Roxy Bar Presents: Pianist Michael Garin

Michael Garin plays a resident-pianist set at Roxy Bar, part of his Tuesday through Saturday run at the room. The evening is built around his piano performance, with a repertoire the venue describes as a free-ranging stream of musical consciousness: material associated with Shaggy, Om Kalthum, Rossini, Jobim, Zappa and Raymond Scott can all enter the mix. Garin also takes requests, sometimes invites children to play along, and may punctuate the music with his own comic flourishes, including tap dancing from the piano bench.

A Drama Desk Award winner, Garin has been a New York nightlife mainstay for decades. His résumé includes Elaine’s, The Monkey Bar, The Rainbow Room and Limelight’s VIP Room, and he hosted midnight burlesque shows in the mid-1990s that helped launch the burlesque revival. He co-created and co-starred in Song of Singapore, the environmental musical that earned his Drama Desk Award, and has had acting stints with Spike Lee. Pianist, songwriter, singer, poet, actor and song-and-dance man, he is known at the Roxy for blurring pianist and DJ, combining a broad musical vocabulary with self-deprecating stage humor. He has also released Hey Look! It’s Michael and Mardie and writes daily promotional poems in an Ogden Nash style.