CABARET REVIEW : Marcovicci Carries a Torch and a Tune

You can take the singer out of the cabaret, but you can’t take the cabaret out of the singer. Andrea Marcovicci’s opening at the Westwood Playhouse Tuesday night with a performance titled “What Is Love?” may have lacked the tinkling of glasses and the scurrying of busy waiters, but it confirmed her status as one of the gifted cabaret performers of this generation.

Well-established as an actress in television, theater and film long before she embarked on a career in torch singing, Marcovicci has become in recent years a regular at New York City’s Algonquin Hotel and Los Angeles’ Gardenia Club.

“What Is Love?” like most of her nightclub performances, was billed--with characteristic Marcovicci acumen--as a “hopelessly romantic evening of love songs.”

But, uncharacteristically, and perhaps because of the relative austerity of her setting, it took a while for Marcovicci to get around to the hopeless part.

In an effort to provide a structure for the songs that would parallel the evolution of a love affair, she spent the first third of the show smiling her way through an upbeat collection of such material as “I Wished on the Moon,” “It Amazes Me” and “I Woke Up in the Morning Feeling Fine.” Good, if not great songs, but so lacking in emotional juice that they obliged Marcovicci to talk--and talk and talk--about their significance.

To her credit, she has a fine wit and a raconteur’s way with a story. But Marcovicci’s real strength--her impassioned ability to lead her listeners through the inner convolutions of dark love songs--took too long to emerge. Not until she moved to the stage steps, sat down, and dug into “The Thrill Is Gone” and an Irving Berlin medley did she finally make the interior connections so vital to her art.

The final third of the program was even better, with songs like “Do You Miss Me” and “Finishing the Hat” breaking through the stiffness of the theater setting, and taking the performance into the impassioned emotions and metaphoric shadows of true cabaret.

At 10886 Le Conte Ave., Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays 7 and 10 p.m.; Sundays 7 p.m., until Sept. 16. $25; (213) 208-5454.