FULL HOUSE IN PASADENA : PEGGY LEE: BALLOONS AND A BIG BREAK

An unfunny thing happened to Peggy Lee on her way through a week in Las Vegas. As she put it Tuesday, during her capacity-house opening at the Pasadena Playhouse, it was “a little accident but a big break.” An on-stage trip resulted in a trip to the hospital with a fractured pelvis; but Lee has long since made a habit of rising above adversity. This time she achieved it by doing her show from a carefully camouflaged wheelchair, on a stage festooned with clusters of big balloons. She even got mileage out of her misfortune by using “Pick Yourself Up” as play-on music, and by opening her show with “I Won’t Dance.”

But Lee is chronically incapable of doing a poor show, upright or seated, clear-eyed or with shades, singing Gershwin’s 60-year-old “ ‘S Wonderful” (updated as a slow, teasing bossa nova) or a poignant new song, “Here’s to Life,” written for her by Artie Butler.

Everything was in place: the early hits, from “Why Don’t You Do Right?” to the smoldering “Fever” and the wistful “Is That All There Is?” There were two songs from her score for “Lady and the Tramp,” two poems, and two numbers from her short-lived Broadway show, “Peg.” A sense that the whole evening seemed in large measure autobiographical was reinforced by such titles as “Just Keep Holding On.”

Lee’s stage presence blends just the right touches of preparation and informality. Though she complained of not being as close to the audience as she would have liked, this acoustically admirable theater brought everything across clear and close.

The heaviest applause, aside from the standing ovation at the close, went to her Billie Holiday tribute, composed of excerpts from “Good Morning Heartache,” “Some Other Spring,” and two Holiday originals, “Don’t Explain” and “God Bless the Child.” This was astonishing on two levels: because she has sometimes been compared to Holiday, the very different quality of her own natural sound destroyed this myth; but during the medley she kept switching back and forth between her own sound and style and Holiday’s bittersweet timbre, capturing Lady Day with an almost uncanny accuracy.

Lee’s reputation for surrounding herself with sympathetic and talented musicians remains untarnished. The pianist Emil Palame headed a flawless group that included two old associates, John Pisano on guitar and Monty Budwig on bass, along with Bob Leatherbarrow, whose vibes solo lit up “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” and the drummer Tony Morales, who supplied the ersatz terpsichore with a light-handed solo on “I Won’t Dance.”

The romantic warmth, the rhythmic sensitivity, the touches of humor and, above all, the indestructible vocal instrument that is Peggy Lee must rank among the rarest treasures of contemporary music. The evidence will be on hand through Sunday.