The best cabaret shows in NYC this month

Nobody stops a show like Broadway's Lillias White, who has built a career out of superpowered numbers in Once on This Island, Dreamgirls, How to Succeed…, The Life, Fela!, Hadestown and more. Her latest visit to 54 Below celebrates the release of her new album, a tribute to one of the finest jazz and pop singers of the 20th century: Sarah Vaughan, whose extraordinary range earned her two very different nicknames, "Sassy" and "the Divine One." The collection includes songs by artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstein, George Gershwin (“The Man I Love"), Erroll Garner ("Misty"), Tadd Dameron (“If You Could See Me Now") and even Vaughan herself. The music director is Mathis Picard, with whom White has been developing the project for years. (In a laudable effort to make cabaret more accessible, 54 Below offers subsidized $15 tickets, with no minimum, for those of limited economic means.)

New York’s cheeriest chorus boys go all out to celebrate the International Transgender Day of Visibility in a free concert at the Cooper Union. The alt-cabaret star and trans icon Justin Vivian Bond, who is always highly visible, lends their distinctive voice to the occasion in a guest spot.

Jennifer Damiano's Broadway career has had vertiginous up and downs: She was in the original casts of Spring Awakening and Next to Normal (scoring a Tony nom for the latter), then survived the carnage of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark only to land in the short-lived American Psycho. Now the proven singer and actor reveals another possible threat, performing original tunes from her debut EP as a songwriter, I’m So Sorry, Mary Jane—the title is a nod to he Spider-Man role—plus covers of favorites by other artists and maybe, if you ask really nicely, a musical-theater song or two.

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.

Talented singers from the Broadway and cabaret worlds sing side by side in this monthly dive into the fathomless depths of the late musical-theater deity Stephen Sondheim. Guests at the March 30 episode include Ramona Mallory, Daniel May, Orville Mendoza, Shereen Pimentel, Jim Poulos, James Seol and Lucia Spina. The saucy Rob Maitner plays host, and music director John Fischer is at the piano. 

John Riddle's smooth voice and suspicious handsomeness have helped make him the romantic rival audiences love to hate (or at least resent) as Hans in Frozen, Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera and the Billy Zane part, Cal, in Titanique. At Joe's Pub he leaves villainy behind—or does he?!—in an all-new nightclub set with a few special guests.

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.

Founded in 2016, New York City's EPIC Players—the acronym stands for Empower, Perform, Include, Create—is a nonprofit theater company that provides opportunities and communities for neurodivergent and disabled performers. In a pair of cabaret shows at Joe's Pub on April 2, performers from the troupe sing numbers from the Broadway roles they'd most like to play. (EPIC will also be appearing at Lincoln Center on April 12 as part of this year's Big Umbrella Festival.)

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.