John O’Hurley at the Café Carlyle: A Man With Standards

Best known as J. Peterman, Elaine’s boss on Seinfeld, John O’Hurley performs his show at the Café Carlyle as if he were that character projecting his outsized personality on an intimate stage. He’s cornered the market on “arrogance and pomposity,” he is quick to point out, as if those were a virtue, and then he launches into “Mr. Clown,” a song he uses to begin and end his hour and a half set. Waxing nostalgic, he reminisces about schooldays when his best friend told he had the worst voice, to later times when Frank Sinatra said he sounded good singing Sinatra: Joe Raposo’s “There Used to be a Ballpark,” the song that wooed Frank, works pretty well for the rest of us too.

His covers of Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River,” Anthony Newley’s “Once Upon a Time,” and “Lullaby”/ melding with Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” and Kander and Ebb’s “Razzle Dazzle” from Chicago were most affecting. Rather than give the love of his life some expensive jewelry, he wrote a song for her: “The Greatest Love the World has Known.”

A hit on Dancing With the Stars, O’Hurley remembered his parents going out for dinner and dancing at Delmonico’s, a time when people enjoyed the simple pleasures of enjoying each other. O’ Hurley’s self-parody includes monologues from the Seinfeld cutting room floor, and a “forced encore” in the form of a note to Seinfeld in which he imagines himself standing knee deep in the Ganges quoting T.S. Eliot. Oh, and he was backed by a band: Rusty Holloway on bass, Ron Vincent on drums, and musical director Steve Rawlins on piano. He almost forgot to introduce them, he was so Peterman.

Regina Weinreich

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