CABARET REVIEW : Disciplined, Aloof Akers at Cinegrill

Back on the nightclub scene after a year and a half in the Broadway musical “Grand Hotel,” Karen Akers opened last week at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s Cinegrill preceded by a flutter of reviews suggesting that her sometimes chilly performance persona had warmed up considerably.

But the changes appeared more related to attitude than temperature. Akers is not so much cool as she is reserved; she tends to stimulate the kind of reaction one might have had to a stately sixth-grade teacher whom one could only imagine loving from afar.

When she sang “I’m going to love you like nothing you’ve known,” from “Sooner or Later,” for example, the line raised the unfortunate question of who would do a more convincing job--Akers or Madonna. And, on a standard like “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” she seemed unaware of the lyrics’ potential impact: Are they sad? Are they angry? For Akers, they were simply sweet, which surely missed the point that Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn had in mind.

Only when she turned to several songs from “Closer Than Ever,” the Richard Maltby/David Shire musical, did Akers begin to support her disciplined presentation skills with a comparable degree of expressiveness. “Life Story”--a contemporary feminist parable--was sung with a passionate intensity that suggested the right material is precisely what she needs to break through the aloof veneer of the ice princess.

Akers, who was superbly backed by Phil Feather on woodwinds, Ken Wild on bass and Don Rebick on piano, returns Tuesday through June 1.