Passing the Torch Back and Forth

What’s it like to be upstaged by your own mother? Ask Andrea Marcovicci.

The cabaret singer, who opened a three-night run Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s Founders Hall, has often told interviewers how she was influenced by her mother, Helen Marcovicci, who sang in New York in the 1940s under the name Helen Stuart. At the end of her opening-night performance, Andrea Marcovicci called her mother to the stage to sing in a style Andrea described as “torch, torch, torch.”

In a voice rich with character, mother Marcovicci sang “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes” and “Take Me in Your Arms” to the evening’s strongest ovations, recalling in slow, deliberate style the heartfelt emotion of Edith Piaf and the fatalism of Billie Holiday. At one point, as her mother sang, Andrea dropped to her knees in admiration.

It was a surprisingly touching way to end an evening already drenched in feeling and sentiment. Marcovicci introduced her program, consisting of music from the movies, saying that all the songs were about love and included the “requisite despair.” This most theatrical of singers then went about delivering on her promise.

If cabaret is a theater of song, then Marcovicci is its leading actress. She used her experience on and off Broadway, in the movies and on television to turn each number into a bit of drama, emphasizing story line as she introduced the numbers and then as she sang them.

She acted with her hands, her eyes and her radiant smile, turning this way and that as if to deliver the lyric to each person in the room. Even sitting cross-legged atop the piano, she waved and gestured dramatically.

With simple backing from pianist Shelly Markham, Marcovicci opened with “As Time Goes By,” then moved into Marilyn and Alan Bergman and Dave Grusin’s “It Might Be You,” from “Tootsie,” before reaching back to the 1953 film “Lili” for “Hi Lili, Hi Lo” (“A Song of Love Is a Sad Song”), in which she coaxed the audience to sing along.

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Even as each number told its own story, they combined to tell Marcovicci’s. Between numbers, she wove anecdotes from her life: how her father took her to see “Lili,” how Audrey Hepburn’s thinness continues to taunt her (when singing “Two for the Road”) and how some songs give the wrong impression--”lies” she called them when singing “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

Her voice was pleasant if not exceptional, trembling with vibrato in tender moments, coming with assertiveness when called for. Her phrasing and ability to emphasize the right word in each line conveyed the meaning in best theatrical style.

Even when she started a song over, as happened twice Thursday, Marcovicci’s assured manner on the stage turned missteps into moments of disarming humor and intimacy.

Once, when stopping a song because she said she had a hair in her mouth, she directed her remark to a group of students who were scheduled to attend a master class she was teaching on Friday and added, “First lesson: If you can fake honesty, you can fake anything.”

She joined her mother for the closing number, “A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening” but soon stepped away to let Mom proceed on her own. Andrea Marcovicci’s concession to her mother’s success with the audience was the most honest thing she did all evening.

* Andrea Marcovicci appears tonight at Founders Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 7:30 and 9:45 p.m. $44 for the 7:30 p.m. show, $40 for the 9:45 p.m. show. (714) 556-2787.