Joel Grey to discuss memoir, sign books at MJCCA event

Performing as the Emcee in the musical “Cabaret” would seemingly be a dream come true for any performer. It’s interesting then to learn that Joel Grey, who played the role in both the original 1966 Broadway show and in the 1972 film, picking up both a Tony and an Oscar for his performances, actually based his characterization on a personal nightmare.

As he recounts in the opening chapter of his new memoir, “Master of Ceremonies,” the actor struggled to find a way to characterize the Emcee, who hovers over the action of the musical about Berlin in the 1930s, a potent symbol of the decadence of the waning days of the Weimar Republic. But, as he wondered to himself, “How do you play a metaphor?”

Late in the rehearsal process, Grey had a nightmare about a crass, second-rate nightclub comedian he’d seen as a young man, heavily made up, desperate for a laugh, pandering, grotesquely over-familiar. It was a particularly resonant and haunting figure for Grey, who had started out on the nightclub circuit himself and had long struggled to make the switch to legitimate theater. In some senses, the figure represented everything Grey was fighting not to become.

At the next rehearsal, he tried on the persona for a run-through of the musical’s big opening number, and when he finished, he felt sure that the vulgar, over-the-top performance would earn him the director’s wrath, if not get him booted from the show. Instead, the director, Hal Prince, took him aside and said simply, “That’s it.”

It’s just one compelling story in a memoir that considers a complicated life, one lived simultaneously in the public eye and in secret. Grey will read from “Master of Ceremonies” at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta on Feb. 18.

“For the last 25 years, I’ve known I would write a memoir, some inner thing,” Grey says. Though he was married to singer Jo Wilder for 24 years (actress Jennifer Grey is one of their children), Grey came out as a gay man in 2015. “I always knew I would call it ‘Master of Ceremonies,’ meaning that it’s not just a role. It turned out to be my role in life to master my own beginnings and difficulties and challenges and come out loving my life.”

Grey was born Joel Katz, and he grew up performing as part of his musician father’s show, “The Borscht Capades.” Grey, who loved the theater, was originally funneled into nightclub performing. “By some quirk of fate, I ended up being in the public eye as a song-and-dance man,” he says. “I didn’t know how to sing. I didn’t know how to dance. I didn’t know anything about nightclubs. I was certainly poor at improvising, which is one of the most important things to stand up there with people being drunk.”

But it wasn’t just his professional journey that proved challenging. Grey grew up in an era of police raids and arrests, when homosexuality was classified as a mental illness and crime. There were few out gay men and no out gay performers. Building a career became a process of hiding his true identity.

As for finally having come out after so many years, Grey says it’s a relief. “It’s easy. It’s natural. It’s OK,” he says. “When I started writing this book, I said: Since so many advances have been made, I thought it was time to do it.”