Critics’ picks: Best live music in NYC

The longtime New York entertainer, drag performer and political activist Marti Gould Cummings hosts a new weekly late-night talk show at Red Eye, joined by different guests from the theater world each week and Yaz Fukuoka at the piano. The series kicks off this month with an impressive roster of interviewees: Broadway soprano Ali Ewoldt (April 2), songwriters Stephen Trask and Our Lady J (April 9), musical comedian Cat Cohen (April 16), silver-voiced leading lady Melissa Errico (April 23) and masked country star turned Cabaret emcee Orville Peck (April 30).

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 April 27 edition include three cast members of Sondheim shows on Broadway—Jeff Blumenkrantz from the original Into the Woods, Leah Horowitz from the 2011 Follies, and Ramona Mallory from the 2009 A Little Night Music (whose parents, Mark Lambert and Victoria Mallory, were theat shows original juvenile leads in 1973!)—as well as Jacob Hoffman, Jon-Michael Reese, Sierra Rein and T. Oliver Reid. The saucy Rob Maitner plays host, and music director John Fischer is at the piano. 

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.

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.

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. 

Understudies, alternates and standbys get their moments in the sun in Stephen DeAngelis's longevous cabaret series, which began in 2003 and has so far shone a spotlight on more than 1,200 performers. The April edition features sometime Gypsy Rose lead Tryphena Wade, Kelly Belarmino, Andrew Montgomery Coleman, Sam Hartley, Hannah Kevitt, Jessi Kirtley, Michael Milkanin and Sunset Boulevardiers Emma Lloyd and Diego Andres Rodriguez. Rachel Dean is the musical director and accompanist.  

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.

Whether attracting or repelling her audiences, the international chanteuse Ute Lemper is never less than magnetic. Her style is perversely polymorphic: One moment she might tear into a song with predatory hunger, then she might purr out a dreamy croon or toss back her head for a brassy squeal of jazz. In her latest 54 Below set she takes a walk on the Weill side, a path she has trod very well in the past.