When you talk with Eddie Bruce — the young, but old-school-stylized nightclub Philadelphia vocalist who splits his career between wedding singing and cabaret crooning — you can feel the urgent passion in his voice as he addresses his work and his life.
However, mention that he has an upcoming “cabaret” coming up at Dino’s Backstage in Glenside with fellow singer Paula Johns and songs such as “What Matters Most,” Sondheim’s “Being Alive” and “Do You Love Me?” from “Fiddler on the Roof” and Bruce bristles.
“OK, first let’s talk about the term ‘cabaret,’” he begins. “I don’t like it. It is misleading to many people who think they are going to see the Kander and Ebb Broadway show ‘Cabaret.’ It is more accurately an intimate concert where the performer presents music that has meaning to him and/or a universal meaning that the audience can experience. It doesn’t have to mean just the Great American Songbook or Broadway … as long as the performer is able to leave the audience with a better sense of who he or she is at the end of the show. Honesty is crucial. Ah, I’m talking too much.”
Bruce has a similar passion when he discusses coming out as a gay man — 25 years ago — after having long been happily married to a woman with children and the whole white-picket-fence-car-life scenario.
In anticipation of his show with Johns, “Rhythm & Romance” at Dino’s Backstage/The Celebrity Room March 29-30, the singer/bandleader chatted about his professional and personal lives with PGN.
PGN: You seem annoyed that I used the word “cabaret.” Has that limited you in a way that maybe you thought you had escaped, like with the wedding-singer tag? Do you not like being pigeonholed?
EB: Not at all, and I am hardly annoyed about the wedding-singer thing, because I make my living doing those. I do, like, 35 weddings a year. I have one this weekend: 3,500 people at the Bellevue. The term “cabaret” is this intimate idea of a concert that we’re referring to. People often consider it to be too old, tired or mistake it for a Liza Minnelli movie. Maybe it can be all that, but it can also be as contemporary as you want it to be, and as cutting-edge as you need it to be — performance art mixed with old-fashioned nightclub vibes, like the Copa or the Empire Room. Add a little truth to that, instead of an act, mix in some self-disclosure, some honesty and music that means something to you. That is what cabaret should be. Maybe we need another term. Let’s make one up.
PGN: I like the performance-art thing, and there are singers similar to you who feel the same way.
EB: Marilyn Maye for one — this incredible lady life force who is going on 89 years old and still selling out shows. She bills herself as a nightclub performer with the glamour and style of the old days in an intimate setting and with a little bit of honesty.
PGN: And personal revelation. Rip the Band-Aid off. You came out ages ago. Why did you do so when you did so?
EB: That’s an old Band-Aid, a different era, a little harder than it might be today. I couldn’t stand the dishonesty and inauthenticity of my seemingly beautiful life: children, dogs, wife, cars, house, career: a perfect picture. I was unhappy — not in my love for all of them, my wife included — but that I was faking it. I was disintegrating internally. When the pain of not doing so was worse than the pain of doing it, I came out.
PGN: There are songs you did before you came out that surely you do now. How do the words and feelings change?
EB: They change with age for sure, whether you’re straight, gay, stay in or come out. The songs I sing are about finding my own truth. I’m not partnered up with anyone at present so I don’t have a particular person I’m thinking of when I’m singing a love song … I take that back. I do a song in this new show, “What Matters Most,” about cherishing what you have when you have it and think of my ex-wife when I’m singing. I loved her, and it was great when it lasted. So what if it didn’t last a lifetime? What matters is that we loved at all. Love is love. It doesn’t come down to gender.
PGN: You’ve performed the songs of Tony Bennett and Anthony Newley and now the righteousness of romance. What sort of show would you like to do next?
EB: I’d like to do the story you just mentioned: something gritty, honest and autobiographical modeled after Elaine Stritch’s “At Liberty”: the raw confessional telling of one’s triumphs, struggles. I have three children who made it through my divorce, but at what price? There’s struggles with substance abuse, jail, institutionalization, near-death — rough shit — but we all came through it happy and healthy, all while I put on my tux every Saturday night. Now, that’s a cabaret.
Eddie Bruce performs with Paula Johns 8 p.m. March 29-30 at Dino’s Backstage/The Celebrity Room, 287 N. Keswick Ave., Glenside. For more information or tickets, visit www.dinosbackstage.com.