In a career spanning more than 40 years, New York performer Mark Nadler has done many things. He's acted in plays and musicals, accompanied Dame Edna Everage and performed with Marvin Hamlisch and Martin Short in a show called Three Singular Sensations. He has been a soloist with symphony orchestras across the US and at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, where he has performed six times. But he's never performed in Canberra.

Nadler is making his national capital debut with Let's Misbehave: a Cole Porter Soiree, in which he accompanies himself on the piano while singing songs by, and telling stories about, one of the great popular American songwriters.

"I'm doing some of his very, very well-known songs – You're the Top, Night and Day, Begin the Beguine, Let's Do It, Brush up Your Shakespeare – and some very obscure songs including some little-known treasures," Nadler says.

Among them is Wake Up and Dream, from the 1929 musical revue of the same title.

"I think it's a beautiful ballad."

That show opened not long after the debut of Paris, Porter's first Broadway success, which contained the hit, Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love). Nadler says it's an example of the "list song" that Porter was famous for – "clever lists, rhyming things that amuse the audience", with often risque lyrics, but his range extended beyond that.

Nadler says his love songs often dripped with "aching, unrequited passion", reflecting Porter's torment as a gay man in a straight world, unable to live openly with a male partner. He was married from 1919 to Linda Lee Thomas until her death in 1954. She was a wealthy divorcee whose previous husband had been abusive. Nadler says there has always been speculation about the relationship between Porter and Thomas, with rumours that Linda was a lesbian.

He says they had a lot in common – both were well off (so it's not like either married for money) and she was greatly responsible for developing his musicianship.

"Thanks to her, he studied classical music [and] wrote a ballet."

Nadler has heard snippets from it: "It's a beautiful piece." It was never performed and Porter didn't write any more for the concert hall. "He wasn't straddling both worlds the way George Gershwin was" – but continued to write musicals and songs that sold many copies as sheet music, the equivalent of records in their day as people played and sang them at home.

Porter and Nadler both came from the midwest – Porter was from Peru (pronounced PEE-ru), Indiana – but were drawn to New York and the world of musical theatre.

Nadler says: "I was born in Iowa, a rural pork state. For every human there are 4.5 pigs. I'm Jewish, so that's all I want to say about that!"

He began performing at the age of five and at 10 was earning money playing piano at a saloon. A gay kid who wanted to become a professional performer, he wanted to get out, and saved enough to put himself through a performing arts boarding school.

In 1979, straight out of school, he went to New York and began studying dance, singing and acting.

"I worked in piano bars and got my stripes, developing my New York following, and started my club act, and people came."

His career has been long and varied – including performing in plays, musicals and television and he's been active in fundraising and charity work, teaching music in homeless shelters and working with children in prison. But he is best known for his cabarets, including shows with a historical bent, looking at the songwriters of the Weimar Republic, for example, or devoted to the works of particular songwriters such as Irving Berlin and George and Ira Gershwin.

Nadler's Porter concert was originally created several years ago as a bonus for big donors after a symphony concert in Indiana, "a post-concert concert", as he puts it, but it's come in handy since.

In 2007, Nadler did his Porter show at the house in Peru where the songwriter had been born. The house had been refurbished.

"It had fallen into disrepair for a long while and become a rats' nest of meth. The historical society in Peru rescued it and restored it."

One of the highlights was the opportunity to perform with the veteran Patricia Morison, who had starred in the original production of Porter's Kiss Me Kate in 1948.

"She was about 90 but her voice was still absolutely pristine."

The same year, he did the show at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel when Porter was finally given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 1999 he began a season working with Barry Humphries in Dame Edna: The Royal Tour. He says that offstage Humphries was "a great gentleman" while onstage, "I learned a great deal from Barry about the fine art of improvisation" by watching Dame Edna play the audience.

And Canberra audiences will be able to see what he picked up for themselves.