The Joey Arias Experience

If you've been living in New York for any significant length of time and know anything about the Downtown performance art scene, then you'll be familiar enough with Joe Arias to want to rush down to Joe's Pub, the cabaret tucked into the Public Theatre complex at Astor Place.

If not, "The Joey Arias Experience" will provide a suitable primer. (But hurry: The third and last show is Dec. 1!)

Although Arias has done the gay-bar drag queen scene, he's really more of a performance artist. His stage gender transformation can be straight on, as in "Strange Fruit," in which he channeled blues icon Billy Holiday and first attracted the Uptown crowd and critics. On the other hand, it can veer close to gender fuck.

At his Joe's Pub gig, Arias appears to be channeling actress Jane Russell, '50s pin-up Betty Paige and '30s flapper cartoon Betty Boop, with a slight dollop of Laura Nyro earth mother. He doesn't wait long to take off a conservative dress suit for a maillot-type showgirl outfit similar to the one Russell wore in the climactic courtroom scene in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."

The Gentlemen at Joe's Pub definitely preferred raven-haired brunettes -- or at least the one on stage. It's obvious that Arias has arrived; or, more accurately, he's moved from Downtown scenester to an artist recognized as brilliant, if not an outright genius; an icon, in other words.

Nevertheless, even icons have to deliver. A somewhat swendy cabaret venue, Joe's Pub has a lower cover price than clubs further uptown. But it's still a real-life cabaret.

Arias announced early on (and a few times after that) that he and his musicians had just returned from a brutal engagement in Toronto and that he was tired. He really didn't have to offer any excuses, because he was terrific.

If his voice was a bit ragged, he really sold his song list. If there was a theme to the evening, it was '60s rock. If this sounds like a recipe for cabaret hell, I am here to tell you that Arias' covers of classics like Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Rain" and Cream's "White Room" took the original and ran with it.

Thus, "Purple Rain" was even more psychedelic and "heavy"; "White Room," even more druggy and bluesy. Even a shopworn soft-rock ballad, Harry Nilsson's "Everyone's Talkin'," seemed fresh and new. One of the evening's highlights was "Revolution," from the Beatles' "The White Album." Arias slowed it down and bluesed even more than John Lennon had. Of course, there was a Lady Day song, one of her best known, "You've Changed."

Arias is an amazing performer and really is a true genius (MacArthur "genius grant" committee, are you listening?). Moreover, I know he was worn out from touring. However, there was a feeling that, as the evening wore on, that really was vodka in all those drinks. He always stayed with the band and his musicality never wavered -- but he seemed to a few times.

A few drinks, on the other hand, might have helped the guest singer who served as back-up shed her cabaret shtick for something more fitting to a performer who began his career in '80s East Village clubs where a rat running across your shoe (as happened to me in Limbo Lounge) came with no extra cover charge. She had a perfectly good cabaret voice and engaging stage manner, however, and came prepared.

That's more than can be said for someone Arias apparently met in Philadelphia, where he is a street "musician," ironic quotes. His was the kind of performance TV competition shows like "American Idol" (or "The Gong Show") throw in to highlight the show's contestants.

That was only a minor glitch, however, in an evening that nicely demonstrated that cabaret singers aren't all conservatory-trained clones and don't have to limit themselves to "The Great American Songbook."

If you don't see Arias in a nicely intimate venue like Joe's Pub, just remember I told you so in a few years when he's moved up to Carnegie Hall.