In Her Words, Life Is a Cabaret : Whether in Intimate Rooms or Vast Halls, Marcovicci Acts on Lyrics

Don’t call Andrea Marcovicci a jazz singer. Marcovicci’s craft is cabaret, something she once defined as “an intensely personal evening of songs and stories, delivered in a simple, honest way.”

“I don’t consider myself a jazz singer at all,” she said recently by phone from her Hollywood home. “I see the two fields as quite different. Being a cabaret singer means concentrating on the lyric rather than the melody. Jazz comes from the music first; the lyric is not as important. Cabaret comes from the words.”

Jazz vocalists, she noted, sometimes distort the words beyond understanding in their attempt to develop the musical side of a song.

“That’s fine; I understand it and enjoy it, but it’s not my metier, “ she said. “I’m not an improviser. But people also like the clean lines of cabaret singing; they like the song to be sung the way it was written. People have heard standards sung so often in the jazz style that when I go back to the original melody, they think I’m singing a new song.”

Marcovicci is one of the most visible purveyors of the cabaret-singer’s craft, well-known for long stints at New York’s Algonquin Hotel and Hollywood’s Gardenia Room.

In the past few years, she’s begun to take her show out of the intimate spaces that help define cabaret, rooms where much of the audience can reach out and touch her. She’s branching out to include performance halls such as the Orange County Performing Arts Center, where she appears tonight and Saturday in a pops program with the Pacific Symphony.

Does the move into larger venues detract from what she does?

“No, not really,” she said. In a large hall, “my arms just get bigger; I try to take up a little more space. I wear more mascara. Oddly enough, if the performer doesn’t see a great difference, the audience won’t feel it.”

And working with an orchestra can give her performance even more impact. “You gain something so remarkable working with an orchestra, a surge of power and energy, and you just float out over the notes and into the audience and just feel huge. I never feel as large as when I have a symphony behind me.”

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Marcovicci’s mother was a torch singer and beauty queen who continued to study voice and give the occasional concert while raising her. As a result, she was always surrounded by music.

“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t sing,” she said. “I was raised with the wonderful songs of the past, Jerome Kern and Rodgers & Hart and Cole Porter. Though I was growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, my music was that of the ‘20s and ‘30s.”

She started singing professionally in the ‘70s “as a folk singer, though I was more eclectic than most. I would do everything from Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman to David Bowie followed by some Gershwin.”

She also began to pursue acting, appearing in the 1976 movie “The Front” with Woody Allen and Zero Mostel. She did Shakespeare in the Park productions in New York and appeared on Broadway. It was her acting career that drew her to Los Angeles in 1978, where she took parts in movies including “The Hand” with Michael Caine and Henry Jaglom’s “Someone to Love” and such television shows as “Taxi,” “Hill Street Blues” and “Magnum, P.I.”

“It took me almost seven years to begin singing again,” she said. “And when I started to perform at the Gardenia, I decided to sing the songs that had the deepest calling to my heart, the songs of long ago that my mother loved.”

Working the intimate confines of cabaret, she found her acting experience was a large part of her presentation.

“The music that I choose to perform requires an actress for its delivery because the songs have powerful lyrics and deep emotions. So I’m acting on the tone, adding elements of what you can do vocally to extend the meaning of the lyric,” she said. “Certainly, I wouldn’t be as emotional a singer without having been an actress.”

Marcovicci said she’ll have an extra level of emotion for her program of songs from World War II with the Pacific Symphony because she’ll be singing those numbers as an expectant mother.

“So many women had to go through their pregnancies by themselves during the war that (the pregnancy) will add some depth to what is already there. And maybe a little silliness.”

As for the physical aspects, she said: “I had to have a special gown built. . . . But I’m singing well and don’t find it at all confining. Just different.”

* Andrea Marcovicci appears with the Pacific Symphony tonight and Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $22 to $53 . (714) 556-2787.