Norbert Leo Butz
‘Girls, Girls, Girls – Live at 54 Below’
Center Stage Records

At the start of the evening, Norbert Leo Butz announces, “I hope you all didn’t come here to be entertained tonight, because you’re not going to be, because I need to talk about an issue I’m having … with women.” 

Like a lot of actors and singers, Mr. Butz tends to modulate his persona according to the medium in which he happens to be working. For instance, he’s best known for his roles on Broadway, as in the original cast of “Wicked” and the recent revival of “My Fair Lady.” In both shows, he’s a happy-go-lucky character who, “with a little bit o’ luck,” will go on “dancing through life.” Yet in his latest movie, “A Complete Unknown,” he’s precisely the opposite as he embodies a real-life character, the rather dour and severe Alan Lomax, one of the most notorious conservatives that the worlds of folk music and jazz have ever known.

We get to see quite a different side of Mr. Butz at his one-man shows at 54 Below and elsewhere. Titled “Girls, Girls, Girls,” the shows are now captured on an album. They are as ambitious and engrossing a cabaret-style presentation by a musical theater headliner as I have seen. Further, as with Melissa Errico’s comparable “Film Noir” project, “Girls” is all the more remarkable in that virtually none of the repertoire actually derives from musical theater.

Mr. Butz is only teasing us with the title “Girls, Girls, Girls,” borrowed from a 1962 Elvis Presley film, using a frivolous title to ease us into what is essentially a serious and highly personal — but still very fun — journey in which he attempts to fathom the female psyche.

Perhaps using the word “girls” in triplicate parallels how Mr. Butz essentially constructs his show on three levels: He starts with some familial anecdotage, about how in his non-working life he’s essentially surrounded by daughters, sisters, a wife — not to mention an ex — and pretty much only female relatives. In his attempts to understand where they’re coming from, he is encouraged by a friendly professor to delve into the mythological and mystical tales of the goddesses of Ancient Greece and to posit them as psychic symbols and archetypes à la Carl Jung.

With his own family as a kind of background noise, Mr. Butz gives us his own take on Athena, Hera, Persephone, Aphrodite, and others, narrating with an irreverence that deliberately undercuts the solemnity of these epic episodes, such as, “The problem with Zeus is that he can’t keep his lightning bolt in his pants.” 

Such observations regarding the soul sisters of the Hellenic era are interrupted and illustrated by country and rock numbers from a diverse range of sources, starting with “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1″ by the Flaming Lips. At the end, he encores with “Jolene,” which he takes pains to make sure we realize is by the contemporary singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne, as opposed to the more famous song by Dolly Parton.

Along the way Mr. Butz and his excellent band — directed by pianist Michael J. Moritz, Jr. and featuring guitarists Jimmy Leahey and Khaled Tabbara, bassist Alan Stevens Hewitt, and drummer Billy LaGuardia — offer a wide-ranging panoply of songs written from the female experience. There are songs of victimhood and songs of empowerment, such as “Mrs. Leroy Brown” by Loretta Lynn, whom he describes as the earth mother Hera of country music. 

There’s also a rhythmic but supremely moving number by Mel Tillis, ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town,” about strained relations between a disabled veteran and his wife; it’s kind of the bittersweet flip side of Doc Pomus’s “Save the Last Dance For Me.” Mr. Butz sings “Galway to Graceland” to tell the story of an older woman — the so-called crone in the pantheon of mythical archetypes. Richard Thompson’s song of an Irish grandmother obsessed with Elvis is at once hysterical and heartbreaking: “She was humming ‘Suspicion,’ that’s the song she liked best. / She had ‘Elvis I Love You” tattooed on her breast.”

Mr. Butz concludes with what is, perhaps ironically, the only show tune in the lineup, “Wig in a Box,” from “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” a song roughly analogous to “(A Little More) Mascara” in “La Cage Aux Folles.” Mr. Butz gradually expands it into a singalong — first he sings the chorus by himself, then the band joins him, and finally he gets the whole house to participate.

The album has a few songs not in the show, among them “Martha,” which is essentially Tom Waits’s version of a turn-of-the-20th-century parlor ballad, as well as two different songs called “Sweet Lorraine,” the famously fun and frivolous 1928 tune immortalized by Nat King Cole and a highly nuanced 1996 number written by Patty Griffin obviously in response to the earlier song. “In the battle of time, in the battle of will, / It’s only your hope and your heart that gets killed.”

As we file out of the underground space and up the stairs, we realize we have been enlightened, uplifted, amused, moved, and, in spite of his announced intention at the start 80 minutes earlier — sarcastic as it may have been — thoroughly entertained.