Shades of Graae: Manic and Mild

Jason Graae is the Jekyll & Hyde of cabaret. Or, perhaps, the three faces of Eve.

Whichever the case, he’s able to put across a sweetly earnest ballad one moment and rampage through a comic number the next--shifting personalities so abruptly that he makes your head spin. It’s a dangerous act, but he makes it work because he’s so genuine in the tender moments and so obviously having fun with the comic ones.

Having displayed these qualities in such stage shows as “Forbidden Broadway” and such cabaret acts as last year’s “An Evening of Self-Indulgence,” he showcases them anew in “An Evening of Self-Indulgence: The Sequel,” which he is performing through Saturday at the Cinegrill.

At Tuesday’s opening performance, he was barely a phrase into his first number--the title tune from the musical “Cabaret”--when that bane of bar singers everywhere, the blender, interrupted him. Soon, the lights were blacking out and the sound system had assumed an evil life of its own. Yet he gamely soldiered on, accompanied by the audience’s roars of laughter.

Soon, he was reprising all of the original “Evening of Self-Indulgence” in a riotous quickie recap and performing a grandly melodramatic--and humorously out-of-context--snippet from “Evita.”

Shifting moods, he turned his pleasing--if not always technically precise--high baritone to the hushed longing of Ann Hampton Callaway’s “Perfect” and the soothing phrases of “Till the Hurt Disappears,” by his musical director-pianist, Gerald Sternbach, and lyricist Faye Greenberg.

The only drawback: There was no real cohesiveness to this wildly diverse material, except for the advertised self-indulgence.

Graae pulled it off, but he’s just about the only guy around who could do so.

*

“An Evening of Self-Indulgence: The Sequel,” Cinegrill at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Blvd., L.A., through Saturday, 9 p.m. $15, plus $10 food or drink minimum. (323) 466-7000. Graae will perform a somewhat different program at the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s Founders Hall in Costa Mesa Oct. 25 to 28. (714) 556-ARTS or (213) 365-3500.