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Cabaret singer adds than her voice to every show

By Walter Tunis Contributing Music Critic

The most permanent of many performance homes for Andrea Marcovicci is a midtown New York supper club at the Algonquin Hotel called the Oak Room. It's a comfortable and intimate setting where the veteran actress and cabaret singer performs for audiences that, given the club's modest size, seldom number more than 80.

"I'm in the audience some of the time," Marcovicci said. "I've been known to hold a hand. If the audience is especially wacky, I've been known to sit on a lap — but in a charming way, of course.

"The audience is responsible for the energy the performer delivers. In cabaret, the spirit and the life they bring to us is something we live on. Then we return it to them. So from the very first applause, from the very first laugh, that's my food. The more they respond, the more energy I have until I practically fly."

All of which is fine for the cozy confines of the Oak Room. But when Marcovicci zips through Lexington for her first-ever Kentucky performance Saturday (she closed a three-week engagement at the Rrazz Room at San Francisco's Hotel Nikko last Sunday and will reopen at the Algonquin on Tuesday), she will be faced with what will be, quite literally, a large task: to create conversational, cabaret intimacy at the Singletary Center for the Arts' 1,500-seat concert hall.

"1,500? Cool. I think that's fabulous," she said. "I tell you what, I have ways of handling that. Bigger clothes, lots more mascara, and getting off the stage as fast as possible."

No, not leaving the stage as in bolting from the performance. Marcovicci intends to interact with the audience in ways that suggest that the Singletary could be a large supper club without the supper.

"If I touch the hand of someone in the front row, I can then direct that energy to the back of the house," she said. "I don't mean to sound too California here. I don't want to sound too woo-woo. But the only way you can make a room too big is if you don't actively create intimacy. And that is not an impossible thing to do. In fact, I think this is going to be a thrill."

To help break the ice at her king-size Kentucky debut, Marcovicci will perform what she calls her "most requested program." A singer who has designed concert repertoires and recordings devoted to the music of Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and many others, Marcovicci will present a program titled I'll Be Seeing You: Love Songs of World War II.

"This is a program that was suggested to me by Walter Cronkite — name drop, name drop, name drop," Marcovicci said. "Before I started this show, I didn't have a great deal of music in my repertoire from '39 to '45. I was more interested in the '20s and '30s than the '40s.

"But during World War II, songwriters had a very specific reason for writing. They were writing songs of hope, songs to keep couples together during a time of war. These were songs of powerful unity from an undivided nation. From a romantic point of view, I sing about the partner who waited at home and the partner who was away. Like all of my shows, this one represents years of research."

Research? Chances are if you discussed the art of performance with a cabaret singer — or any interpretative vocal artist — research might not be the most immediate talking point. But then, Marcovocci's shows are far from thematic recitals. For instance, I'll Be Seeing You balances songs by Sammy Cahn, Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen and others with the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, as well as explanatory monologues on the songs and the times that inspired them.

"I sometimes refer to my audience as 'class,'" Marcovicci said.

"Look, I'm a little Catholic girl who loves to underline. I try to see all the movies, read all the articles and collect all the sheet music I can for these programs. I go into rehearsals with approximately 150 songs. Then we start listening, underlining and cutting away. When the narrative gets formed, that's when the songs are plugged in."

Of course, understanding the completeness that Marcovicci provides to a seemingly sparsely outlined performance (she will be accompanied Saturday only by pianist and longtime musical director Shelly Markham) becomes easier when you view all the non-singing work her career has encompassed.

Onstage, she has played Ophelia to Sam Waterston's Hamlet for New York's Shakespeare in the Park. On screen, she starred opposite Woody Allen in 1976's The Front. Marcovicci also has appeared in soap operas (Love Is a Many Splendored Thing) and numerous TV dramas (Hill Street Blues, Kojak, and more recently, Arli$$).

"I've been gifted for over 40 years in being able to learn every aspect of this craft — shockingly enough, even the backstage aspects. I know lighting. I direct my own shows. I'm very savvy about arranging because I've studied music. I'm an actress who sings. But the more people laugh at my shows, the more I feel I'm doing stand-up.

"Without having learned all of this, I don't think I would be the complete performer that I am today. One part of my career keeps helping the other, which keeps helping still another."