As a fashion designer, Isaac Mizrahi would keep working on his garments up until the moment his models walked out onto the runway.
With his cabaret performances, that same drive holds true. Days before he comes to Southern California for a trio of shows, Mizrahi is writing new song lyrics to old standards and finetuning jokes for his encore.
“At the end of the show, I talk about the difference between then and now and Trump America,” he says of his California tour that includes nights in Beverly Hills, Long Beach and La Jolla.
“I talk about my pronoun. I’m very fiercely protective, especially now, of pronouns and people’s wishes to be called certain things,” he continues. “I am questioning what my pronoun is – and it’s not really “he” or “she.”
“I think my pronoun is ‘Liza,’” Mizrahi says of Ms. Minnelli, a performer who knows a thing or two about a cabaret. “If you say, ‘Liza/’ I say, ‘Yes? Can I help you?’
“Then I do ‘Liza With a Z’ – that’s my favorite thing to do as an encore.”
Since his annual residency at the Cafe Carlyle in New York City and a run of shows in Florida, Mizrahi’s been working on ways to zhuzh up the finish.
“I feel like I can bring the audience even further into that thought,” he says. “How it’s not the easiest thing in the world to be a Liza.”
Mizrahi elaborates on the thought, as if to explain how someone you knew as a designer could become a cabaret performer – or a Liza.
“You’re making clothes, and then all of a sudden you’re standing in front of people, and you’re singing,” Mizrahi says.
“It takes a lot of courage for a person to be a Liza when you don’t expect to be a Liza.”
The stage came first
Mizrahi, 63, became famous initially for a fashion career that took off in 1987 when his eponymous first collection debuted at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City. Since then, he’s had several different lines, been the star of the acclaimed documentary “Unzipped,” judged contestants for seven seasons of “Project Runway: All Stars,” and had his own talk show on the Style Network.
But the cabaret show is a link to his earliest passion for performance, Mizrahi says.
“I was doing this before I was doing clothes,” he says on a phone call from his Long Island home. “I went to the performing arts high school, and I was groomed as a stage performer and an entertainer.
“I had a few roles here and there,” Mizrahi continues. “I was in the movie ‘Fame,’ which was about the school I went to. It was filmed the year I graduated. I performed with friends in nightclubs in the city in the ’70s and ’80s. Even when I was working at Perry Ellis, even when I was working at Calvin Klein, I was doing things. I was designing costumes and all kinds of things involved with the theater.”
Mizrahi says he’d always planned to open a fashion company someday. It just happened much earlier than he’d ever imagined.
“The reason I was scared to be an actor when I left high school was because I needed money to get out of the house,” he says. “I mean, it just isn’t great being who I was in that family, being gay in that very religious Jewish family.
“I was a little afraid I wouldn’t get hired as an actor and I wouldn’t be able to support myself. And there were so many jobs as design assistants. So I went to Parsons (School of Design) and I got an amazing job. I was making a lot of money when I was like 20 years old and I was able to move out.”
Still, even after he launched his own fashion line, there were moments where he missed that other path.
“I remember a phone call in my first studio from a friend of mine,” Mizrahi says. “He had this incredible kind of downtown New York City performance company, and they were doing the Clare Booth Luce play ‘The Women’ starring only men.
“He was like, Isaac, you must be this part!’ which was the Countess de Lage,” he continues. “And I swear to God, when he said it, I was like, ‘Darling, right now I’m trashing everything I’ve done for the past two years.’”
Mizrahi did not, in fact, close his fashion studio to star in an off-off-Broadway production of “The Woman.” But he wanted to.
“It absolutely killed me” he says. “It killed me that I couldn’t do that.”
There is a sweet postscript to that bittersweet anecdote. In 2002, Mizrahi won a Drama Desk Award for outstanding costume design for the 2001 Broadway revival of “The Women.”
The role of the Countess de Lage was performed by Rue McLanahan of “Golden Girls” fame.
