John Kelly is a man of many faces -- including Joni Mitchell's.

What do you call a man who's channeled painter Egon Schiele, composer Robert Schumann, the Mona Lisa, Maria Callas' daughter and a transvestite trapeze artist?

"I'm a chameleon," says performance artist John Kelly.

No kidding. But he's best known for one alter ego in particular -- that of singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell.

Kelly first appeared as Mitchell in 1984 at NYC's now-defunct Wigstock festival, where he sang a rendition -- lyrics slightly altered for the occasion -- of "Woodstock." He went on to develop two highly successful performance pieces based around her music: Paved Paradise: The Songs of Joni Mitchell in 1997, and 2001's Shiny Hot Nights: More Songs of Joni Mitchell, which comes to the Annenberg Center next week. His impersonation -- or, to be more precise, his habitation -- of Mitchell is astonishing: Not only does his formidable vocal range rival the diva's own, he also manages in some intangible way to invoke her essence. He could sing these songs straight, so to speak -- out of Joni drag -- and it would be effective. But when he sings in her persona, complete with blond wig, VG-8 guitar and dulcimer, he creates something else altogether: a multilayered, gender-blurred performance event at once mesmerizing and funny and moving. You get, in a sense, two artists for the price of one.

Or maybe, considering Kelly's polymorphic talents, you get something like 10. He not only acts, sings and creates solo and ensemble multimedia works, he's a dancer/choreographer (he studied with American Ballet Theater), a painter (Parsons School of Design) and a videographer. He's won Bessies, Obies, a Guggenheim and a Rockefeller. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici turned several of Kelly's poems into a song cycle, which Kelly performed. He's played Broadway (the Irish counter-tenor role in James Joyce's The Dead) and opened (in his Joni Mitchell guise) for Natalie Merchant's Ophelia tour. Last fall, the performer's many faces were celebrated in John Kelly (2Wice Books/Aperture), a book of photos and essays.

"I'm not one persona," he says, speaking by phone from his home in Chelsea. "If I were one persona my career might look different."

That career, he suspects, may be too multifaceted for popular culture to bear.

"We like everything to be spelled out. We're wired to pigeonhole, to distrust our artists in general -- and to mistrust an artist who does more than one thing."

He's been particularly aware of that pigeonholing tendency when it comes to the entertainment industry's treatment of drag.

"If [drag] is too complex, it forces people to deal with a more complex equation -- lots of buttons are being pushed, your perception button, your assumption button. But when it came out of the closet in the U.S., it got watered down. Hollywood co-opted it or did it within 'ha-ha' quotes like Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire.... Our culture's a jumble of cntradictions when it comes to stuff like gender performance."

An interesting contradiction amidst the jumble is that the culture's fascination with drag has helped draw attention to his Joni Mitchell portrayal. That, and the fact that she's Joni Mitchell -- a much more well-known figure than, say, Egon Schiele.

"Joni is my Bolero," says Kelly. "My connection to the popular audience."

That said, he sees a link between her and other figures he's portrayed, whom he describes as characters "going through some kind of struggle." With Mitchell, "the struggles occur in each of the songs. Each is a little soliloquy or a play, these little dramas that she invents and then gets to play the character."

Kelly, who is in his mid-40s, found himself drawn to Joni Mitchell's music when he was "a kid in Jersey City" and his two older sisters were listening to her records. "Just hearing Blue and Ladies of the Canyon -- it was all so new. Wow, this experience, this voice! There's a world out there!"

Decades later, during the run of Paved Paradise at Fez in NYC, he found himself performing for Mitchell herself.

"It was pretty intense. I didn't want to see her [in the audience]. I made her sit in the back." Strategic seating didn't help, though. The crowd knew she was there. During the concert, says Kelly, "they were eyeballing her every chance they got."

But there was no need to worry. In a backstage meeting after the show that has since become legend thanks to coverage in The New York Times and other outlets, the two Jonis bonded, the original bestowing a dulcimer upon her acolyte. Mitchell, interviewed by the Times, said she'd expected a parody. Instead, Kelly's homage made her cry -- twice.

Shiny Hot Nights opens at the Annenberg on Halloween. Theatergoers are being encouraged to come in costume that night, so Kelly may find himself facing a whole audienceful of Jonis.

"That would be very funny," says Kelly. "Maybe some Carlys or a Sinéad or two would be nice."

Shiny Hot Nights: More Songs of Joni Mitchell, Oct. 31 -Nov. 3, Harold Prince Theater at the Annenberg Center, 3680 Walnut St., 215-898-3900. Benefit performance for the Michael Quigley Decade Fund, Wed., Oct. 30, for information call 215-898-4980