Critics’ picks: Best live music in NYC

Maye’s stellar past includes a string of classy RCA albums in the ’60s and countless Tonight Show appearances, but this husky-voiced, earthy belter still sounds great at the age of 96—and she turns 97 on April 10, toward the start of her two week run at 54 below. Beyond her remarkable energy and musical acuity, the astonishing Maye has a bone-deep comfort that imbues familiar songs with fresh simplicity, truthfulness and power.    

A Fabergé radical—beautiful, ridiculous and full of hidden tricks—the sublimely freakish Taylor Mac pilots audiences through fantastical journeys, guided by the compass of his magnetic individuality. In the culmination of a five-year project, the writer-performer famously surveyed the past 250 years of American music in a 24-hour marathon that was immediately hailed as a history-making event in and of itself. Mac's weekly April shows at Pangea are workshops of a all-new show that invites audiences to sing along with original songs written during the dark days of the Covid pandemic.

Recovering Broadway actor John Hill, an original Hairspray nice kid and Boy from Oz heel, has matured into a comedian and muscle-daddy Instathot; his résumé includes a long and fruitful collaboration with Bravo macher Andy Cohen, first as a producer of Watch What Happens: Live! and now as Cohen's daily radio cohost on SiriusXM. He also knows how to put an entertaining club act together (as he has often helped do for Natalie Joy Johnson). In his latest visit to the Green Room 42, he shares acid-edged dispatches about gay dating, sober living and reality TV, studded with sometimes naughty original comedic songs.

PJ Adzima, who currently plays the hopeful but hopelessly repressed Elder McKinley in Broadway's The Book of Mormon, hosts a neovaudevillian monthly variety show at the Slipper Room that proffers an eclectic mix of musical-theater, comedy, drag, circus and burlesque performances. A down-and-dirtier version of the show also plays there every week on Saturdays at midnight.

Few singers have the sheer macho swagger of Lea DeLaria, who rose to fame as a butcher-than-thou stand-up comic and Broadway star, and more recently earned new fans as Big Boo on Orange Is the New Black. As a jazz vocalist, she has tough-guy sell and a penchant for scat. In her monthly brunch set at 54 Below, she tackles Great American Songbook standards and showtunes by such upper-echelon writers as Stephen Sondheim, Michael John LaChiusa and Kander and Ebb. 

After originating the web-singing title role in the ill-fated Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Reeve Carney swung back onto Broadway as Orpheus in Hadestown and has also played Dorian Gray in Penny Dreadful and Tom Ford in House of Gucci. Now he brings his otherworldly tenor to the Green Room 42 with a solo show that includes some standards but focuses on original songs.

Part cabaret, part piano bar and part social set, Cast Party offers a chance to hear rising and established talents step up to the microphone (backed by the slap and tickle of Steve Doyle on bass and Billy Stritch at the ivories, plus the bang of Daniel Glass on drums). The waggish Caruso presides as host.

He’s worked with Liza Minnelli, Kylie Minogue and just about every downtown act in NYC. Now composer, pianist and performer Lance Horne hosts his own wild night of singing, drinking and dancing, strip-teasing and bad behavior at the East Village nightlife hub Club Cumming. Expect advanced show-tune geekery and appearances by Broadway stars looking to get down by the piano. Plan to sleep in on Tuesday.

More amore! After a successful debut last year, this cabaret collection of Italian-American hits (such as “Mambo Italiano,” “Volare" and “Quando, Quando, Quando") is back for another go at 54 Below. The cast includes holdovers from the first incarnation—Anthony Festa, Analise Scarpaci, Rachel Zatcoff and the show's producer, Raquel Nobile Fernandez—as well as newcomers Donna Vivino, Bella DeNapoli, Cole Grey and Jared Zirilli. The music director, again, is Charles Santoro. 

Mosher is one of those talents you need to see to believe: warm, funny, biting, ferociously committed. In her biweekly series—now held at the Green Room 42 after years at Birdland—she invites a gaggle of performers from Broadway and beyond to show their talents. Guests at the April 15 edition include Jelani Remy, Jeff Harnar, Richard Jay-Alexander, Ava Nicole Frances, Keve Wilson, Yael Rasooly, Ivory Fox, Juson Williams, Annie Thomas, Ella Miller and Izzy Casciani.