Interview: Lea DeLaria of THE VERY BEST OF LEA DELARIA at Feinstein's At The Nikko

I think it’s safe to say there is no one else on the planet who’s had a career like Lea DeLaria. She first came to fame as a balls-to-the-wall lesbian standup comic, the kind all too ready to say the quiet part out loud. She broke new ground as the first openly gay comic on a late-night talk show with her 1993 appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show. Then she starred in the 1998 Broadway revival of On the Town where her small stature, big personality and even bigger voice had critics scrambling for new adjectives, hailing her as the new Ethel Merman.

DeLaria did a complete 180 with her 2001 album “Play It Cool” on the Warner Jazz label, which established her as one of the finest jazz vocalists of her generation. She has Ella Fitzgerald’s innate feel for swing, Peggy Lee’s knack for deftly underplaying a lyric, Annie Ross’ virtuosic bebop phrasing and Betty Carter’s fearlessness and ability to bend notes, all wrapped into something uniquely her. She turns classic showtunes like “All That Jazz” and “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” into rip-roaring corkers. Her subsequent “House of David” album so completely reinvented David Bowie’s repertoire that it’s hard to believe he hadn’t written tunes like “Rebel Rebel” specifically for her.

And then there is the work for which DeLaria is arguably most widely known – her extensive career as an actor onscreen. Among her many credits are playing Big Boo on the iconic Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, which won her three Screen Actors Guild Awards, Armistead Maupin’s Further Tales of the City miniseries and the seminal coming-of-age film Edge of Seventeen.

DeLaria is soon headed to the Bay Area where she started her career for a pair of dates at the swanky Feinstein’s at the Nikko nightclub. Audiences can expect an evening of impeccable jazz leavened with comedy and DeLaria’s irrepressible Stage Presence. I spoke with her by phone last week to learn more about the show and how she developed her serious jazz chops and unique vocal style. We also chatted about her formative days performing at the Valencia Rose in San Francisco and I asked her about a certain joke of hers that instantly became such a part of the zeitgeist that she had to drop it from her act. In conversation, she is exactly what you would expect – a warm and funny jazz nerd with a penchant for dropping the F bomb. The following has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What repertoire do you have planned for your Feinstein’s at the Nikko shows?

I think most people know I have a bunch of records out, so I will be doing tracks off of each of my records, telling stories about the tracks themselves and the making of that particular album. When other musicians do that it’s really dry, but obviously in San Francisco everyone knows I got my start there as a comedian who also sang, so when I tell stories about these things they’re always really funny.

You have had such a multi-faceted and unorthodox career. Do you ever run into fans of Orange Is the New Black or your standup comedy who are like, “Wait, Lea, you sing, too?”

Oh, I still get that, which is hilarious when you consider how many Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals I’ve done and the records I have out on a major label. And I even sang on Orange Is the New Black! So it’s just funny, and I don’t take offense at it. And if people don’t know, sometimes that’s a real treat. When I first got my deal with the Warner Jazz label, for example, people heard “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” on the radio and went insane for it. So they would buy tickets to see my show, having no idea of who I was or what I looked like. When I would walk into the club looking like me, you could just see the people kind of cross their arms and go, “What the fuck is that dyke gonna do?” You know what I mean? But then I’d sing “Welcome to My Party” and it would be like “What is that dyke gonna do? I’m gonna do that!” There’s just no way you can hear me sing that song without going “Holy shit!” I have a very distinct and unique style and sound, which is one of the first things my jazz pianist father told me to do, have your own sound.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard your Play It Cool album. It blew me away because I knew you could sing, but I didn’t know you had such an innate feel for jazz. Did you inherit that from your father?

Absolutely. He also taught me to read music, he taught me to sing, he taught me all the important things about the language of jazz. So my love for that idiom comes from me having been immersed in it from the second I was born. He was a professional jazz musician and none of my other siblings were remotely interested. I, on the other hand, almost as soon as I could talk, was singing.

I saw you in March at Broadway Backwards and your rendition of “Mack the Knife” just totally killed. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard you sing that song before. What is it like to do those big benefits where you’re expected to come on and wow the audience in five minutes? Are they fun or a little terrifying?

I wouldn’t say that it’s terrifying. First of all, we’re having a blast. We’re all part of the Broadway community and we’re all friends, but we never get to see each other because we’re always working. I spent the vast majority of my time in the dressing room with Leslie Uggams and Bernadette Peters, so it’s really great to just hang out. The audience is what I would call an incredibly friendly audience. They want to be entertained, so in many ways you just come out chomping at the bit to do it for them.

In my case, this arrangement of “Mack the Knife” when it was sent to me and I heard it, I was like “Oh, I’m gonna kill this. This is such a great arrangement.” Then it was just a matter of learning the words. “Mack the Knife” is basically the same shit over and over again so you’ve gotta figure out when you’re supposed to say “Dear” and when you’re supposed to say “Babe.” And it’s all inner rhymes, rhymed within the line rather than with the next line, which makes it a little rougher to memorize. But once I felt really confident with the memorization, then it was just all “Let’s have drinks.” We’re all backstage drinking wine and laughing and talking, and then going to the wings and watching people and screaming and loving everything.

You have your own unique sound, but I also hear overtones of all kinds of great jazz singers – Ella Fitzgerald, Annie Ross, Blossom Dearie, Carmen McRae, Diane Schuur, Janis Siegel and on and on. Who did you listen to growing up?