Sing a song
As a cabaret performer, Mizrahi has been described by the New York Times as “a founding father of a genre that fuses performance art, music, and stand-up comedy,” by the New York Times.
The songs he curates for each new edition of the show range from the Great American Songbook and show tunes to contemporary pop songs, often with original arrangements developed in collaboration with the jazz sextet that accompanies him at his residencies in New York City and on the road.
“It’s an obsession I have with music, with songs,” he says of how a song makes its way into his repertoire. “My husband sent me that Billie Eilish song, ‘Everything I Wanted,’ a long time ago. I didn’t even know I liked her, but I love her now because I listen to everything she does. When I went to the ‘Barbie’ movie, frankly, the only thing I liked about that movie was the song [Eilish’s ‘What Was I Made For?’]
Mizrahi married his longtime partner, Arnold Germer, in 2011 several months after same-sex marriage was legalized in New York.
As for the older tunes?
“It might be showtunes and Sondheim, who was a good friend of mine,” Mizrahi says. “You hear some beautiful rendition of a song and you go, ‘You know what? If I change the tempo of that, and I make it into a slow song or a ballad or something, it could be unbelievable.’
“I do this cover of ‘Borderline,’” he says, referencing Madonna’s first Top 10 hit. “She didn’t write it, but she killed it. That’s her song. I do this slowed-down down kind of gritty version of, and it kills. It’s an arrangement I worked on with Ben (Waltzer, his drummer for several decades) and the guy who plays the glockenspiel.
“But also I rewrite the lyrics to ‘You’re The Top,’ that Cole Porter song, and I do that every single time I do a gig,” Mizrahi says. “I just wrote a bunch of new lyrics for L.A., which are just slightly more aggressive lyrics than I would have had in Florida. I just got finished with that literally yesterday and I was reading them to my husband, laughing.”
No bags allowed
When Mizrahi gets to Southern California, he’ll be traveling light.
“If you’re traveling with me, you cannot check any bags,” he says. “Honestly, I try to avoid checking clothes to the point where I will ship them. I don’t like standing, I don’t like those carousels. It’s really upsetting to me. I really take measures not to have luggage.”
Not everything about the road is a chore, Mizrahi adds.
“I especially love it when I’m traveling with the band,” he says. “One of my literally-look-forward-to things is when we have a bus that takes us from one location to another.
“That, darling? A tour bus? Ah, there is nothing more fun than a tour bus, you know.”
Just remember the words
It’s possible that when Mizrahi performs in Southern California, a famous face or two might show up in the audience. In his newest role, Mizrahi is a consulting producer on the Hulu comedy series “Mid-Century Modern,” which premiered on March 28 and stars Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer, Nathan Lee Graham, and the late Linda Lavin.
“Max Mutchnick is a friend of mine and he had this idea to pitch a show that was like ‘The Golden Girls’ but with three gay men,” Mizrahi says. “So, of course, the minute he said that I was like, ‘Excuse me, darling?’ And so we began to talk about it.”
Mizrahi read each script and offered notes and shared his thoughts and perspectives on the characters and stories in each episode.
“Whether they listened to my notes is not the issue,” he says. “The issue is that they had an outside person in New York looking at a script and going, ‘You know what about … blah, blah, blah.’”
He also continues to pick up traditional acting roles from time to time. In 2002, Mizrahi played the role of Amos Hart in “Chicago” on Broadway for six weeks. In December, he did a cameo opposite Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow for the forthcoming film “Marty Supreme.”
“It’s an adrenaline rush,” he says. “I have to tell you, when I was on Broadway doing Amos Hart, I had to get my (stuff) together every night, just emotionally. And I’ll tell you one thing, speaking of Liza, she was the one I looked at.
“I was like, look at her: she just walks out there and takes the (bleeping) audience. She owns those people and they love her back.
“Before you go on stage, you hear your music,” Mizrahi says of how he steels himself for the show. “It’s like, ‘That’s it, darling. Get out there and just remember the (bleeping) words.”