Adelaide Mestre's 'Top Drawer' Returns to Southampton Cultural Center

In 1960, Adelaide Mestre’s father and family fled Cuba in the wake of Castro’s revolution. Decades after her father’s death, Mestre, who grew up in New York, set out on a mission in search of poignant reminders of his life.

Mestre is a Sag Harbor resident and her award-winning one-woman show “Top Drawer” is a staged musical memoir about her journey to seek out her deceased father’s Steinway grand piano, which was left behind in Cuba when the family fled. The show returns to the Southampton Cultural Center stage for an encore performance on Sunday, December 10, at 4 p.m.

“Top Drawer” chronicles Mestre’s life growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with her mother, a thrice married, opera-singing socialite with impossible top-drawer standards, and her father, a gay, Cuban, manic-depressive concert pianist. With sentiment and humor, Mestre spins a tale of dysfunction and redemption and, ultimately, shares her discovery that art can be a kind of alchemy that transmutes loss and abandonment into freedom.

“Top Drawer” will make you laugh, cry and maybe even sing. Adelaide Mestre is an actress, singer, writer and solo show performer who has performed in numerous theatrical productions, musicals, cabarets and films including Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives.” “Top Drawer” was first presented at the New York International Fringe and has gone on to be produced at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora and cities around the country. Written and performed by Adelaide Mestre with Doug Oberhamer at the piano, the show is directed by Coco Cohn with technical direction and stage management by Stefania Diana Schramm.

Tickets for the December 10 performance of “Top Drawer” are $40 at scc-arts.org/top-drawer/. Southampton Cultural Center is at 25 Pond Lane in Southampton.