Lea DeLaria’s Big Gay Brunch

Cabaret

Lea DeLaria

By
Juan A. Ramirez
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on
September 11, 2024 4:15 PM
Category:
Features

Lea DeLaria, that rascally entertainer for whom everyone has a beloved in, has been hosting delightful monthly brunches at 54 Below for the better part of the year. (Mine, by the way, is the vastly underrated 1998 indie Edge of Seventeen.) Titled Brunch Is Gay after her observation that the weekend meal is a “gay high holiday,” the series is in its final stretch of its scheduled run, with guests like Lilli Cooper and Jackie Hoffman on the docket.

DeLaria is a gloriously varied entertainer; one performance in one medium can lead to a vastly different aspect of her person. So when I caught the July brunch, I discovered (oops) Janis Siegel, a nine-time Grammy-winning jazz singer who brought out DeLaria’s swing side. The two dueted “Down for Double” and Cy Coleman’s “I’ve Got Your Number” (which Siegel praised as a “nasty love song”) with some fantastic scatting, and Siegel doubled down on Coleman, taking his “I Walk a Little Faster” on her own before a brief round of audience Q&As.

It was touching to see DeLaria, herself a jazz aficionado (and the daughter of a jazz pianist!), fan out over Siegel, and wax poetic on Ella Fitzgerald and all her favorite artists. She’s a mean jazz singer too, opening with “Welcome to My Party” from LaChiusa’s Wild Party and doing a great rendition of Muddy Waters’ “I Love the Life I Live, I Live the Life I Love.”

The brunches are scheduled through December, though will hopefully extend up to (and beyond) the release of her next album, Fuck Love: a collection of “love gone wrong” songs she plans to drop for Valentine’s Day 2025. Already this year she’s had Drag Race fave Alexis Michelle, the musician Bitch (of course), and Tony-winner Gabriel Ebert (for a Cole Porter-themed brunch, which sounds impossibly delectable) join, and DeLaria is as amiable a host as she is a lively performer. And after? She calls to the bartenders, mid-bows, to have her post-show drinks ready: Casamigos añejo neat – with Perrier on the side.

Lea DeLaria: Brunch Is Gay is in performance monthly through December 8, 2024 at 54 Below on West 54th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

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Juan A. Ramirez

Juan A. Ramirez writes arts and culture reviews, features, and interviews for publications in New York and Boston, and will continue to do so until every last person is annoyed. Thanks to his MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University, he has suddenly found himself the expert on Queer Melodrama in Venezuelan Cinema, and is figuring out ways to apply that.