Review: Nothing is Off Limits for Isaac Mizrahi in Café Carlyle Debut DOES THIS SONG MAKE ME LOOK FAT?

Isaac Mizrahi has a simple question to ask: "Does this song make me look fat?"

Any variation of that prompt is normally a strong cue to walk on eggshells, but making his Café Carlyle debut on January 31 with a show named for and based on that query, Mizrahi took a no-holds-barred approach to the human body and just how hilarious and, at times, revolting it can be.

After opening the show with a silky-smooth cover of "Yes" (Kander & Ebb), the fashion designer-cum-cabaret singer dove in headfirst to his fascination of body horror and the body in general. When an audience member protested over the risqué-for-the-room subject of "vodka tamponing," Mizrahi brushed it off with a sheepish, "Oh boy, I have some racy stuff coming."

Mizrahi certainly didn't hold back for her or anyone else, and the show was better for it. Yet right from the start, the bawdier moments of his act were counteracted magnificently with the unexpectedly pure-even innocent- tone of his singing voice, and he seemed to revel in taking sharp left turns throughout the night.

His song selection mixed standards like the exuberant "C'est Si Bon" (Henri Betti/Andre Hornez) with several unexpected tracks, including the SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK multiplication tune "Figure Eight" (Bob Dorough). Originally sung by Blossom Dearie, it's oddly maudlin for an educational children's song, and Mizrahi's earnest rendition only enhanced the number's absurd charms.

In between songs, Mizrahi joked about things as average as adding a mirror near his shower ("Have you ever watched yourself lather? That'll keep you honest."), to moments few of us experience in our daily lives, like having the suit he wore onstage arrive from London nearly a decade after it was commissioned.

He almost always came back to the body horror implicit in, you know, being corporeal. In the most extreme case, that meant sending an Ambien-fueled email Anna Wintour in the middle of the night, urging her to split the famed September issue of Vogue in two. Per his recollection, Wintour asked "R U OK?" in a five-character text. Because, as he said ever-so-drily, "Anna was never big on sentences."

Throughout his breezy set, Mizrahi was most electric on stage when he was dishing about the stars he's worked with- from making, not one, but two breakaway skirts for Liza Minnelli, to watching Faye Dunaway refer to herself in the third person while trying on clothes (as in, "Oh, that's very Faye.").

When he wasn't tossing out witticisms, Mizrahi was handing out gifts, clearing out an assortment of unwanted home clutter, with the audience going wild over everything from a nail crystal kit to a bottle of kosher wine and even an award whose origins he couldn't recall.

Mizrahi was joined onstage by musical director Ben Waltzer on piano, Neal Miner on bass, Stefan Schatz on percussion, Joe Strasser on drums and Benny Benack III on trumpet. Benack was the inadvertent center of the evening's funniest running gag, with Mizrahi fretting that he was being upstaged, beginning with a knockout rendition of "Lotus Blossom" (Sam Coslow, Arthur Johnston).

Mizrahi's jazzy performance was confident and sultry, a far cry from his self-deprecating stories and, of course, the show's title. But the trumpet player's incredible solo, making his instrument growl, blew the crowd away with a true 1920s speakeasy vibe and led Mizrahi to insist, "Only one star, baby. One star!"

Benack's work on "You Fascinate Me So" (Cy Coleman/Carolyn Leigh) was "all too fascinating" to Mizrahi, and leading into his take on Cole Porter's "It's Bad for Me," he hilariously grumbled, "Let me guess: another trumpet solo?"

While Mizrahi appeared incredibly comfortable onstage, his segues weren't creaky so much as non-existent, with the performer mostly opting for some version of, "Shall we go to the next song?" Well, aside for that Cole Porter standard, which he determined to be about "how sex is difficult and painful," kicking it off with an enthusiastic, "All right, penises, here we go!"

But if Mizrahi's showman abilities were ever in question, any naysaying would've been quashed when his microphone malfunctioned at the start of "Baubles, Bangles & Beads" (George Forrest, Robert Wright).

Rather than go full New-Year's-Rockin'-Eve Mariah Carey, he simply shrugged and said, "Oh, no mic? I'll project." He proceeded to knock it out of the park, first with just a piano accompaniment and eventually with more of the band joining in.

Although much of DOES THIS SONG MAKE ME LOOK FAT? wasn't overtly political, Mizrahi ramped it up near the end, singing the "HBO version" of another Porter song, reworking the lyrics for a broadly comedic resistance anthem about white supremacists and love being detained at the Newark airport.

Asking for just a few more moments of the audience's time, Mizrahi closed out the show with a sweet cover of "Love Is All Around" (Sonny Curtis), the theme song to THE Mary Tyler Moore SHOW. Before he did, he exclaimed, "This is about America; this is about women; this is about love!"

From start to finish, Mizrahi filled the room with both uncontained gaiety and a sense that we all share some of the same fundamental anxieties, even if it's as seemingly banal as worrying about the side effects of prescription drugs. And, in a time when many are uncertain if we're going to make it after all, is there anything more important than that?

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