The Showboats Must Go On (Even on Their Nights Off) By ERIK PIEPENBURG

uly 5, 2010
The Showboats Must Go On (Even on Their Nights Off) By ERIK PIEPENBURG
Bites from the Broadway bug can be deep, incurable and — for both actors and fans — easy to scratch, even on nights when not much is playing onstage.

Instead of resting on their nights off or going home after the curtain falls, many Broadway performers head to places across the city where no show tune or pop song is wasted. Watching them are Facebook-generated micro-fan clubs, fellow actors, Broadway hangers-on and, if kismet allows, producers, casting agents or other theatrical dream makers.

The options are plentiful on Monday nights, when most Broadway theaters are dark. One of the newest is at Bar-Tini Ultra Lounge, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen, and is presided over by the heavily mascaraed drag performer Paige Turner. On a recent Monday, Russell Fischer, who plays Joey and understudies the role of Frankie Valli in “Jersey Boys,” hopped on the small stage around 11 p.m. and performed two very non-Broadway songs (by Maroon 5 and Gnarls Barkley). He also auctioned off signed “Jersey Boys” posters to benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

“This is a great way to express myself,” Mr. Fischer said. “It’s so much more fun than staying home on my night off.”

The crowds at these events know their stuff. On that same evening a group of young men sang along to Paige Turner’s lip-synched performance of “The Spark of Creation” from the musical “Children of Eden.” And during a round of Name That Tune it took the crowd only five notes to shout out the identity of “The Trolley Song” from the film “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

In the audience was Joe Aaron Reid, enjoying a night out with friends before leaving for the Williamstown Theater Festival to appear in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Mr. Reid, who recently appeared in the Broadway revival of “Finian’s Rainbow,” said deciding whether to stay at home on his nights off was determined by how well his Broadway work week had gone.

“Everything depended on how good I was that week,” he said. “If I was good, I’d go out. If not, it was better to stay home.”

At the long-running Musical Mondays night at Splash, a gay nightclub in Chelsea, chorus boys (and their female friends) sing along to videos of Broadway musical numbers, movie clips and excerpts from Tony Award ceremonies past. (“And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” and “Defying Gravity” are favorites.) Around midnight the club turns into Curtain Call, a song-and-dance show hosted by Emily McNamara at which Broadway stars can sometimes be spotted performing.

Actors and other theater creatures are familiar to Jim Caruso, the host of Cast Party, a Monday night open-mike show at Birdland in the theater district, now in its seventh year. Mr. Caruso said off-night events like his, in which actors fresh off the bus have been known to mingle with the likes of Liza Minnelli and Idina Menzel, remain popular because they allow members of the Broadway world to pull a Jerome Kern and showboat.

“We’re all showoffs to a certain extent,” said Mr. Caruso, who appeared in “Liza’s at the Palace” on Broadway. “If you’re in a show, especially if you’re in the ensemble, maybe you’re not showing off what you do brilliantly. At Cast Party you can blow it out.” (Monday night at Birdland Mr. Caruso is to present a special benefit for Nashville flooding relief efforts called Singin’ in the Shower.)

Performing on nights off may also help actors find work. Mr. Caruso said Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist of “Wicked,” had once appeared at Cast Party and “talked to people about auditioning” for his show. “People have made some incredible contacts in that room,” Mr. Caruso said.

Broadway performers also use off-night and after-hours events as a way to catch up with friends who work more traditional 9-to-5 schedules. Performers “want to feel like they get a night out as well,” said Brandon Cutrell, who hosts After Party on Friday nights at the Laurie Beechman Theater in Hell’s Kitchen. “Even though they have a two-show day the next day.”

A recent guest at After Party was the comic actress Jackie Hoffman, now playing Grandma in “The Addams Family” on Broadway. Ms. Hoffman said her main reason for performing was to promote her CD of original songs. But she acknowledged that playing in front of a small crowd was intimate in a way the large Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where “The Addams Family” is playing, was not.

“In the show I’m in now I’m not a star,” she said. “But if I go to some low-end cabaret night, I can be the star.”

Not to mention that typical audience members for Ms. Hoffman’s solo shows, with their jokes about terrorism and cancer, probably aren’t lining up for “Addams Family” tchotchkes.

Ms. Hoffman said the audiences at “The Addams Family” were mostly families. “But these kinds of places are my crowd,” she added, “gays and bitter people.”

Blame the “Glee”-ification of the theater world, but at many of these musical evenings the set lists go beyond show tunes. A Pat Benatar anthem or a Christina Aguilera ballad can be a welcome respite after singing “Circle of Life” eight times a week.

“The people who come to my show just want to hear belting,” said Ben Cameron, the host of Broadway Sessions, Tuesday nights at Therapy, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen. “This is not the place to try out your new Weill song.”

Fatigue, either physical or vocal, doesn’t seem to stop many performers. Cheering on Mr. Fischer at Bar-Tini was Nova Thomas, who gave him voice lessons at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. Ms. Thomas said that while she, an opera singer, would normally rest her voice on a night off, she encouraged Mr. Fisher to perform on his.

“I reminded him to embrace the joy of singing and making music,” she said. “This is reminding him of why he sings.”