"Life is a cabaret, old chum!"

Liza Minnelli said it best, and now Penn State will have its own razzling, dazzling cabaret.

Eight women from the School of Music will perform in an original cabaret tonight at the Penn State Downtown Theatre Center, 146 S. Allen St., at 7:30. Ain't There Anyone Here for Love? features songs from musical theatre, jazz and some cabaret music, Allison Schwier (senior-chemical engineering), a performer in the show, said.

"This is actually the first cabaret of its kind within the School of Music," Schwier said. "We wanted to take an opportunity to showcase all the talents of the School of Music."

The cabaret boasts a wide variety of songs, including numbers from Into the Woods and the recent I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change.

"I think it's just nice because it shows a variety of all different kinds of styles and we each sort of picked out pieces that mean a lot to us or that we feel really good about performing," said Sarah Holgate (senior-piano performance), another entertainer in the show.

Schwier and Holgate came up with the idea for a cabaret at Penn State. They established the idea in the spring, and over the summer each cast member worked individually, Schwier said.

Now they are putting their work together into one big performance, with the L-word as a unifying theme.

"Everyone picked their songs ahead of time and we wanted to tie it all together with a theme, and love was the common theme," Holgate said. "We wrote out the order and patter after having the songs and had to somehow fit them all together. That was a challenge and kind of a fun thing at the same time."

For those unfamiliar with cabaret lingo, "patter" is the term for words said between each musical number in the show. The ensemble consists of seven undergraduate students and one professor.

"Most of us in the show spent a lot of time doing musicals and jazz and different things in high school," Holgate said. "Since we've come here we've been so busy with our regular majors, so we didn't have a chance to do those things as much as we used to. [The cabaret] is an opportunity to do something that we all enjoy."

Jennifer Trost, assistant professor of music, became involved after having Schwier as a student last year. This is her second year at Penn State after spending 13 years as an opera singer in Germany.

"This is new for me, so I'm also testing myself by doing cabaret," Trost said. "[This] is the first time I've done something like this in about 20 years, but it's turning out to be a lot of fun." While offering some supervision, this is a student-run project, so the students made some decisions concerning how they wanted to present the show, Trost said.

"I think that there's an element of improvisation, being spontaneous in the moment and I think that's what makes it alive," she said.