Brandon Cutrell

The unwritten rule book for male cabaret singers with aspirations to popular appeal holds that they must retain an air of calculated coolness and tactful emotional restraint. But Brandon Cutrell, one of the most sheerly engaging young singers on the nightclub scene, has never been good with rules: He sings his heart out, and he’s got a lot of heart to sing. The irrepressible son of a Methodist minister in Indiana, Cutrell studied opera before switching to musical theater. On Fridays, he now presides as host of the Duplex’s open-mike show-tune night, Mostly Sondheim, where he often seems like a creature of pure bounce: boyishly ebullient, mischievously campy, gleefully profane.

Cutrell, 29, will surely be on his best behavior when he makes his uptown debut in a specially priced show at the swank Feinstein’s. (“I’ll be in a suit and I won’t curse too much,” he promises.) Accompanied by the beaming and proficient pianist Ray Fellman, Cutrell performs a handful of standards, but when he really gets cooking, he leans toward new American: pop tunes from the likes of Alanis Morissette and Kelly Clarkson, as well as underexposed songs by rising local composers. “Will I ever be famous? Maybe not,” Cutrell concedes in a song by Tim DiPasqua, whose lyrics perfectly limn this talented singer’s upstream career path in cabaret. “Would it ever really matter? No. I’m gonna do it for you.”—Adam Feldman