A bearded man in a slate-gray suit sauntered into an upscale restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, microphone in hand. As he shuffled between the tables, a familiar tune began to play.
The man unbuttoned his jacket to cheers as the chorus hit: “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day / It’s a new life, for me / And I’m feeling good.”
As the bombastic horn riff to “Feeling Good” washed over the private dining room, some may have felt as if Michael Bublé, who made the song one of his signature covers in 2005, had appeared before them. But the man performing wasn’t Bublé, and he wasn’t even really singing — at least at first.
Rather, it was Dan Perlman, a writer and comedian who had agreed days earlier to surprise a Bublé super fan by impersonating the crooner at her birthday party. There was just one catch: To nearly everyone except the woman’s daughter, who offered him the gig, Perlman looks nothing like Bublé.
To prepare, Perlman had a vocal lesson, ran improv drills as Bublé and found a suit fit for the cover of his own holiday album. He chronicled the experience in a short documentary, “Being Bublé,” which was screened at the Santa Fe International Film Festival in New Mexico and the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey this fall before Perlman shared it on YouTube.
“Any outcome is funny,” Perlman, 36, said in an interview. “If they hate me, it’s funny. If they’re confused, it’s funny. If they love me, it’s funny. And my ego is not wrapped up in the idea of being the best Michael Bublé impersonator, so there’s some freedom in that.”
A representative for Bublé did not have an immediate answer when asked if the singer was aware of the stunt.
In late November last year, a week before the birthday party, Olivia Cooper approached Perlman after a comedy performance in Brooklyn with a surreal observation that set his Bublé exploration in motion.
“I’m sure you get this all the time,” Perlman recalled her saying, “but you look exactly like Michael Bublé.”
At first, he tried to spin the remark into a compliment (“ … and you find Michael Bublé attractive?”), but Cooper wasn’t flirting.
She explained that she had been frantically searching for a Bublé impersonator to perform at her mother’s surprise 60th birthday party, but was struggling to find one for less than $10,000.
Perlman, a creator and star of the Showtime series “Flatbush Misdemeanors,” joked that his going rate was $9,950. (In a stand-up set shown in the documentary, Perlman recalled telling Cooper he would perform for $8,000 — an amount he and Cooper declined to confirm for this article.)
“I was just so in,” Perlman said. “It sounded insane.”
In an interview, Cooper, 37, acknowledged that she was “without many other options” when she hired Perlman.
She had hunted down a traveling Bublé performer, but he charged far more than her budget allowed. Several celebrity impersonation companies entertained her request, but none could offer a Bublé.
In Perlman, she saw potential.
He was an entertainer who enjoyed being onstage. His voice seemed low enough to mimic Bublé’s singing style. Plus, she thought, his round face and dark hair made him a convincing look-alike.
“They do share a lot of features,” Cooper said. “I find myself surprised that people are so far from seeing it.”
As Perlman recalls, his instructions were clear: He would lip-sync or sing “Feeling Good,” and then stay at the party for about 30 minutes, in character as Bublé.
A quick search confirmed that Bublé was a father of four from Canada, which suggested to Perlman that he was an exceptionally nice, humble guy. And because he is most famous for reinterpreting widely known songs, Bublé owes his success to his immediate accessibility and old-school charm.
Those qualities formed the foundation of Perlman’s impersonation. Everyone at the party needed to feel as if they were in the presence of someone earnest and special, said Anthony DeVito, a comedian who ran improv drills with Perlman to help him prepare.
“A guy who’s super broad, who’s safe, who’s warm, who’s positive, how does he move through the world?” DeVito said. “He winks a lot, probably, but it’s not a sleazy wink. It’s a wink of, ‘Hey, you and I are together.’”
Clearly, Perlman was not a dead ringer for Bublé. Still, the people who helped him prepare for the stunt described the resemblance, if you can call it that, this way: If you squint, or tilt your head, he could pass.
“The essence of Bublé is something that everyone kind of knows, but no one really knows,” said Charlotte Kassimir, a friend who produced the documentary. “I don’t think that Dan looks like Michael Bublé. I know Dan cannot sing like Michael Bublé. But by the end of it, I was like, ‘I see it.’”
Perlman “speaks in the way that Michael Bublé sings,” she added, and it’s easy to imagine that his smooth comedic delivery could translate into a dazzling — or at least competent — jazz performance.
But that was not how Erin Matthews, a vocal coach who gave Perlman a 45-minute “Feeling Good” lesson, saw it.
Perlman’s singing voice is much lower than Bublé’s, so he struggled to reach the higher notes in the crescendo. Matthews’s priority was helping him learn the song’s notes and melody.
By the end of their lesson, she wasn’t convinced that Perlman could nail the performance. Still, she said, people with low bass voices like his often have an ear for jazz, and his comfort onstage gave him a strong sense of rhythm.
After a week of reminders that he looked and sounded nothing like Bublé, Perlman was unsure if he would sing live when he arrived at the party.
When the big moment came, he lip-synced for the first half of the song, but something felt off.
“I had Bublé’s look, his charm and his moves, but they needed something else to really bring it home,” he narrates in his documentary. “Lip-syncing wasn’t good enough. It was time to sing.”
When Perlman approached Marie Barnevik McKeige, the birthday honoree, he danced clumsily with her and invited the crowd to celebrate with him. Then, he belted out the song’s final verse in his own voice.
Dozens of guests rose from their chairs and clapped, danced and whipped out their phones, believing — or allowing themselves to believe — that they were watching the real Bublé perform.
Barnevik McKeige, who has attended at least seven Bublé concerts, thought Perlman was “spectacular.” She knew he wasn’t the real Bublé, but was charmed by his performance. She said he nailed Bublé’s mannerisms and had the same “twinkle in his eye” that fans admire.
“Michael Bublé has this little smirky charm about him, like, ‘Hey look what I’m doing here, this is for fun, I love doing this,’” she said. “Dan radiates the same kind of giddiness.”
After the performance, Perlman was astonished as people approached him for autographs and photos. He riffed about his Christmas special, his children and his love of Canada, and assured a handful of skeptics that, yes, he was the real Bublé.
Most seemed to buy into his impersonation with excitement and joy. He likened the experience to children meeting Santa Claus — a pure, innocent belief in something inoffensive and fun.
“If a guy with a beard and a suit walks up to you and says, ‘I’m Michael Bublé,’ it’s like, sure, why not?” he said. “It’s harmless.”
Hannah Ziegler is a general assignment reporter for The Times, covering topics such as crime, business, weather, pop culture and online trends.
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