After a six-year absence, Laurel Casey can been seen on Wednesdays at the Sidebar & Grille in downtown Providence.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

PROVIDENCE — Laurel Casey has come back, in disguise: very blonde and a little buxom.

“I’m hot,” the 56-year-old cabaret singer says. “But I’m not hot.”

Casey’s warm. You’d be, too, under a Farrah Fawcett-like wig and three pairs of padded bras.

“I know what club owners want. They want big boobs and blonde hair. They don’t care if I can sing.”

For the record, Casey can sing. The iconoclast, who last performed in Providence six years ago and had a cult-like following, can act and joke, too. But she can also offend. This would explain a lot, certainly the stunning frequency with which she’s fired from clubs.

“I like to get fired. I can get work easily. It’s keeping it that’s the problem.”

A revealed body part here, a provocative remark there, the next thing Casey knows, she’s got a problem, but not a job.

Fortunately, Casey has a buddy: Vincent Cianci, the former Providence mayor. Years ago, in the Plunder Dome era, before Cianci was sent to prison, he was living in the Biltmore Hotel, and Casey was performing in it. Occasionally, they’d sing an impromptu duet.

And on one occasion, Casey mooned the mayor.

“I don’t remember that,” Cianci says.

Casey remembers it. Cianci came into the former Davio’s club with a few friends, who acted a bit rambunctiously, saying things such as “show us what you got” as they tossed $10 and $20 bills at Casey’s feet. And Casey responded by turning her back to them and lowering her skirt, while singing “Moon Over Miami.”

“She’s a little risqué,” Cianci says. “But hopefully she’s toned down her act so she can get more jobs.”

Cianci, a long-time fan, was the one who encouraged Casey to come to Providence in the first place in 2000. This was after Casey exhausted her performance options in Newport, where she had a penchant for provocation: flashing her breasts and confronting the occasional disrespectful patron.

And Cianci was the one who last spring on his radio show on WPRO encouraged Casey to come out of her cabaret retirement, return to performing and to Providence.

“She can be sometimes salacious, sometimes moving,” Cianci says. “And sometimes she will use language that you wouldn’t expect to hear on stage, to be euphemistic.”

So Casey has come. She has left Middlebury, Vt., where she was born and raised, and where she has lived the last six years, caring for her mother, who died a year ago.

Casey hadn’t sung in roughly six years. But recently she got a gig, working Wednesday nights at the Sidebar & Grille in Providence, a basement bistro owned by Art Coloian, Cianci’s former chief of staff.

“She is unpredictable,” Coloian says. “And she can be a little salty at times.”

At this particular time, three weeks into her poorly publicized comeback, Casey, is underappreciated. On this night, 20 people attend her show, which is more than double the previous week’s turnout, but nowhere near the restaurant’s attendance on so-called Meatball Mondays.

“This is the first time in my life I’ve competed with meatballs,” Casey says to her audience. “And I’m being beaten by meatballs.”

Casey is accompanied by a bass player and keyboardist. She sings jazz. Her voice is smooth and sultry, rich and full.

But Casey does more than sing. She runs around the restaurant. She stands on the tables and the bar. She offers quips and commentary between songs. And while Casey makes many costume changes, she does so discretely.

“I’ve evolved,” she says. “There’s not going to be any more flashing.”

To get a sense of Casey’s kind of cabaret, you need to go back a bit, to Germany just after World War I, to the heyday of the Weimar Republic. Music, theater and political satire came together to poke fun at the Nazis, while it was still safe to do so.

But Casey rarely addresses American politics now.

“It’s not funny anymore. It’s satire of satire.”

One of the last times Casey put politics in a Providence show was after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She wrapped herself in a tablecloth as a makeshift burka and sang a mock version of the Afghanistan national anthem. And when a patron requested she follow with the U.S. national anthem, Casey sang “Money Makes the World Go Around.”

Casey was fired, again.

Soon thereafter she went to Boston, where she worked for three weeks, until what she calls “the ice cube incident.” The club’s air conditioning was broken. So Casey sang while walking around with a bucket of ice cubes, which she dropped down people’s backs. But one guy thought the gay guy behind him put ice down his back. Casey couldn’t convince him otherwise. And a fight broke out.

So Casey went west, to Framingham, where after three weeks of disturbing diners once too often, she was fired again.

“I get bored by the third week. I just realize I’m a singer in an Italian restaurant and I’m not getting any respect.”

Exasperation set in.

“I didn’t know if I wanted to do this anymore.”

With her mother’s health failing, and Casey’s career frustration rising, Casey withdrew to Vermont. She’s the middle child of a secretary mother and a telephone company repairman father. She has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in theater. She has an Actor’s Equity card, and has performed at the Public Theater in New York and The Goodman in Chicago. In her 30-year career, she has worked in Aspen, Colo., as a singing waitress, and in Amsterdam and Bangkok as a cabaret singer, and in New York, too, where she was also a subway stop singer, and a storyteller in Laundromats, bowling alleys and Chinese restaurants.

And through it all, talented as Casey is, she’s been poor. So she got married.

“I couldn’t pay the rent. I married for money and he didn’t have any.”

The marriage lasted 10 years and produced one child, a daughter who’s now 26. In Vermont and now in Rhode Island, Casey makes ends meet by teaching yoga. But Casey could only suppress the urge to perform so long.

“I have to sing because I can sing. If I didn’t have talent, I’d have a very good job at an insurance company right now.”

Much of what Casey discusses in her show is herself, with disarming honesty: her divorce and facelift, her struggle with depression and alcoholism; you name it.

“I don’t have any secrets. If you don’t have secrets, you’re free because they can’t gossip about you. You’re gossiping about yourself.”

Casey says that with candor she connects to members of her audience, whose experiences she suspects aren’t so different from hers.

“I think inside we’re all basically the same.”

In the Sidebar & Grille are mostly people who have heard Casey perform before, and enjoy her antics. This includes the man eating dinner, from whom Casey plucks a piece of chicken off his plate during a song; and the man who hired Casey six years earlier to perform at his 50th birthday party.

“She was terrific,” says Rob Sherwin of Pawtucket. “People are still talking about it. She opens people’s eyes to different perspectives.”

Casey picks songs that she can manipulate with her own words, or present in her own way. She doesn’t want audience members to merely listen, but to think.

“I want to be a monkey wrench in the consciousness of their mental Zeitgeist.”

In one song toward the end of her set, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” Casey ends by repeating “and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . .” a couple of dozen times.

The repetition is funny at first, then profound. Real love, Casey conveys, is enduring and not always easy and exciting.

“Songs are scaffolding for me. I will use them to do my thing.”

Laurel Casey performs Wednesday, 7 to 10 p.m., at the Sidebar & Grille, 127 Dorrance St., Providence.