POP MUSIC REVIEW : ENCHANTING VOICE OF McGOVERN

Maureen McGovern is the kind of performer who makes everything worthwhile for a music reviewer--all the schlepping from one end of town to the other, all the hours spent listening to marginal talent.

The classically trained, eclectically gifted singer’s opening of “Another Woman in Love” at the Westwood Playhouse on Tuesday night was--like a bottle of Lafite-Rothschild and Beluga caviar--an experience to treasure.

Best known, perhaps, as the performer of the ‘70s sound track themes, “The Morning After” (from the “Poseidon Adventure”) and “We May Never Love Like This Again” (from another disaster film, “The Towering Inferno”), McGovern also has appeared--far more impressively--in the Broadway productions of “The Pirates of Penzance” and “Nine.”

But neither sound track recordings nor the Broadway stage showcased her astonishing talents as fully as the current show.

McGovern’s 90-minute set was performed on a bare stage, with Jeff Harris’ spare and subtle piano playing as her only accompaniment. It was enough.

McGovern was alternately romantic, bawdy, nostalgic and funny. Singing a smoothly lyrical version of “Long Ago and Far Away,” she modulated into an interpretation of “All the Things You Are” that was so high and so pure, so achingly beautiful, that it brought chills to even this jaded listener.

David Frishberg’s buoyantly humorous “Another Song About Paris” was tellingly juxtaposed with a version of “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” whose dark dissonances revealed a deep understanding of the song’s wartime meaning.

If there was a peak to this program of precious moments, it was surely the Gershwin medley, with its mind-boggling and precisely accurate vocal simulation of “Rhapsody in Blue’s” opening clarinet run. “Summertime” called up the languor and the eroticism of the hot Southern sun. And on “Fascinating Rhythm,” McGovern paid off the title by easing through the melody in 3/4, 4/4 and 5/4.

But words at their best are never adequate to describe music at its best. Suffice to say that McGovern should be heard. In a decade of dreamless singers, she is a rare voice of enchantment.

McGovern continues at the Westwood Playhouse at 8 p.m. through Saturday, with a 3 p.m. performance on Sunday.