Atlantic City Weekly

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If dancing's your passion and you're seeking a new spot to cut loose this summer, check out the Taj Mahal's Ego Lounge on a Friday or Saturday evening. Doreen Taylor, a classically trained singer/songwriter/actress/dancer recently brought her acclaimed one-woman dance party from the Philadelphia club scene to the Taj's contemporary 11,000-square-foot lounge. She sings hits from a number of genres like pop, rock, jazz, swing, country and disco, and when she's not behind the mike she's DJ-ing during the four-hour (5-9pm) shindig. The show will be a weekend staple at the Taj through Sept. 5, except for Saturday, Aug. 22, when she's booked to perform at another venue.

"I always joke that if you don't like what you're hearing, wait five minutes and it'll change," says Taylor, who grew up outside of Buffalo, N.Y., and has a Masters degree in opera performance from Temple University in Philly. "I've done shows where I've sung all Sinatra or Dean Martin, and I've done standards where it's all jazz or all classics, but for this [show] it's very high energy the entire time. It's a non-stop, four-hour dance party designed to get people out on the dance floor."

During the act Taylor mixes in trivia, prize giveaways and some occasional comedy ("Nothing so raunchy you can't bring your mother to see it," she says), and in between live sets she'll spin records to keep things energetic.

"Sometimes a show will drag if you disappear for a while between sets and you lose people, so what I'll do is DJ so that it's non-stop from when I step on stage until the end," she says. "And I'll try to change it and mix things up from weekend to weekend.

"In Atlantic City, where a lot of people are just down for the weekend or visiting from other parts of the country or the world, you really can keep a show the same from week to week," she adds. "But for me personally, I need to keep it lively, keep it fresh. It's one of those things that's always evolving somehow. Occasionally I'll have a brainstorm at like three o'clock in the morning and get up and try to change it somehow."

Taylor discovered at an early age, and through a somewhat circuitous connection with a vocal coach, that she has a multiple-octave range to her voice. Singing, dancing and show business was not a professional preference of hers early on, but when one of her closest friends told her "you have this in you, and somehow you're going to do it," the prospect began to take shape. It was a bit later, in Toronto, when she and her mother and grandmother saw a performance of Phantom of the Opera, that a sort of prophetic moment took place in her show business career.

"I was never one of those kids who sang in the choir, or sang in any kind of serious capacity," she says. "But something happened to me when I saw that show, something touched me. My mom bought me the karaoke tracks [to Phantom], she heard me singing one time when she was vacuuming, and she thought it was the real recording."

Taylor wrote one and co-wrote two of the four songs on a demo CD entitled Unbreakable, and finds it somewhat cathartic to compose lyrics with music. "It's an outlet for me," she says. "In the same way people write things down in a journal as a release, I'll put feelings I have down in a song because it seems to be a language I understand better."

The vast majority of what she'll perform at Ego and other venues are cover songs that the masses tend to recognize, largely because that's standard operating procedure in casino lounges. She says that Ego, which features a sizable stage, dance floor and several private cabanas, gives her plenty of leeway in how she presents her show.

"[The Taj executives] have given me a lot of liberties, and haven't asserted that this is what you're doing, this is what you're wearing, or anything like that," she says. "That's really nice. Ego picked up the show after it had already gained a little steam in Philly. They liked what they saw and kind of let me do it with the attitude that they won't mess with it as long as it's working. But I know my limits and won't tempt the gods too much.

"I like this sort of performing best because you never really know what's going to happen," she adds. "When you're doing a musical or an opera or a stage performance, you're generally set back a ways from the audience, you're in costume, you have cast members around you, and you have that degree of separation. When you're doing a one-woman show you have to be 'on' because the audience is right in front of you and there's no one to fall back on if you screw up. There's no cast, dancers, backup singers -- you're it."