Actor and singer Michael Griffiths has spent nearly 20 years on stage and in cabaret, in musicals such as We Will Rock You and Jersey Boys and singing the songs of Madonna and Annie Lennox, among other artists. But he says playing Cole Porter in his one-man cabaret Cole is "the hardest thing I've ever done".

Porter's songs, he says, require far greater musicianship than the rock and pop songs of the jukebox musicals or the latterday singer-songwriters whose material he's sung.

"He learned from Stravinsky for a bit and then became a Broadway songwriter ... He started out as a musical prodigy as a child," Griffiths says.

"He wasn't writing pop songs with three different chords. He put sophisticated music into his songs and made it seem effortless."

Griffiths says performing Cole for the first time in Canberra will be, in effect an "out of town tryout" before he takes it to the US.

In fact, he's being modest: he's been touring the show successfully for more than a year. Cole - written by his old schoolfriend, writer Anna Goldsworthy - was created for the Adelaide Cabaret Festival after Goldsworthy's partner suggested Cole Porter as a subject for him and festival director Barry Humphries, a longtime fan of the American musical theatre composer, enthusiastically said yes. Griffiths says he didn't know all that much about Porter at the time apart from having sung a few of his songs but Goldsworthy knew quite a bit and they threw themselves into preparing the show.

"We started it in 2015 and debuted it in June 2015. It's been seen everywhere except Canberra."

Griffiths - who won the 2015 Best Cabaret Weekly Award and a Helpmann Award last year - will soon be remedying that with a performance at Teatro Vivaldi. In Cole, he accompanies himself at the piano while playing Porter in a biographical show he says is full of heartache, humour and many hit songs as the gay, wealthy Porter talks about the ups and downs of his life and career.

"We've set it in the late 1940s after he had had fallen off his horse and was injured and post-Kiss Me Kate," Griffiths says. By then, Porter had written many of the shows and songs that had made him one of the most celebrated Broadway composers and had suffered a riding accident that would lead to decades of pain, dozens of operations and, eventually, the amputation of one of his legs.

It's an intimate show, as though Porter is in his living room at the piano talking to his friends about his life and periodically moving into an appropriate song. For example, as Porter talks about meeting his wife, Linda, in Paris at the wedding of an aristocratic couple, he begins singing It's De-Lovely (from the 1936 musical Red Hot and Blue).

"There are 20 or 30 songs," Griffiths says - Porter standards like Night and Day, Anything Goes, You're The Top, Let's Misbehave, What Is This Thing Called Love and many more, romantic, witty and sometimes melancholy.

Griffiths, 42, began studying classical piano as a boy and was going to be a contemporary classical composer. He began studying composition in Adelaide but when taking part in amateur musicals he fell in love with being on stage and applied to the musical theatre course at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. After graduation he moved to Sydney and worked in professional musicals honing his craft. Although he worked steadily, by no means a given in theatre, it took a toll.

"After seven or eight years of eight shows a week without much of a break I was burned out. At 39 I was feeling I like I wanted a break," he says.

"I lost the love a bit."

He decided to see if he could make a living doing his own, more intimate shows, and as the productions he had been in had all been jukebox musicals it didn't seem too much of a stretch to devise cabarets combining storytelling with songs. He's built up quite a repertory: it began with Madonna ("I'm 40, I'm gay ... It's just a thing"), moved on to Annie Lennox ("a childhood idol"), became more thematic with Adolescent ("a personal show about growing up") and then came Cole Porter.

As well as the instrumental challenges of Porter's songs, Griffiths has had to master the vocal challenges - Porter's sophisticated lyrics and patrician, mid-Atlantic accent - and together with Goldsworthy has worked to recreate the life and legacy of one of the great American songwriters. And soon he'll be taking it to California: at the very first Adelaide performance, an American producer saw the show and was enthusiastic. Now, having made all the arrangements, Griffiths and his partner will soon travel to the US, and he will also go to New Zealand, keeping the spirit of Cole Porter alive.

Asked whether he would ever consider going back to musical theatre, Griffiths says he's been asked to audition for some shows and while he wouldn't rule out doing it again, right now he's simply too busy. He's booked all year including a new show he's working on for this year's Adelaide Cabaret Festival in June he can't yet talk about. One thing, though, he is proud of: "I've never missed a show, and I've been doing this full-time for three years now."