A comfort zone beyond prime time

Actress Hattie Winston has her most widespread visibility as the feisty nurse Margaret in the Ted Danson sitcom “Becker.” But like so many other TV actors, her roots are in the stage and musical theater, where she was an Obie Award-winning actress and a founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company.

On Thursday, in the second installment of the Alex Theatre’s Onstage Cabaret Series in Glendale, Winston -- accompanied by husband Harold Wheeler on piano, Trey Henry on bass and Ralph Humphrey on drums -- reconnected with those roots in a 90-minute cabaret set.

Like most cabaret programs, songs were loosely structured around personal history. But Winston wisely stretched the potentially wearying my-life-as-an-artist genre to include an eclectic array of tunes.

In “Another Spring,” a touching song by Angelo Badalamenti and John Clifford, Winston portrayed an aging woman musing over the past and the future. Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets” became a kind of urban folk tale, sung in an impressive Jamaican accent.

Other songs received new Winston lyrics: The Frank Sinatra hit “It Was a Very Good Year” (by Ervin Drake) became her own musical odyssey; Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was stretched to include stops in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York.

Winston was at her best, however, with more intimate numbers: the aching love lyrics of Dan Hill and Barry Mann’s “Sometimes When We Touch”; Dave Frishberg’s paean to the Apple, “Do You Miss New York”; and “Here’s to Life,” Phyllis Molinary and Artie Butler’s classic ultimate survivor song.

Winston’s musical theater background occasionally led her into larger-than-life exposition reaching too far beyond the intimacy of cabaret. And she erred in failing to acknowledge the songwriters. Otherwise, there was no denying the impressiveness of her transition from Margaret the nurse to Hattie the cabaret star.