John O’Hurley to be first guest for ‘George Bugatti’s Piano Bar’ at The Smith Center

Two guys walk into a bar. But not just any bar.

It’s “George Bugatti’s Piano Bar,” alias The Smith Center’s Cabaret Jazz.

As for the two guys, one is pianist and singer Bugatti. The other is actor John O’Hurley, Bugatti’s first guest in his new Cabaret Jazz series, which opens Sunday.

“The only people I’m going to be bringing on are people I’ve met in piano bars,” Bugatti says. “John was the first person who popped into my head.” (The second is Antonia Bennett — her dad is a guy named Tony Bennett — who’ll join Bugatti on May 19.)

O’Hurley — whose roles range from J. Peterman on “Seinfeld” to King Arthur during “Spamalot’s” 2007-08 run at Wynn Las Vegas — first caught Bugatti’s act at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, “when it was the place to go and he was the guy to see,” the actor notes.

Bugatti would pick a couple of numbers for them to do together, O’Hurley recalls in a telephone interview. “George had the same affinity for the Great American Songbook I did, when melody and lyrics were important, when the songs were hummable and the songs told stories.”

Currently touring as “Chicago’s” razzle-dazzle defense attorney Billy Flynn (a role he also played on Broadway), O’Hurley’s taking a break to make his Smith Center debut in what he’s heard described as “the most beautiful little cabaret room in all of Vegas.”

To Bugatti — who turned to New York piano bars after an injury ended his dreams of becoming a classical pianist — the atmosphere is “so conducive to a certain kind of music,” he says. “It’s musical theater, but it’s jazz, but it’s a bar. It just encompasses a lot of different things.”

One of them, O’Hurley says, is the intimate style of music, with songs meant to be sung at a distance of three to five feet away. “The songs are so honest and the songs are so authentic,” they encourage a connection between performer and audience.

“You’re the leader,” Bugatti agrees. “But you follow the room and follow the people.”

It’s a talent Bugatti’s honed at piano bars from New York to Las Vegas, where he opened Bellagio’s now-gone Fontana Lounge alongside cabaret favorites Michael Feinstein and John Pizzarelli. At the Bootlegger Bistro, his “on-and-off” local base for two years, Bugatti returns to the piano-bar vibe “especially later in the evening, when people are here for the music.”

That chance to combine songs and stories in turn inspired Bugatti’s “Piano Bar” series.

At Sunday’s show, Bugatti will start the first 15 minutes, then bring O’Hurley out to “have our silliness. Then he’ll do his thing.”

O’Hurley’s thing: his cabaret act “A Man With Standards,” which he describes as “supper club (with) everything except the supper.” In other words, “stories of my life along with music (of the time), all the way from ‘The Itsy-Bitsy Spider’ in elementary school, all the way through Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra and Anthony Newley.”

Not to mention another songwriter by the name of John O’Hurley. He wrote one of those songs, “The Greatest Love the World Has Known,” for his wife’s 40th birthday and “every time I sing it, I watch people wipe their eyes.”

Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.