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Meet the Executioner. Your Amateur Night at the Apollo Is Over.

C.P. Lacey, the Executioner at the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night, in one of his James Brown costumes.Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

C. P. Lacey glanced at his oversized silver watch and began tap-dancing across the floor of his cramped dressing room in Harlem. There was pep in his fleet-footed steps. At 55, he moved joyfully among the dazzling costumes and wigs in his dimly lit quarters.

“Gotta check my taps for sound,” Mr. Lacey, decked out in a gray silk suit and tilted fedora, said 90 minutes before showtime at the Apollo Theater. He turned up one spit-shined shoe to reveal a tiny microphone on the bottom, and then checked the other.

Mr. Lacey might have been a breakout star in another era. His heart is in vaudeville and in talent shows, but he was born too late for the Ziegfeld Follies, too early for “American Idol.” Instead, for the past 30 years, he has been playing the supporting role of the Executioner every Wednesday at Amateur Night at the Apollo, the competition that has been a steppingstone for Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, D’Angelo and many more.

The Executioner is a dream killer of sorts: When song-and-dance contestants begin bombing onstage, and the audience boos crescendo to a certain decibel, he tap-dances out and shoos the wannabes back to anonymity. He always does so in style, dressed as one of the 30 celebrities he impersonates — Little Richard, Michael Jackson, Prince, Barack Obama and others who have appeared at the Apollo.

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Mr. Lacey dressed as Prince at the Apollo’s wall of fame.Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

“C. P. is a show within the show,” said Marion J. Caffey, the longtime producer of Amateur Night, which has been the Apollo’s signature program since the theater opened its doors to black patrons in 1934. (The venue originally opened in 1914 as Hurtig and Seamon’s New Burlesque Theater and admitted only white performers and audience members.)

Mr. Lacey, himself a six-time Amateur Night winner, has toured the United States, Europe and Asia with his one-man show of impersonations. He landed the Executioner gig in 1987 after his predecessor, Howard Sims, known as Sandman, left Amateur Night to make “Tap,” a movie with Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis Jr.

Mr. Lacey found film work here and there, portraying Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. and MC Hammer in “The Hebrew Hammer,” and even performing as the Executioner in Spike Lee’s music video for “No One in the World,” featuring Anita Baker. He recently finished writing a one-man play, “1 in a Million: The C. P. Lacey Story,” which he hopes to perform in New York this year.

But he is best known as the Executioner. Dashing the hopes of people who want to make it big, just as he still hopes to do.

“I’ve made it,” Mr. Lacey said, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t continue to make it.” (He declined to say how much the job pays.)

The comedian JB Smoove, who rocketed to stardom on the hit HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” recalled seeing Mr. Lacey “killing audiences with his dancing and impersonations” back in the 1990s.

“He’s an electrifying performer whose only problem has been timing,” said Mr. Smoove, a longtime friend. “If he were in his 20s today and could display his skills on shows like ‘America’s Got Talent,’ he’d be known around the world.”

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Mr. Lacey, a tap dancer, escorts the losing acts off the stage.Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

So much has changed about the Apollo — its audiences, once mostly black, are now increasingly international, and much has been upgraded — but Mr. Lacey has been a constant. He nearly quit show business when he fell into a brief depression after his mother and sister died a year apart, but he rallied with the help of his wife and his work.

On a recent Wednesday evening, cooling his taps after his dressing-room rehearsal, Mr. Lacey looked at his watch again. It was one hour before curtain, and the squawking of audience members filling the theater — some speaking Spanish, others Japanese — began bouncing off his dressing room door, one short staircase below the stage.

Mr. Lacey walked across the room and ran a finger above a row of neatly pressed costumes hanging on a large rack, and began talking to himself.

“Little Richard, no. Marvin Gaye, no. Stevie Wonder, that’s next week. Ah, here we are,” he said, pulling from the rack a flaming-red tuxedo with a satin lapel and satin piping. It was one of a half-dozen get-ups Mr. Lacey wears whenever he impersonates his boyhood idol, James Brown.

“If I execute someone tonight, I’ll do it as my main man, the Godfather of Soul,” he said, before reaching for Brown’s signature hairdo on a table filled with celebrity wigs.

Soon it was show time.

“Oh no, no, no, contestants! Not the Executioner! You don’t want to see this guy tonight,” said Joe Gray, who gets the show started, as Mr. Lacey burst from behind the curtain and began tap-dancing sideways across the stage to the roaring approval of the crowd.

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The Apollo.Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Two female vocalists managed to avoid execution. Then Taichi Sayanagi, a 24-year-old college student from Tokyo, stepped onstage to perform Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk.”

Mr. Sayanagi had sharp vocals but subpar dance moves and a nervousness that the audience could practically smell. Midway through the act, the crowd began to boo until it drowned out Mr. Sayanagi’s voice and set off a siren, otherwise known as the Apollo’s “bad talent alarm.”

Out came the Executioner, in his James Brown finest.

The crowd erupted as Mr. Lacey, strutting and gyrating like his hero, chased Mr. Sayanagi off the stage. The unceremonious exit was capped with a make-believe boot to Mr. Sayanagi’s backside.

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Mr. Lacey, dressed as James Brown, “executes” a contestant, Taichi Sayanagi.Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

“I didn’t think I deserved to be executed tonight,” he said later, looking a little dazed. “It kind of shocked me.”

There were no other executions that night, but the crowd gave a thunderous standing ovation to the winner, the vocalist Kimberly Adair, who sat behind a keyboard and belted out a powerful original composition titled “Voice of My Soul.”

As the performers spilled onto the sidewalk beneath a large marquee that read “Be Good or Be Gone,” Mr. Lacey retreated to the quiet of his dressing room and filled a suitcase with his tap shoes, several wigs, and other tools of his trade. On his way out a side door, a young assistant called after him.

“Hey, Mr. Lacey,” he shouted, “What does the C. P. stand for?”

The Executioner smiled, and shared his legal name.

“Crowd Pleaser.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Meet the Executioner. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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