Oh, I listened to everybody, but – and I might shock you with this – I listen to more instrumentalists than I do singers. Which is why, for example, I did not know the lyrics to “Mack the Knife.” I’d certainly heard millions of instrumentalists play it, but Ella Fitzgerald in her Berlin live record famously fucked up the words on it. So it was like yeah, I kinda know some of these words, but then again I’m not gonna be able to get away with this the way Ella Fitzgerald gets away with it. I gotta learn these words!

But you will most often hear a saxophone coming out of my apartment. I’m a huge John Coltrane fan and Bird, Charlie Parker. But if I’m listening to singers, I go back and forth between Ella and Betty Carter as my two favorites. It just kind of depends on what mood I’m in.

I love how you’re able to totally reinvent songs like “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” or “All That Jazz,” plus so much of David Bowie’s repertoire, while still remaining true their original vibe. I was listening to your rendition of “Rebel Rebel” just yesterday and I found it hard to believe Bowie did not write that song specifically for you.

That’s very kind.

How do you find your own way into songs that we already know really, really well, and make them sound so personal to you?

Well, I don’t see why anybody would want to hear just a carbon copy version of somebody else’s song. There’s nothing interesting to me in that. But taking a song and an artist and a songwriter who you really respect – and there is no one that I respect more than David Bowie, there’s no one I respect more than Stephen Sondheim and Kander & Ebb - its actually my way of paying tribute to them to do their songs but [belts out] “do it my way.” So that’s what I’m kind of doing. I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to make my David Bowie album without David Bowie. He is the one that told everybody to go to my GoFundMe and donate money. Because apparently he had heard me and wanted to support me. And we broke the record, the cover, on his website. So he was immensely a big part of what happened and me being able to make that record, because my record label no longer existed.

How cool is that?

Right?

So he obviously heard your record.

Yes, he did. And in fact, I was doing it live in a little club called Smoke Jazz & Supper Club here in New York. They used to do a show on Wednesday nights called Round Midnight, so at 11:55 I was doing a run of doing my Bowie show and his entire band came, and they were agog.

Since the Feinstein gig marks your return to San Francisco, I have to ask you about the Valencia Rose. Back in the 80s, it seemed you were always performing there. I remember seeing you billed as a “fuckin’ dyke” and I wondered who IS this person?

“That fuckin’ dyke,” yeah!

When you think back on those days, what images come to mind?

God, there’s so many. The camel heads always pop into my head. The Valencia Rose very famously had three camel heads that stuck out by the stage. They were made of plaster and they were white and they were actually quite chic. One of my first jokes was on the other side of the wall there were three camel asses. The pink Valencia rose definitely pops right into my mind, Tom Ammiano pops right into my mind, Marga Gomez – fabulous, Ron Lanza, the people that brought the whole thing together.

And then of course the City just being devastated by AIDS, which is probably the thing that compelled me into a whole different league of standup because of my rage over my friends dying. It fueled my standup and it fueled my rage and it fueled me to get out there and be an activist and not just an entertainer.

My own favorite screen performance of yours is in the movie Edge of Seventeen. You were sort of the gay auntie we all wish we’d had.

Yes, that’s a perennial favorite among gay men of a certain age.

Did you base your interpretation of that character on anyone from your own life?

No, I did not. That movie was the true story of the person who wrote that movie. This woman existed, so I tried to get into the spirit of who she is. Apparently, she had a certain cadence with the way that she spoke, but since there wasn’t any recording of it, I had to fill it with my own. I think that’s one of the reasons it was such a relaxed and easy performance, and funny and people relate to her. Cause she was very, very real, but it was my own cadence, and instilled with love, because she always led with love. It was one of the first times I was ever allowed to play anyone quite like that.

You totally nailed the midwestern sensibility of that character, which surprised me because I’d always thought of you as such an urban creature.

I have a very urban sense about me, but I grew up in rural America. I was born in Belleville, Illinois, near St. Louis. But I left for San Francisco when I was a kid.

Like so many of us, you knew where you needed to be.

Oh, please! In those days, it was “Get to the Coast, Honey!” You know, you realize you’re gay, you go to the Coast, one or the other, West or East, sometimes both, but get the fuck out of the Midwest.

Is it true that you’re the originator of the Lesbian U-Haul joke?

Yes, I wrote that joke. That is a fact.

It’s one of those jokes that just feels so true that it became part of the vernacular.

Yeah, when I wrote it, I was living on the East coast, but I always did a West coast tour – and the joke beat me to the West coast! Like I had to cut the joke out of my act because it beat me to the West coast. Right? Then when I went to England, I took the joke there and they had never heard it, only there you had to say a “removal van” because they don’t have U-Hauls. And from England I went down to Australia, and it beat me to fuckin’ Australia! [laughs]

I will never forget watching ER and having that joke told – on ER! – and me just sitting there going “What, no money, no residuals, no nothing?” [laughs] Any queer comic from that time, they all know it was my joke. But people within our community just don’t.

It never occurred to me you could be a little too successful with a joke, to the point where people will think you’re stealing someone else’s material.

It’s like Henny Youngman, very famously the person who wrote “Take my wife… please.” He wrote it, but every comic in the world used it, so comics had to go “Well, Henny Youngman wrote that, it’s his joke.” It just became part of the vernacular of the Jewish comedy scene, and then the world in general.

So that’s kind of what happened to me. It was part of the vernacular of our culture and then – Boom! – it’s just gone everywhere. I wear that proudly. I like when somebody says it to me and then I just start laughing. And when I laugh, they’re like “You never heard that?” And I go, “I wrote it!” And they’re like, “Wait – what?!” It’s so funny.

(Photos by Tina Turnbow)

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