Aaron Tveit Gets Personal Onstage at Café Carlyle
Originating a role on Broadway, a Tony Award, “Sweeney Todd.” This month, Aaron Tveit is checking another item off his New York performer bucket list: a residency at Café Carlyle.
His solo show at the iconic uptown venue has been several years in the making, with Tveit waiting for the right moment to make it a reality. “The Carlyle really has seemed like this beacon of a place to perform as a New Yorker,” says Tveit. “I didn’t want to simply throw a show together for The Carlyle. It felt like a place to do a new show.”
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Timing, as they say, is everything. The beloved Broadway tenor signed on to take over the lead role in “Sweeney Todd” this spring, and his Café Carlyle residency was announced — and quickly extended — to debut the month after the show’s closure.
“I felt like ‘Sweeney’ was a step in a new direction, and a little more serious and a little more adult than some of the other stuff that I had done,” Tveit says. “So it seemed like a really nice pairing to go from that right to this other thing that would be hopefully another new experience, and another way to show another side of me.”
The usual distance between Tveit and the audience is broken down by the intimacy of the room. “It’s so tiny in there, there’s really nowhere to hide. So you have to be really open,” he says.
The show features songs that Tveit has performed previously in concert and onstage, with new renditions and songs thrown into the mix. His set list reflects three distinct categories: songs that speak to the gravitas of The Carlyle, an homage to the musicals that Tveit has starred in, and pop songs — he opens with “I’m Just Ken” — that have influenced his career. “Once that list of songs worked, it was a little easier to find my way in and out of them with stories and anecdotes.”
Early in the show, he performs a new two-song arrangement from “Sweeney” and “Into the Woods.” Stephen Sondheim has been an influential figure in Tveit’s stage career, and he later shares the performance note he received from the composer after a production of “Company.”
“I always try to do songs that I can connect with for whatever reason. I don’t ever want to sing songs just for the sake of singing,” Tveit says of the highly personal nature of the show. Songs that he normally performs in character are instead contextualized within Tveit’s own life.
“I’m a native New Yorker, and I’ve lived in New York City for essentially 20 years. A lot of what I talk about in the show is how that last 20 years is a real chunk of time, and encompasses my career from when I left school to start working,” he says. “I’ve tried to talk about the things that really inspired me over that time, the shows I’ve done, music, people — even the people I’m on stage with, that I’ve met over the years,” adds Tveit. (His band is composed of musicians from many of the shows he’s performed in.) “The best positive feedback is that people — and friends of mine that I have known for a long time — have said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that about you.’”
A particularly emotional moment in the show for Tveit is when he sings selections from the 2009 Broadway musical “Next to Normal,” in which Tveit originated the role of Gabe. During the first night of his residency, Tveit found it difficult to make it through the rendition.
“I made a joke before I started; I basically said, ‘I don’t sing these songs very often because they’re very close to a nerve behind my heart,’” he says. “And then right on cue — it probably seemed like a setup, but it was totally genuine — I was very overwhelmed and I couldn’t even begin the song.”
He describes “Next to Normal,” which deals with mental illness, as a “life-changing experience.” “Still to this day, people stop me on the street and say, ‘Hey, I saw “Next to Normal,” thank you for telling that story,’” he adds. “It’s a tremendous thing to have been a part of. But I was very surprised how caught off guard I was in front of a hundred people [at Café Carlyle].”
Now a week into his residency, with another two weeks to go, Tveit is feeling at ease in the room.
“The audiences have been wonderful,” Tveit says. “You think you have an idea of how it’s going to work, how the audience will respond, and then much like putting on any kind of play, you don’t really know until you get in front of an audience. I’m feeling confident that where we have landed is a solid thing for the rest of the run,” he says, adding that there are a few songs “waiting in the wings” that may get swapped in periodically for the show’s encore “depending on the day and how we’re feeling.”
Speaking of getting back in front of an audience: after his final performance on June 29, Tveit, who also recently finished filming an upcoming miniseries in Vancouver, will have a short break before heading back onstage with “Moulin Rouge” at the end of July for a just-announced limited engagement. Tveit originated the lead male role in the stage production, which earned him a Tony Award in 2021.
But until then? “I’m going on vacation,” Tveit says.
Launch Gallery: A Look Into Aaron Tviet's Debut Residency at Café Carlyle
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