Bringing his Café Carlyle cabaret show to Boca Raton will be even more fun and fabulous on the big stage at Mizner Park, says the multi-talented fashion designer, actor, singer and Project Runway All-Stars judge, Isaac Mizrahi.
Mizrahi will present his cabaret show, “An Evening with Isaac Mizrahi,” on Saturday, March 9, at the Festival of the Arts Boca at the Mizner Park Amphitheater.
The New York High School for the Performing Arts graduate has a long history of theater performance and has never stopped performing, despite other passions and commitments.
“I mean this truly,” he says by phone from New York, when asked what audiences can expect from his show. “It’s cabaret on a bigger scale. With more people reacting, it’s more fun for me and the audience.”
“There’s a give-and-take that happens,” he says. “It’s fun and weirdly intimate at the same time. Because I don’t do three jillion tour dates, each show is really special.”
In addition to his couture line, where he dressed celebrities such as Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman and Sarah Jessica Parker, his 1994 documentary film, Unzipped, received an award at the Sundance Film Festival.
He hosted The Isaac Mizrahi Show on the Oxygen network, which ran for seven years, authored two books, and appeared in movies and TV. Currently, he hosts the podcast Hello Isaac and is chief designer for the Isaac Mizrahi brands, which he has promoted on QVC since 2009.
For the cabaret show, Mizrahi brings his own six-piece jazz band, a piano, two bass players, a drummer and percussionist. He has an annual residency at Café Carlyle in New York City and recounts an anecdote about once being there in the audience for renowned cabaret singer Bobby Short.
Although Mizrahi was sitting in the back of the room, he says he could feel Short’s eyes on him and was so nervous, he couldn’t enjoy his dinner.
In Boca, he will perform a range of tunes from Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Billie Eilish and Cole Porter and dish on sex, politics, social media and his latest Instagram obsessions. He channels his “spirit mother,” the late comedian Joan Rivers (the two worked together on QVC and red carpet events).
He also finds comedic inspiration in Sarah Silverman and Michelle Wolf (“the funniest, the funniest”) a writer for both the Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah who also performed at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Best friends in high school with Gina Belafonte, an actor and the youngest daughter of singer Harry Belafonte, Mizrahi remembers hanging out at their house on West End Avenue and finding inspiration in Harry Belafonte as a role model, both artistically and personally.
“He was a great thinker,” Mizrahi says. “I looked up to him.”
Mizrahi comes to his creative callings organically.
As a kid growing up in New York in a traditional, Orthodox Syrian Jewish household, being gay or forging a career in the arts was not “a thing.”
At the age of 10, out of the blue, Mizrahi, says he became obsessed with Liza Minelli, Dionne Warwick, Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland, and not knowing they were gay icons, began doing female impersonations in his driveway.
“This was not a source of pride in my family in the 1970s,” he says.
His parents were “amazing parents,” he says, but afraid for their gay son. Rather than pursuing his acting or performing dreams at that time, Mizrahi chose fashion as the safer option.
“I wanted to get a job, make money and get my own place,” he remembers.
After graduating from Parsons School of Design in 1982, Mizrahi got hired at Perry Ellis as a womenswear designer and went on to win the Perry Ellis Best Newcomer award in 1988.
Admitting that luck and good timing play a role in his success, Mizrahi also acknowledges that hard work helps.
“It doesn’t hurt to work while you’re waiting for that break,” he jokes. “I can’t define it, exactly. It just means that sometimes you get a break in life. You may not even realize it’s a break, then everything happens.”
Things continue to happen for Mizrahi.
In 2011, he married his long-time partner, Arnold Germer, and the two live with their two rescue dogs in Greenwich Village, in a home furnished with his original designs that has been featured in Architectural Digest.
That’s where Mizrahi indulges his other passion, for cooking.
Although, he says, since his husband became vegan, he doesn’t cook or roast as much, he will occasionally cook himself some pasta with pork (hope his mother’s not reading this!).
He cooked an all-vegan Asian-inspired Thanksgiving dinner, which he said was fun, but a lot of work shopping and assembling all the ingredients. Discovering the Impossible brand burgers, he says he now prefers them to regular burgers, especially if he’s performing.
“When you’re on stage, what you eat is really important,” he says, joking that “Seventy-five percent of show business is eating the right thing.” Performing on stage can be exhausting and demanding, and like an athlete, you have to maximize your endurance.
Coming to Boca Raton, Mizrahi says he won’t have much time to sight-see or hang by the beach. It’s one stop on his tour schedule, which includes stops in New Hope, Pa., Queens, N.Y., and Westport, Conn., in June.
Always sketching ideas and thoughts for fashion and now for the stage, Mizrahi finds inspiration wherever he goes. When an idea for his new Carlyle show hits at 3 a.m., he sends himself an email to keep track of his ideas.
“I’ve been to Florida before, but it’s all a blur,” he jokes. “I look forward to coming down to Boca Raton, rehearsing with the band, then relaxing and chilling before and after the show.”
An Evening With Isaac Mizrahi is set for 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Mizner Park Amphitheatre. For tickets, which range from $30 to $115, visit festivalboca.org or call 561-757-4762.