Julian Fleisher came to New York to be an actor but, by his own admission, “got distracted and took a few detours.” Hence the title of his upcoming show on Sept. 28 at Joe’s Pub: “Detours With Friends.”
Fleisher, born and bred in downtown Baltimore and educated as an English major at Yale, was, he says, “a theater rat.” Living in the West Village, he got some good parts in off-Broadway productions, but not the roles he wanted.
“I was being sent out for parts like the cab driver, a terrorist, a Hasidic Jew — I simply wasn’t good looking enough to get the kind of parts that had the kind of songs that I wanted to sing,” he recalls. “I had an epiphany one night after watching ‘Blade Runner’ — if all I wanted to do was sing great songs, why didn’t I just skip the auditions and start a band?”
Ensconced in the East Village in the mid-90s, he did just that — putting together a show doing “jazzy covers” with inspiration from Mel Torme.
“I was truly in love with Torme,” he explains. “My dad (renowned classical pianist Leon Fleisher) introduced me to his music when I was a kid.”
Fleisher managed to get himself a gig as “the boy singer in the house band at the Supper Club in the Edison Hotel in Times Square. It was like being in a movie — Barry Levitt, who was like second father to me, led the band. It was just a dream. I was getting paid to sing my face off.”
It wasn’t enough to pay all the bills though, so Fleisher “side-hustled like crazy.”
“I’ve written twelve or more books on grammar and vocabulary building, worked for The Princeton Review Test Prep, and became a very adept Photoshop artist back in the early days”, he recalls. “They would say, ‘Can you take this waterfall and make it look like a heart attack?’”
And if anyone can claim to have written the book on Drag culture, it’s Fleisher. In 1996 he produced “The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide,” a…
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