course the melodrama of Every Baby Needs a Daddy is great," she says. "To me it sounds like one of those gumshoe crime novels in music form. It reminds me of Dick Francis and Dragnet."

The best of the songs appear on Kate's recording, Just Marilyn, a sexy, sophisticated album receiving play on radio stations in France, Germany and Switzerland.

With big band arrangements by Colin Campbell, conductor of the Rat Pack Show, the songs beckon you to dress up in a white dinner jacket or an evening gown, order a martini and swing on the dance floor. And there was plenty of dancing this summer in Paris at the popular nightclub Le Petit Journal and at La Grand Hotel International where Kate took her live show.

"A lot of life is about romance and love -- wanting it, it, needing it, happy that you have it, miserable if you don't," Kate says. "I like expressing all of these sentiments. It's great to sing about love. Marilyn had great arrangers and it was such a pleasure to work with someone who understood how to put all this together to make something for the musicians and for me, the singer."

Why Marilyn?

Kate says there's more to Marilyn than Happy Birthday, Mr. President, the light comedies and the white dress. "She was one of the first women to take control of her own career and beat the studio heads at their own game. She is not one dimensional and I think that's how she is often viewed, unfortunately."

Kate isn't a one-dimensional performer either.

She has starred in opera and light-opera pieces including The Merry Widow, The Magic Flute and The Medium. She was in the cast of Andrew Lloyd Webber's production of The Phantom of the Opera in Basel, Switzerland and played the title role in Evita in the national Swiss production at Lake Thun in 2003. Performances include clubs and theaters such as the Mannheim National Theater, Badrutt's Palace Club Prive and the Ritz of Paris as well as many others.