At the Vogue Theatre on Friday, February 27

The poor fellow sitting next to me obviously had no idea what to expect. The benighted schmuck was probably the only person at the sold-out Vogue who had never heard Antony and the Johnsons before. He was almost certainly the only one who left the theatre disappointed. In some ways, I can understand his bewilderment.

First, he was treated to the downright weird spectacle of performance artist Johanna Constantine, who doused herself in red body paint and flapped her Freddy Krueger claws around to a scrape-and-clank musique concrète score. Then the real strangeness started.

To the uninitiated, Antony Hegarty probably looks like any other doughy bear of a guy with a murse and long, girly hair. But when he opens his mouth? Well, it’s a bit of a shock. His voice is an otherworldly instrument, sounding neither wholly male nor wholly female, but existing in some realm beyond the bounds of gender. It warbles and trembles and yet it seems to do exactly what he wants.

Hegarty doesn’t move much on-stage. In fact, he remained seated at a big black Steinway for his entire set, but he nonetheless held the crowd’s rapt attention with his singular voice and his powerful, if sombre, lyrics. Of course, he wasn’t alone up there. His Johnsons—drummer Parker Kindred, violinist Maxim Mostin, violinist-guitarist Rob Moose, cellist Julia Kent, bassist Jeff Langston, and multi-instrumentalist Doug Wieselman—aided him superbly, crafting a finely honed chamber-pop backing that was often breathtakingly elegant.

The band’s performance was full of pin-drop-quiet moments, including the yearning “Another World”. In that song, from the most recent Antony and the Johnsons album, The Crying Light, Hegarty never makes it clear what’s dying, the narrator or the world around him, but he enumerates the things he’ll miss when it’s all over: the sea, the snow, the trees.

That the Johnsons treated that number, and so many others, with such a soft touch made it all the more dramatic when they kicked things up a notch. “Shake That Devil” started with Hegarty’s singing backed by little more than a foreboding drone. At the midway point, however, the song burst into life with a thumping gospel backbeat, a call-and-response chant, and an exorcism by saxophone courtesy of Wieselman. The multitalented sideman also detonated some devastating six-string napalm on “Fistful of Love”, weaving a thread of guitar carnage through the soulful tune.

Thanks in large part to his lyrical concerns—mortality, existential fear, and all that fun stuff—Hegarty has been pegged as humourless. Belying that reputation, he regaled his Vancouver fans with hilarious banter, and even had the house lights turned up at one point so he could see who he was talking to. The singer shared his thoughts on the changing streetscapes of New York, Vancouver’s troubled Downtown Eastside, and his own role in global warming. He even offered the following feng shui tip: “Fish can be very therapeutic. A fish in your environment can help you to feel more free.”

Such was Hegarty’s rapport with the audience that he opted to perform (for the first time anywhere, apparently) his cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Was Young When I Left Home”, beautifully rendered with only Moose’s delicate acoustic picking as accompaniment.

Oh, and he also did a version of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”. The disgruntled dude next to me actually recognized that one, but he probably still hated it.